It’s really hit or miss. The communities generally have most of the same downsides as those on the corporate competition, but with added issues due to the small size of Lemmy/fediverse and inherent features of a decentralized platform.
I mostly stick to bigger communities and instances on Lemmy, which was not a thing I did much on the r-word site, and I admit that makes it trickier to make a one-to-one comparison.
My hobbies and interests aren’t actually all that obscure, but the communities for them on Lemmy are functionally dead, fractured across multiple instances, or just plain non-existent as far as I can tell. Really little or no engagement. So, that sucks.
Another issue that seems especially apparent here is that it seems much easier for smaller groups with “loud” voices / strong opinions to overwhelm any kind of discussion or debate and give the appearance that their opinion is majority opinion, even if it is not. I’m not saying that doesn’t happen elsewhere, just that it seems especially pronounced here. People would complain about group think on the r-word site, but it’s often amplified here.
One thing I like about some of the bigger communities here is that it seems like it’s more visible when unprovoked rudeness and incivility are called out. Not that it never happened on the corporate r-word site, but I do run across that a bit more here.
I’m asking because I’ve personally found it far more hostile than Reddit (the only other platform I’ve put much time into). What I’ve mostly seen is that people downvote quickly and tend towards eliteism relative to Reddit. That said, I recognize that this could be just by instance or community, so I’m curious how others have found it.
Yeah idk, I’ve tended to see the exact opposite. I rarely downvote and I think most people I interact with on here do the same.
What kind of communities do you frequent? For me it’s a pretty curated c/home with most chill communities and then I’ll browse c/all and even on there most people seem chill.
So long winded but to answer your question I think most people are nice, the elitist comments might not get drowned out as much since there’s less people.
Edit: wanted to add that the people here on lemmy seem to be older and techy and that demographic tends to be more clear and blunt. However, that might be something that comes off hostile but really isn’t.
I’d say there are fewer hostile people, but the ones that are hostile are really hostile.
The problem is not just that it’s hostile, but it’s also full of people that know jack shit.
On Reddit you go to r/whatever and there’s a good chance the guy answering your question is the actual godfather of whatever. Those guys didn’t make the move to Lemmy because they are hardcore into whatever, but casually into Reddit. What we got are the people that were hard core into Reddit, and casual into whatever.
So we have a bunch of blind leading the blind dilettantes getting all pissed off about shit they know fuck all about.
Knowledge is low, sire.
That’s actually a really great point that was hitting on something I felt but didn’t understand about my interactions and I think it really sums it up. It feels like every community is a general community here - explaining how technology works on reddit to someone on a general purpose sub was expected, but here you get people posting clickbaity anti-capitalist anti-tech shit in tech communities that are factually wrong and getting absurd upvotes and agreement from people who agree with the politics and that’s all.
On Reddit you go to r/whatever and there’s a good chance the guy answering your question is the actual godfather of whatever.
There was also a good chance they were another Unidan.
My experience is the opposite. I’m mostly on startrek.website & lemmy.world, while keeping local in the former and going for all in the latter.
ive found it incredibly diverse. there are many instances, and some are known for nice folks. beehaw is friendly… midwest.social has been nice to me. lemmy.world is a taunting wasps nest of nonsense… the bigger the community the more… rough… you may find it.
I recommend an instance that doesn’t even have downvotes if they bother you!
I don’t have an issue with downvotes on the face of it - I came from Reddit, and found their system pretty good. The issue I have is that it seems to be used as a “disagree” button a lot more here, which discourages discussion regardless of the quality. For example, even on this post, anyone who said they’ve had a negative experience has been downvoted.
i dunno i have never used lemmy from a server that does downvotes it grants an immunity to these kinds of concerns. Just be cool and get along and everybody seems okay to me. It’s easy to block the few jerk’s you run into 🤷♂️. I used reddit for a long time and I find this community just peachy
It seems nice and scratches the itch to be approximately social, but suffering through seeing the same 5 articles posted nearly back to back by bots is deeply annoying. And the lack of content when sorting by 6hrs means I inevitably have to spam block the weird porn/fetish stuff that decides to crop up in-between lol.
It is the exact same as reddit, only there’s less content and comments.
The people, mods, bots, and content are all just the same. There’s even still people shilling covert adds on here. It’s just cheaper and easier for them to get to the front page of lemmy, since you only need like 20 bot/fake accounts.
I haven’t recognized any posts as covert ads here I think. Can you give an example?
I’ve been on the Internet specifically for the social aspects of it since 1990 and I honestly don’t see much difference at all between any specific site, forum, Usenet bulletin board, chat room, or service. Just the in-jokes are different and some terminology changes. People are people no matter where they are. The internet as a whole fosters a particular subset of people that even amongst their own different tribes, are fundamentally the same. A lot of outcasts and marginalized people that have no others of their particular group in reality to vibe with. I’m one of them, and I love the web because there are so many others like me here, everywhere I happen to go on it.
