Same as with every other social media … the people.
I’m not your friend, buddy!
I’m not your buddy, guy!
Im not your guy, pal!
I’ll be your pal
Not enough people for even slightly niche communities. Wanna talk about smash brothers ? 732 people, only 2 posts in the last month.
This is why people still use reddit on the side.
This is exactly why I don’t use Reddit on the side. When I run out of content on Lemmy, there’s no choice but to do something productive instead. Had to go 100% cold turkey on Reddit to make that work though.
Exactly. I have a 1.5 hour daily time limit on Voyager, my Lemmy client, and I hit it every day, no problem. I do miss some of the niche subs but, every time I go back to ask a quick question, so many people are just so goddamned mean that I’m still very happy I left.
Oh yeah the community is 1000% better and healthier, I don’t miss Reddit at all. Plus I’m a child of the 70s, I grew up with limited content. It’s good for you.
Summer was not meant for being productive.
Why not create a community? We even have a community to promote communities https://lemmy.ca/c/communitypromo and we have couple others too.
slightly niche
Sports is like the most mainstream of interests, and lemmy still doesn’t have a critical mass of sports discussion in general, much less specific sports/leagues, specific teams, specific games/matches, or specific players.
So I keep my reddit sports account.
I also keep an account for my local city subreddit, and one for my career field, because Lemmy doesn’t have those either.
I’m the main poster on !football@sopuli.xyz. Most popular post on the planet.
I guess people on Lemmy just don’t like sports.
I’ll subscribe, since it’s about the real kind of football (the one that’s played with your feet, and a ball. Not an egg, and your hands)
I’ve been trying to get into sports. Always enjoyed parricipating sports, never tried watching.
Welcome!
Hell even !music@lemmy.world (as far as I can tell, the biggest one on the platform) only has like 10k subs, like a dozen posts today, and basically all of the posts were people just advertising music. Zero discussion.
Even for things i would think are big, the communities here are still vanishingly small. I joined reddit in like 2014 and even back then it was more popular than Lemmy is now
I see good discussions on
Not really into music myself, I guess the issue might be that it’s too generic? Even on Reddit I don’t think /r/music was that busy, too many different genres
!television@lemmy.world only has 11 posts in the last 24 hrs and !movies@lemmy.world only has 7…
Not sure why you referenced the LW version when I mentioned the piefed.social ones, but
- 50 comments in this post: https://lemmy.world/post/31721709
- 12 in this one: https://lemmy.world/post/31849186?
- 28 here: https://lemmy.world/post/31826379
- 12 here: https://lemmy.world/post/31718582
Number of posts themselves isn’t really that relevant, comments are usually a more interesting metric.
lemmy.ml and its admins being the developers at the same time.
I don’t think that in itself if the problem. anyone can host an instance. The problem is lemmy.ml being the apparent default instance, advertising itself as an instance for privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, and not mentioning seemingly anywhere in the description/rules that only red flavour authoritarian dogma is allowed in political discussion.
“America bad, therefore former ‘communist’ russia and current ‘communist’ china good.”
Edit: it’s not featured as prominently as it used to be on join-lemmy.org so things may be improving. they should still mention in the description that western viewpoints on many issues are not allowed due to “rule 1”
I realized .ml was fucking insane and delusional when they glorified Stalin and refused to recognize the atrocities he committed.
No matter what your political stance is, as soon as you deny negative facts and exclusively push the “positives” it becomes a problem and may radicalize you (if that isn’t already the case).
What happened to nuanced moderate politics? It seems people unconditionally put the “left” or “right” label on themselves. And ironically these blind followers will have the audacity to call anyone close to the political center, or people who are honest with themselves, cowards.
Yeah, well the guy who runs it is a notorious tankie.
You either tow the pro stalinist line or you are punished
I was on .ml first after leaving reddit, because I didn’t know this was the case, until I called out straight up state propaganda and defended capitalism with social and ethical policies once. You can imagine how they responded to that.
They certainly mislead me. My first year or so was on lemmy.ml @PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@lemmy.ml
After repeated bans i decided to move to a more relaxed instance. i still interact with lemmy.ml because some of the bigger open source communities are there, but .ml admins now cannot block me from accessing the full lemmyverse, only their diminishing corner of it
Huh, just checked out the ranking on join-lemmy.org. The default setting is “random”, which might be why it’s not featured up top.
