…sometimes it does feel like this.
Hey, we left cause of the enshitification of Reddit itself, toxicity of the users was always part of the package deal.
As a Reddit refugee myself,I can’t disagree with that. But I will clarify that there’s generally two kinds of Reddit Refugees, though:
- The kind that got fed up with Reddit and wants to be part of something better
- The people who were banned from Reddit and think this is some kind of safe haven to continue acting on their worst impulses that got them banned elsewhere.
The meme is largely referencing the latter.
to continue acting on their worst impulses
I feel seen.
As do I, mind you my worse impulses are just me being bloodthirsty. But John Brown was also somewhat bloodthirsty and I dont see anyone of deserving of life criticizijg him.
I hope I’m in the first category. This place has less people but better engagement.
You should know what category you fall into… It’s not like getting banned and going somewhere else is an event chain you wouldn’t know about.
I came because Reddit’s a shitty company and due to the ban of 3rd party apps. Which group am I?
Meh. Maybe I’m just not in the wrong corners of the Lemmy fediverse, but honestly I’m not really seeing very many of the banned finding their way here. That was a huge problem in the cesspools like Voat, but for whatever reason it seems like Lemmy has mostly been spared, in my limited experience at least.
That said, yeah there’s a fair amount of blunt talking and general mild misanthropy, but frankly I almost welcome that as a change from the overmoderated sterility of corporate spaces like Reddit which have to think in terms of advertiser-friendliness.
Toxic users lead to greater engagement and line go up.
Yes exactly. When reddit pulled that api pricing shit, I just got up and left. I came here expecting shitposts, braindead “hot” takes, piss-poor reading comprehension, and americans acting like they’re the only country in the world. I got exactly what I expected and I couldn’t be more satisfied, 10/10 would nuke my reddit account again.
They’ve started putting multiple adds in the middle of comment sections now
You’ll find that anywhere. Not just on the Internet, either. Literally, everywhere.
High school never ends.
True, but Reddit had the right conditions for toxicity to grow and begin to run rampant. Lemmy, with its decentralized nature, should limit the spread of any toxic communities.
I dont think it will limmits it at all it will spread so u end uo wirh multiple communities for the same thibg with different flavours of toxicity. We already have that with world news ie the .ml flavour of toxicity vs the other instances with differing flavours
The .ml situation predates the whole reddit thing, no?
Correct
You should check out Facebook, Twitter, IRC, NextDoor, 4chan, 9gag, or any other Internet forum (including comment sections of news articles). Reddit does not hold exclusive rights to any “right conditions for toxicity to grow”.
Yeah, there’s lots of places with rampant toxicity. I was just comparing reddit and lemmy, and I consider the Federated nature of lemmy to help prevent (not necessarily stop) toxicity from growing.
I’m not an expert on this whole Federated thing, but to me, it sounds like if one community is having problems with another, they can just disassociate and not have to deal with it anymore.
I think the difficulty will be the slippery and nebulous definition of “toxic”
It’s more easily expressed when people don’t have to directly face the sensitivity of the other humans. For example, from inside a car, in an online competitive game or an online forum.
looks at pot plant
😠
It took me a couple months to fully leave years of bad reddit habits behind. I didn’t realize how deeply ingrained they’d become. The toxicity had gradually snuck up on me.
this
Shit! Still happening to me.
Yeah, well, fuck you too.
Aww man, it’s still happening to me!
(this is, itself, a redditism)
As you see, we’re among grownups, you can say fuck.
Happens to the best of us.
To preface this I’m a lurker myself. I wonder what bad habits it left behind in you? After the whole API and 3rd Party Apps fiasco I just left it behind. But I wouldn’t say that I took the toxicity over from it to Lemmy. Especially wondering what exactly is ingrained in your soul that’s left behind from it. As far I know I’m still the same but as I’ve told just mostly lurking so don’t think it had much as an influence on me except the doom scrolling.
