When I first started using Lemmy it seemed like such a nice place with interesting discussions. It seemed like the first group of people to join after the app exodus were being quite careful to be respectful of the existing culture.
Now, it seems as though the culture from Reddit has completely replaced it. Toxicity and all. I will say I do follow a lot of communities from a wide range of instances so it’s clearly not everywhere.
Am I the only one who’s feeling like we’ve just stormed in and bulldozed Lemmy?
You must log in or register to comment.
Lemmy doesn’t have a collective culture. Each instance has it’s own culture or will develop it over time, even though a lot of reddit vestige remains. (It’s only been like 2 months)
I don’t think toxicity ever will get too bad here, for the simple fact that if you don’t like the say, c/politics of one instance, you are always free to go to the c/politics of another instance or even start your own.
Eventually, the toxic instances/community will bleed users and die out, defed is a factor but doesn’t have too much to do with this.
lemmy.ml on a good day had like 15 to 30 upvotes on the front page. There wasn’t much of a culture before.
See the traffic in April this year, a little over 4 months ago. Lemmy.world only been around for like 2 and a half months now. That’s the most active it’s been since before the exodus. The exodus definitely helped jumpstart the site.
Yeah, my answer to “has the Reddit exodus killed the former Lemmy culture” is “what culture lmao”
Not that i was on Lemmy before, but i was on Mastodon before Elon bought Twitter and it was a ghost town.
After blocking most of the meme subs, I find it a pretty nice place.
deleted by creator
Just browse lemmy on all and block community which you don’t like i have blocked 526
Ive been thinking about doing just that. Its just the ratio of memes to news to interesting stuff is so bad on here. To many memes man.
It’s quickly getting more toxic and aggressive. But we’re not counting karma, so as soon as you recognize that someone is arguing with you in bad faith just block them.
It’s quickly getting more toxic and aggressive.
Exactly. About a month ago your most likely negative reaction would be I’m not sure if I would agree with that because of x and y but I could see why you would say that. Maybe you get ± 2 votes
Now they have to die on every hill to prove you wrong no matter what you bring to the table and magically it’s -10
And you go through their history and they have a two week old account with 27 fights picked.
Hopefully they’ll get bored of making new accounts and the block lists stay strong.
Nice. Lemmy is finally big enough for “Lemmy sucks now, the old days were better” posts 🥲
I’m one of those Reddit refugees. I can’t say anything about how things were before I got here, but I would like to add that I treat Lemmy a whole lot different from Reddit. When I joined there was plenty of talk about the lack of content, people only upvoting but not commenting, that kind of thing.
So I took this as a sign that I should be more of a participant and not the three-posts-to-my-name lurker that I was at Reddit. And I saw similar motivations with other users. So I do hope that at least part of the refugees have added a positive influence, and more so than they ever did when they were still using Reddit.Also, to add to this: culture is a living thing, like people and ecosystems. Change is inherent and healthy.
It’s totally reasonable to debate whether an event brings good change or bad change, but complaining about a community being different is, imo, not healthy or rational.
We can, through collective effort, precipitate change away from or reverse negative change, and the first step to that is complaining about it.
Same here. I vote on almost every post I see, even if I’m not interested, based on if I think it’s a good fit for the community. On Reddit I just upvoted things I liked
I meant more like writing comments and posting things, but I like that you’re making a conscious effort to do better so do whatever you feel comfortable with :)
Votes don’t matter much here, because there isn’t enough content in the first place. Votes mattered on Reddit because there was too much content, and small posts would never be seen unless you’re browsing by new. Also, people farmed karma so that they could resell their accounts, or access karma-restricted subs. No such incentives here.
It makes sense.
Most people who came here two months ago did so because they explicitly wanted to leave Reddit, but not because of Reddit content or the site culture. It was because admin decisions on third party apps and the API.
They still wanted Reddit, just with different Admins and different apps. Ideally, they’d have wanted communities to fully migrate over.
lemmy.world specifically became basically a lifeboat, having been linked to from original third party apps.
Yes, it was created and had the technical and resource requirements to keep up with the new influx of users without constantly crashing (in the beginning), but nonetheless, that meant it got the largest influx of the migration.
It’s honestly a bit strange for me to see people in here with two month old accounts saying “oh yeah the culture has just changed so much”.
You all were the change. It’s that influx of users that basically brought Reddit here.
Anyone who came here before the API changes did so either because they had some kind of issues with Reddit, whether it was the dominant culture or what, and wanted an alternative or because they were interested in the open source and federated nature of the project regardless of Reddit’s own decisions.