But what’s weird is that lemmy.world isn’t in the ranking at all.
If you sort by active, the top two are lemmynsfw.com, followed by lemmy.ml.
well tbf they are the two most active servers there though. not sure why .world isnt on there though. maybe removed temporarily so that newbies filter out to smaller instances
IIRC it is intentional that world isn’t there to help spread out users to other instances.
Lemmy.ml needs to be defederated from all other instances. It’s literally an extremist instance of hate and bigotry.
Tankies on their way to hate private ownership and dictatorship of the bourgeoisie so much that they begin to love state ownership and dictatorship of the bureacracy
Niche communities. Large spaces are built of small niche interest groups. The tooling around small spaces needs to be first class if we want the larger space to be healthy
The lemmy.ml instance not being treated the same as the rest of the Triad in regards to defederation
Some highlights from the link:
"Don’t worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/30580167
“See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn’t count!!” ~ Davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/30673342
.ml admin, Nutomics continued transphobia https://lemmy.world/post/29222558
CW: Original transphobic Comment from Nutomic
“NK is actually good and anything counter to that is Western propaganda!” ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/31595035
General negative sentiment to other instances who haven’t “seen the way” yet ~davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/27426510
“If you don’t support Russia then you just don’t understand geopolitics” ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/27352415
And a long list of bans/censorship and allowing the proliferation of known propaganda and misinformation outlets clearly demonstrating use of their instance and recognition to force a political narrative
I am currently working on a report on vote manipulation and the early results are showing clear signs of the some most prolific .ml accounts participating in brigading and vote manipulation.
I can’t count the number of times I made a comment way deep in a chain that conflicts with .ml dogma, and after the first downvote, there are suddenly 5 more within minutes
PieFed doesn’t have any of these issues
It does, since it still federates with lemmy.ml…
I think the parent comment is talking about piefed the software, compared to Lemmy the software, not the specific
piefed.socialinstance they’re posting from.That would explain. But that comment is in answer to the top-level comment about the lemmy.ml instance.
The developers of the Lemmy software are the admins of the lemmy.ml instance and are problematic. The complaint is that the software itself can’t be separated from the priorities of the .ml instance.
Piefed doesn’t have the same issue, even if the flagship instance federates with .ml
Duplicate communities posting the same content over and over again.
Communities are tied to an instance. How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down? There is a slightly mad rush to migrate communities already.
Lemmy should have used usent style naming for communities.
I think there is a feature request to allow communities to subscribe to other communities so that their posts and comments are synced.
Great, so the duplication happens automatically! This is solving the wrong problem, IMHO…
Duplicate communities posting the same content over and over again.
Piefed solves that issue: https://piefed.zip/post/100161
All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view
A few options
- https://piefed.social/ - flagship instance
- https://piefed.zip/ - lemmy.zip team
- https://piefed.ca/ - lemmy.ca team
- https://feddit.online/
How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down?
Active communities have moved elsewhere:
Inactive communities weren’t active in the first place.
Communities are tied to an instance. How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down? There is a slightly mad rush to migrate communities already.
This is what the Piefed community migration system is designed to mitigate. It makes communities completely modular, allowing a community to move their entire posting history to another instance. As soon as it can pull subscribers automatically, it’ll be as if nothing happened.
Lemmy uses ActivityPub, so that can’t really be done in line with the spec.
Repeated content. When I doomscroll I see the same posts I’ve already seen instead of less popular ones.
Make sure to sort your all feed by hot instead of active.
I’ll try that, thanks!
I instantly disliked that when I joined Lemmy. This could totally be solved in the frontend by storing hashes of pictures I’ve seen before.
Block the person or the community.
I had this problem with US politics, same most multiple times, blocking communities did work for me.I do want to see the content and community, just once though. I don’t even mean the same story being posted multiple times, but I think I see the exact same post multiple times.
Onboarding. I think it’ll be better if people promoted individual instances instead of Lemmy as a whole. As a whole, it seems vague.
Or if instances used the word “Lemmy” in their domain names. I can say “go to Lemmy.world or Lemmy.zip or Lemmy.cafe” but if I tell someone to go “sh.itjust.works” they will get confused and wonder why “that site is not Lemmy?”