We should come up with a detox program
I wonder how many go back when they don’t see a karma score here.
It all started back in 1998, when the Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell in a Cell, and plummeted 16 feet through an announcers table.
Yea no. Try having a nuanced discussion on any (insert heated topic here) on Lemmy and watch the labels fly out faster than the ejaculate of a post pubescent 15 year old.
Don’t worry. We’ll make butter milk out of it lol
Hopefully the absence of an algorithm pushing engagement at all costs will dispel some of it.
Would you like to be the moderator of Pyongyang?
You just got banned from EU
I think any real user from Reddit that isn’t a bot is an asset these days. I hate Reddit as much as the next person, but giving people shit for coming from there to here feels hypocritical.
I think both can be true tbh. I welcome everyone from reddit and encourage us to grow. I also will say leave toxicity at the door, or sub to other instances/communities that enjoy it.
A lot of users here are not Reddit refugees, they are Reddit rejects.
Are we growing though?
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats shows MAU (monthly active users) decreasing - we are now at 43k, last month was 45k, the month before 47k, etc. Total servers also decreasing - now 540, was 552, 579, etc. Overall posts and comments are slightly up though - so we’re seeing increased activity from fewer users, rather than an increase in actual users. One could argue whether we’re truly “decreasing” vs. merely flat, but either way I don’t see us increasing.
And 3 of those users are myself, all active and only 2 of which I had a week ago, speaking to how alts are most definitely a thing. Also, federation issues especially staying in sync with Lemmy.World may be causing people to shift instances (or to leave entirely?). If so that would be a good thing bc 0.19.6 promises to help address that. (Although in my case, I wanted an instance that allows custom blocks of any instance I choose without needing to rely on an admin team, and that isn’t dependent upon the Lemmy codebase.)
For one thing, people might be turning away due to the upcoming USA election, in which case depending on who survives that, they could return? But every person I’ve ever recommended to check out Lemmy has looked at me in disgust and actively chided me for having recommended it when they see some of the political extremism here. e.g.:
Whenever I go looking for examples of such I usually find it in 0-60 seconds, by going to Lemmy.ml and browsing by Local.
Your instance is doing wonderful work keeping such out - I wonder if that image will even render for you:-). But overall, across the wide Fediverse, people are not willing to put up with such, and seem to be leaving us overall rather than find some other way to deal with whatever it is that was bugging them.
And with such trends, and the way we treat normies, I don’t see us ever going mainstream. Maybe PieFed and Sublinks, along with Mbin and ofc Tesseract on e.g. dubvee.org will help turn that around? That would be so nice?:-)
Btw what will we call ourselves then, if it does - will we still be “Lemmy”/Lemmings, or just general Fedizens? Either way there’s great hope for the future, but also a lot of work to do to reach that point.
I wasn’t really looking at the MAU stats when I made this; it just felt like it’s been more actively lately (both good and bad). Unfortunate the numbers are actually trending downward.
For one thing, people might be turning away due to the upcoming USA election
Possibly. I’ve gone into self-imposed
socialmedia blackouts during election season many a time. Sometimes you just need a break.Whenever I go looking for examples of such I usually find it in 0-60 seconds, by going to Lemmy.ml and browsing by Local … people are not willing to put up with such, and seem to be leaving us
Yeah. I have felt for a while that
ml
being the official or at least de facto flagship instance is doing more harm than good. I’m not going to tell them how to run their instance, but I am sad and frustrated that it seems to turn so many people away under the impression the whole fediverse is like that.I’m cool with Fedizens 😀.
Yeah like to label it as “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers” seems not entirely… complete in its description.