Though tbf, pre migration, this place was basically dead. Posts would have a handful of comments at best and it was mostly Lemmygrad users and also FOSS enthusiasts. Hexbear was the most active Lemmy instance and was a chapotraphouse lifeboat formed in 2020 but it didn’t federate so it was really mostly just Lemmy.ml as a general instance and Lemmygrad unless you explicitly knew and cared for Hexbear. Neither was very “toxic” in their own communities and there really wasn’t much inter instance fighting, even if there still were people on lemmy.ml who didn’t care for grad, as far as I remember. I honestly mostly lurked and didn’t participate often.
The apps also were much worse.
Things started picking up as the API announcement happened. That’s probably when we had the best balance of positivity and user growth.
It exploded when the API changes went into effect and voila.
Still, I would say it’s mostly still a bit better than Reddit and there’s more effort in commenting for the most part.
I don’t think I’ve seen a pun chain or a “he’s not your buddy, guy” or anything like that.
And that’s only the first migration. Expect a way bigger one once Reddit sunsets the old reddit interface.
This is exactly what happened to Reddit with the Digg shitshow and then gradual public adoption. Reddit used to have thoughtful conversation and was where I could go to get interesting perspectives. Eventually enough people joined that the quality went way down.
Always depends on the community/sub though. Niche subs specific to the subject will have good discussion. Big subs that tend to be a bit more generic content will have the generic subs.
I don’t think it’s a Lemmy/Reddit thing and more of a small/large community thing.
Oh, I agree completely. As the masses arrive conversation generally gets less nuanced and less thoughtful. Group think becomes more obvious too.
I don’t think I’ve seen a pun chain or a “he’s not your buddy, guy” or anything like that.
And no Schnoodle guy either! No more annoying pseudo-emotional poems followed by celebrity worship, which didn’t add anything to the conversation, except for making threads long and wasting screen space on mobile devices.
Tbf many of us, myself included, had had a problem with the general reddit culture for a very long time (in my case dating back to 2011)
The API change and Sp*z’s libelous lies (egregious even by his abysmally low standards) finally gave me the motivation to leave, and I’m genuinely happy that I’ve never checked back on my old account (which is still up, but has been mostly scrubbed of content)
I didn’t come here to find more reddit. In fact, I tried switching back to tumblr at first before learning more about the potential of the fediverse
I felt that way until I found out the bigger instances aren’t even much older. Lemmy World itself apparently started as soon as the changes were announced but before any big protests began. Instances that were around even before those either were not very active to even have an established culture, or are so niche they’re not really affected.
Also, it’s likely that anyone on Lemmy had tried reddit prior. Lemmy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Lemmy culture is former reddit culture to some extent, for better or worse.
Everyone wants to pretend like the ones who left reddit where the good guys. Most of them just want the same thing: attention, controversy and bad memes. We where a part of reddit and as such, we brought reddit here too. Maybe is not you or me, but there’s people out there who will bring their toxicity everywhere they go. Be it Reddit, Twitter or Lemmy
Can you link to a few comments or posts that you think represent this nasty reddit culture?
Beehaw is still pretty nice :) The moderation is part of why I joined it. I’ve definitely noticed other community getting toxic comments in the past few weeks, though
If a place is moderated so heavily that is has no nasty comments, I wonder what else is being moderated away?
Just look at the modlogs and you can see what is deleted
Lol k
Things are fine man. There’s just a lot of de federation lately which I don’t think is exactly right.
That depends entirely on what instances we are talking about. Lemmy.grad and Hexbear users have no business existing anywhere but their own shitty tankie bubble.
Are those the super communists that are like fuck any place that’s not Russia and China? Lol
If so I guess I feel the pain but I just give em the block
I do too but my fingers are starting to hurt with them infesting every corner of the fediverse.
TRUE. fuck tankies.
The important thing to understand is that Lemmy doesn’t have an inherent culture. Nor does Reddit, or Twitter, or Mastodon, or any other platform.
They are communities, and communities naturally change as they scale.
So yes, of course Lemmy had changed. But I’d argue that the inherent strength of the whole concept of “federation” is that any one particular instance only has to witness as much or as little of that change as they want to.
If you don’t like where Lemmy as a whole is going, find (or create) an instance that agrees with you and de-federates from most others. win-win.
The point is that you are responsible for your own particular Lemmy experience in ways that you never were on Reddit.
Hexbear and lemmy.grad were there before and are as toxic as any reddit sub I’ve ever been in.
It’s the politics, and the siloing as a result.
Anything politics related is incredibly toxic. I’ve received death threats for having the wrong political opinions.
Ah yeah I’m afraid we don’t take the high road anymore. It’s not worked. Probably because “the libs” have realised that y’all don’t have a better nature to appeal to.
(And something tells me you’re projecting)