I advocate the opposite. Because people then see “lemmy.world” and immediately associate it with the rumours about the devs being tankies even though .world and the lemmy devs are unrelated
Maybe. Some people might not even know what a tankie is until they start using Lemmy.
I didn’t. Tankie was a completely new word to me when I started here.
I don’t think we want that. It sets some weird precedent that instances need to be lemmy-dot-something, which is both untrue and restrictive on server hosts as a barrier for entry if that becomes the universal convention.
The lack of content compared to reddit. If you look at !learn_programming@programming.dev for example, there is only one post this week, and 4 posts this month. How is it that, with all the web developers and AI vibe coding shit, no one is actually asking questions?
When I was on reddit, I had to hide posts because there were 10 or 20 interesting questions every day.
It’s a negative feedback loop. There is a good chance programmers asking questions NEED the answer (homework, work-work) so they don’t risk asking in low pop forums, making the forum low pop because there are no questions.
Mods seem inactive.
If people are interested in that topic (or any other), they can join !fedigrow@lemmy.zip. That community regroups people trying to grow communities, and the issues they face.
As everyone has pointed out, people and content. Its good in some ways since not every post is drowned out with one thousand replies nobody will ever see, but at the same time, you’re not getting much of anything at all sometimes. Not even very niche ones either. Even groups that represent entire states has limited info or replies still. If it can grow to that size and see some more unique and local content more I think even that would be a much better place for it to be.
Yeah this is my issue with it. I can find all the arts, Linux, and political stuff just fine. Sports, music, and places communities are seriously lacking. They exist, but are a shell of what you’d hope they’d be. Engagement is so low, it’s not worth bothering. The sports and music communities being so small and sparse is a real bummer.
Yeah the North Carolina community has 383 subscribers and the last post was 9 days ago.
Issues that would be solved by time/gaining more users
- Not nearly enough people to cover all the niche interest communities that Reddit does. At Reddit you find an expert on almost any topic to help you with your problems and you’ll find information on pretty much anything. Lemmy isn’t there yet.
- Not nearly enough history. A lot of content is still good and informative after many years. Lemmy doesn’t have a library of old-but-still-relevant content to search.
Issues independent of user count
- Search sucks. Reddit’s search does too, but reddit is easily searchable via Google. Lemmy isn’t.
- Onboarding is difficult, because you have to choose an instance, which is hugely important, but a newcomer has no idea what makes/is a good community to join
Issues that get worse with more users (aka, the potentially deal-breaking issues)
- Lemmy scales terribly. Every larger instance needs to retain a copy of pretty much all other content out there, and each comment/like/delete/update/… needs to be propagated to every other major instance out there. Adding more instances thus increases complexity and cost instead of decreasing it. Running a major lemmy instance is already prohibitively expensive now, with just about 50k monthly active users. If Lemmy was to scale to Reddit numbers (1.1 billion monthly active users, roughly 22 000x the number of users), everything would just break down.
- Moderation work scales just as terribly. Not only does an admin need to make sure the communities on their instance are moderated, but they also need to moderate all other communities on all other instances.
- Related to the last point, there’s some legal issues as well if an admin doesn’t moderate all other instances. Since content is copied from other instances to your instance, illegal content (e.g. illegal pornography, copyrighted works, …) are also copied to your own server without your active participation. That makes it legally mandatory to moderate all other communities.
- Legal pitfalls in general. If lemmy becomes sizeable enough, all sorts of laws in regards to social media platforms will apply. That’s one thing if the social media platform is run by a huge corporation with a legal department, but it’s an entirely different story for a tiny group of non-profit idealists running the social media platform.
Onboarding is difficult, because you have to choose an instance, which is hugely important, but a newcomer has no idea what makes/is a good community to join
It’s just as much a left-wing echo chamber as Truth Social is a right-wing one - and that’s a problem in both cases. Some might say it’s fine because we’re on the right side of history and they’re not, or something along those lines - but the people on Truth Social think the exact same thing. No one’s views ever change that way.
The right wing instances are just defederated from this larger federated group because the people on them were unable to follow the rules of other instances. Repeatedly, they would throw tantrums and create loads of dupe accounts to spam shit when people downvoted their shitty views or their accounts got banned. If they were capable of behaving with civility and following the rules, they’d still be here.
No idea how active that corner of the Lemmyverse is these days, but they have repeatedly chosen to behave in a way that leaves instance administrators with little choice other than defederation.