I’ve found that I rarely get called out for poor spelling or grammar on lemmy compared to other sites. So long as it is pretty obvious what the correct word or grammar is no one cares to mention. The exception is if the mistake is particularly humorous.
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Super cool at first, but slowly becoming more and more like Reddit.
Only a matter of time before it becomes a less moderated version of Reddit.
There are still echo chambers just like Reddit.
Echo chamber is just another way of saying people tend to group up with like minded people. I certainly don’t want to interact with people on the internet that I avoid in real life.
Polite counterpoint: ‘echo chambers’ are more than that, I feel. It’s not that they are a group of like-minded people, so much as they police groupthink and don’t allow even moderately dissenting opinions.
See: r/conservative, and them permabanning anyone who so much as hints at a different mindset.
It’s even in leftist zines.
It really depends. If I run a queer friendly space, then part of being queer friendly is not putting people in the position to have to defend their existence every time they log in. Which means that anything I can see that even smells off gets removed immediately. If you come and whine about it instead of giving me a clear signal you understood, you’re getting banned.
Is it an echo chamber?
I don’t know. Probably.Would I run it any other way?
Fuck no.That was my experience on blahaj. I’d never been banned from a community, let alone one I’ve been an ally to before. Such a pure echo chamber that even discussing why the outside world holds the views they have, even without expressing agreement, gets you labeled a transphobe.
Honestly, it soured me on lemmy as a whole since that was the content I had been enjoying the most.
It funny you bring up r/conservatism. It use to be a fairly big sub and far more moderate until Trump got into power. But if you had anything bad to say about Trump, banned.
Now it is just an echo chamber with few members. Go there and given day and only a few posts with up vote above 100. Really mostly a bunch of pathetic people since the moderate conservatives left.
Lemmy can be a bit this way but on the opposite spectrum.
I’m a Democratic Socialist so pretty much everyone hates me when I offer my opinions.
With that said, I love Lemmy.
No algorithm and no ads means I get far more positive than negative interactions on average.
Really? I would have sworn demsoc/socdem to be the most popular position here. At least during peak CET hours ;)
Negative, Ghost Rider.
Both Republicans and Democrats enthusiastically work together to keep us off the ballot and silenced in the media, and that includes federated media.
Dems get particularly upset when you point out the realities of Biden’s America for the working class.
That’s funny. My experience with lemmy is it’s overwhelmingly leftist. And anything that doesn’t reinforce their worldview is heavily downvoted. Every liberal who isn’t hanging out on lemmygrad is called a liberal as a slur or a reactionary.
The only things I’ve seen that are exclusively non-leftist is the conservative Lemmy that thinks Fox News and Newsmax is a credible source of information
And whatever hexbear is.
The thing is that Democratic Socialism is not seen favorably by a lot of leftists, as they’re seen as being more loyal to the establishment than to revolution. Too leftist for the American Overton window, but not leftist enough for Lemmygrad types, basically
I don’t know that it’s too leftist for me - just a lot of the personalities are too much for me - i can’t listen to anymore Bernie-would’ve-won and Hillary’s-a-war-criminal 8 years later.
I also think Hillary would’ve been a great president for real, so no one likes me either.
Anyway left is globally right.
The only things I’ve seen that are exclusively non-leftist is the conservative Lemmy that thinks Fox News and Newsmax is a credible source of information
I think so, too.
Nothing good comes from nazareth
I like it better. Sometimes you do see users being irrational, entitled/whiny or disingenuous, but it’s still way less than you’d see in Twitter or Reddit. And I’ve seen users chewing others for engaging in those three things, frankly that’s fucking great.
However I do think that there’s lots of room to improve. I’ll mention some sore points:
- On disagreement, some users immediately assuming that the others are stupid (lacking reasoning) or ignorant (lacking a piece of info), instead of asking themselves “am I missing something?”.
- While witch hunters are not as bad here as in Reddit, they’re still bad. If you want to denounce people, basic reading comprehension is obligatory.
- Excessive focus on the words being used to convey something instead of what is being conveyed.
- “WAAAHHH TL;DR!@!@!1” is becoming more and more frequent. If it’s too long to read, it’s also too long to whine about its length.
The cynicism is more annoying to me, but reddit had more of it, I didn’t care much there though.
Generally discussion has been more mature and respectful. Still, I think people are more likely to downvote things they disagree with but I think happens more in controversial topics like Threads defederation, Gaza, and politics in general.
If you want to compare to Reddit, they tend to hide comments with negative scores anyway, and though I can’t see the upvote/downvote ratio for comments, having 5 upvotes and 4 downvotes feels worse than 500 upvotes and 400 downvotes. The points don’t matter anyway so don’t even bother worrying about them.
Just be nice and think of the other person.
ETA: You also have to curate your feed a bit to block stuff you don’t want to see, certain accounts and stuff like the immature trolls on hexbear.
Same shit, different platform.
Generally better, but give it a minute.
It’s about the same as everywhere else. The most fun I have on any social media platform these days is blocking assholes.