Blaze is doing amazing work advocating for Lemmy on r/RedditAlternatives etc., and these days recommends Lemm.ee, one of the largest instances that also defederates from virtually nothing so that very little to no content is missed by the user. On the other hand, some content users very much would rather have been presented to them as opt-in rather than have to opt-out of it. i.e. if one of the major things that instance does is to make fun of the capitalist democratic Western society, then it is perhaps understandable if - regardless of truth or falsehood - people, especially normies, living inside of that same capitalist democratic Western society do not appreciate the jokes? Especially those calling for literal murder, or when an admin there tells someone to kill themselves. Duh, of course people are going to be turned away by such.
At this point it’s like a rite of passage, to learn how to become a responsible Fedizen: learn who and how to block (not necessarily in that order:-).
We’re doing our part!
And that’s important, plus all that anyone can ever do:-).
In fairness, there’s still total net growth of some 6000 MAU since February
How do you see the past numbers there though, without conflating the Mastodon users that says that we have ~1 million MAUs?
This one likewise says 43k MAUs right now, though I don’t recall how many we had in February. The other site only shows as far back as June, 48k MAUs. So that’s a drop of 5k MAUs since June.
Assuming the numbers are comparable across the two sites like that - and they seem to agree as far as we can tell - it looks like the numbers went up sometime between February and June, but since then we’ve lost almost all that we gained.
i.e., the Reddit drama may have caused people to come check us out, but then the largest majority of people left, likely going right back to Reddit. Possibly bc of the deep (niche) content stores that they still have - e.g. if everyone else uses Windows, it’s just easier for you to use it too, and it takes a special mindset to buck that trend.:-)
The link should take you to the Lemmy page.
Some ~30% net MAU growth since December of last year is nothing to sniff at.
i.e., the Reddit drama may have caused people to come check us out, but then the largest majority of people left, likely going right back to Reddit. Possibly bc of the deep (niche) content stores that they still have - e.g. if everyone else uses Windows, it’s just easier for you to use it too, and it takes a special mindset to buck that trend.:-)
Most people who left from Reddit after The Great Exodus did so in the first 3-4 months, though.
Thanks, that longer view does change the narrative a bit. Yeah the Rexodus was the big influx, maybe if they finally kill off old-reddit there could be another but who knows. Then again in the OP it describes “growing”, whereas the reality seems more like at one point almost a year ago we grew, especially that sharp spike between February and March, but ever since and currently we are actively shrinking. I guess both are true, depending on whether you take the yearly or half-yearly POV.
Yeah, there’s definitely no explosive growth currently. Might be that some communities here are getting more ‘solid’, though, and feel more active.
So denouncing genocide is now “political extremism”? If posts like that are scaring people away, that’s good, we don’t need them here.
Uh yeah welcome, could you leave that baggage outside tho? kthx
At least not everyone is toxic online.
Source: ex-Redditor of 16 years
I think I was on Reddit for 12 (?), but I wasn’t nearly as active there as I am here.
YOU ARE WRONG
NO! I AM WRONG!!1!!1!!!
Is this specifically about that one guy from last week a bunch of people blocked retouch straight away after his “I’m here from reddit” post?
Just the other day I had to block this idiot from harassing me, claiming I was faking ignorance about Trump’s stance on Israel so I could “bait Americans into a discussion”, for some reason. I’m European, I don’t follow presidential candidate policies very closely at all. This tool was also European, and Palestinian. I don’t know why they were insisting so hard I would do this inexplicably weird thing, but maybe their emotions were running high. I’m against genocide btw, of course. ✊
Please forgive them. Many people in the USA are going to literally die depending on what happens in the next month, so yes emotions are running quite high right now. You stepped into a VERY active minefield there:-).
Oh, but definitely block them - I mean forgive as in don’t let it weight you down, but absolutely cut that noise out of your life.:-)
I usually just block everyone that posts about politics in general. Shit is annoying af.
Politics is an annoying part of life, for sure, but I was engaged in the conversation so I guess I have some part in it.
People will be toxic no matter what. I don’t think making prospective new users feel unwelcome is a good idea when we’d like to see some growth.
Lemmy is FAR more toxic than Reddit.