I don’t think there is such a thing as a left wing echo chamber. We bicker incessantly. The other day I was making a joke at the expense of the car-brain mentality and someone came at me for ableism.
I’m not mad at them, it’s just illustrative of my point. We don’t take shit from each other, and we take each other to task over jokes. The right will, meanwhile, forgive literal pedophilia, rape, and murder of each other. I’m sure as hell not saying we should, but we will never create an echo chamber as good as they do because of that.
There is also a dearth of cannibalistic viewpoints here. And Zoroastrians are woefully underrepresented.
I don’t come here to change my views (though it happens from time to time), and neither do they. I’m not ignorant of their thoughts; I’m inundated with them every day. I don’t need to interact with assholes here. I don’t want to come here and watch people scream back and forth at each other, and I definitely am not interested in participating—there is a reason I’ve left other social media.
You don’t have to subscribe to political communities if you don’t want to see political discussion. But the dearth of genuine political discussion here is a problem for the people who do want it, that can’t be fixed by individual action.
What is genuine political discussion? How do you moderate it? Who is going to come when it’s moderated? How do you deal with both legitimate and legitimate complaints about biased moderation?
I just don’t think it’s a thing on social media. I think it can happen in private conversations, but as soon as it becomes more about winning an argument or posturing for readers, I think any hope of earnest discourse is lost. The more public a conversation, the worse it is. It’s like trying to argue with a bully in front of their friends. You might be able to reach the humanity in them, but not in that moment.
It used to be, in the early days of mass social media (and it was widespread on forums)
Moderation isn’t easy but it also needn’t be fraught - set standards of civility (strict or loose) and basic rules about hate speech, and let people take themselves out of discussions that are within the rules that they nevertheless don’t like.
It works a lot better in small communities where you talk to the same people - you can ignore people you don’t like and not have the same conversation over and over.
But the dearth of genuine political discussion here is a problem for the people who do want it
It’s not genuine if we don’t want to constantly have to expose ourselves to toxic bigots or “smooth” manipulators who think it’s not really toxic bigotry if they are “just asking questions?”
It’s not genuine if we don’t want to start every single discussion of something bad Trump did with rebutting a half dozen versions of “but whatabout that time when dems…”?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
I will not be shamed into allowing toxicity into my life, on social media or otherwise, in the name of “avoiding an echo chamber.” NOTHING is stopping a conservative from coming here and making cogent, factual arguments, aside from their own fragility.
The conservatives who “can’t” post to Lemmy are the ones who don’t know how to have an actual conversation and get banned. What fraction of conservatives that represents is an excercise left to the reader. But I’ve got my own opinion on that number for sure.
The fact that you characterise natural ways of engaging in a discussion negatively doesn’t mean it’s not genuine, and it doesn’t mean you’re forced to look at it if it’s available.
NOTHING is stopping a conservative from coming here and making cogent, factual arguments, aside from their own fragility.
The structure of vote-based social media makes it difficult, and the people who, rather than remove themselves from places where arguments happen, shout down the people having the arguments, stops this from happening.
You’d be right to point out that conservative-majority spaces are just as, if not more guilty of this, but that doesn’t make it less true.
The conservatives who “can’t” post to Lemmy are the ones who don’t know how to have an actual conversation and get banned.
That’s true but it’s not the only thing that’s going on.
The fact that you characterise natural ways of engaging in a discussion negatively doesn’t mean it’s not genuine,
It’s natural to ask questions. It’s natural to point out hypocrisy.
JAQing off and Whataboutism are not those things.
Edit: And frankly, having to explain that in regard to my comment above is precisely what I love not having to constantly do at Lemmy. (Because people both understand the difference, and don’t pretend not to.)
it doesn’t mean you’re forced to look at it if it’s available.
The case being made here is that this is a left wing echo chamber, and that I am not interested in genuine discussion if I either don’t think it is, or don’t care that it is.
I have provided examples of trolling, toxic behavior.
I do not want trolling, toxic behavior here. It is not welcome by me in the community, whether I’m forced to look at it or not.
I’m also not supporting (and nor am I aware of any such thing existing) some kind of a blanket ban on conservatives. They are the folks always telling people to man up, grab themselves by their bootstraps, have the courage of their convictions, etc etc. Guess they need to take some of their own advice if it’s a little rough sometimes trying to push authoritarianism and bigotry in some spaces. And if they get banned because they have forgotten how to talk to people who don’t already agree with them, I can’t find it in me to care.
I will not be shamed into allowing toxicity into my life, on social media or otherwise, in the name of “avoiding an echo chamber.”
JAQing off and Whataboutism are not those things.
Yeah, but if you go in saying that this is the inevitable result of having conservatives discuss politics here, I am suspicious that your threshold for those terms is waaayy lower than mine.
The person I replied to originally wasn’t talking about trolling or toxic behaviour, they were talking about conservative viewpoints (likening them to cannibalism, I might add) so, if you want to chip in that trolling isn’t welcome then I’ll certainly agree with that, but there’s a reason I’m not really talking about that.
These are two of the the primary things gone from my life now that I’ve cut every conservative I can from it. It’s glorious.
So if you want me to support some kind of outreach for conservatives (who apparently can’t post anywhere they aren’t overtly welcomed and that’s a problem the rest of us need to fix) I need some understanding of what you think the upside is.
I haven’t seen that.
I’ve seen scolding people for not wanting to surround themselves with people who have had years and years to demonstrate what they are like and what they support. The only thing new about modern conservatism is how it no longer bothers trying to pretend it’s not hateful.
As I have said repeatedly, nothing stops a conservative from coming here and communicating like an adult.
You don’t have to subscribe to political communities if you don’t want to see political discussion.
True but it seems like the majority of Lemmys like attaching anything and everything to something political. I saw some post about a squirrel or something, just chiling in the heat. Supposed to be cute. Immediately devolved into how fat the squirrel looked and how it must be a MAGA squirrel. Then the conversation just devolved into “cheeto man”(stupidist overused Lemmy term ever!) jokes over and over.
Also, Lemmy: why the fuck do you all think saying “cheeto man” is so hilarious? It’s something that 2nd graders would snicker at. Once. And you all say it over and over. WTF?! No wonder you all can’t get girlfriends.
Yeah this is something that has got way worse over time. It used to be that most forums would default to “no politics” and then there were discussion areas set aside for that. And now if you criticise someone for bringing politics into something where it doesn’t belong, you will get angry responses declaring that you’re burying your head in the sand. No, I just don’t want lowest-hanging-fruit political comments on every cat picture.
I think the main problem is that there isn’t much besides politics and memes. Most communities that aren’t politics seem to devolve into meme communities.
I feel like that’s an issue that’s exacerbated by the predominance of image posts over text posts, and text post only communities.
It’s probably an issue with vote-based discussions full stop. Post something funny and it’ll get votes because of the laughs; post something everyone in your echo-chamber agrees with and it’ll get votes because it’s right-on.
Maybe I just want to go back to forums.
Forums still exist, but I hard agree with you. I was so excited when the lemmy devs were considering hiding votes counts from the frontend by default. Unfortunately (imo) it got shot down by the community pretty quickly.
I think “likes” as a socials concept are part of a dark engagement pattern we’ve willfully brought over from the mainstream, and we won’t be able to be much better than them until we’re rid of it.
Yeah, I am on… two forums. I think the issue is that it’s not where the people are any more.
I actually think the problem with voting is that the way it’s used to promote threads instead of doing it on a time basis. It’s part of a way of engaging with a site which punishes long-running conversations.
What do you mean on a time basis?
Agree that it’s hard to find really long running conversions (like what you see on forums), unless you happen to be going back and forth with one other person (notifications pull you back in).
!communitypromo@lemmy.ca has a pinned post for communities that are not politics or memes
The problem is the right no longer argue their points in good faith.
“The right” consists of individuals, just like “the left” does - and there’s plenty of bad faith to be found on both sides.
Is this like plenty of fine people on both sides? In aggregate, one side is far more egregious and it’s not even close.
Speaking of bad faith…
Yes, and just like Trump, I’m not speaking of the white nationalists and nazies.
"So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists – because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
“Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people. But you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets, and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group.”
Uh huh, and I’m sure we can take him at his word. It’s not like he’s ever lied. He never gave a nod to nazis ever, like telling the proud boys to stand by. Yup, good old not racist donnie, I’m sure he totally hates white supremacists.
You wanna talk bad faith, believe anything that comes out of his orange piehole.
Misrepresenting what someone says is a textbook example of bad faith so doing that in a discussion about bad faith is ironic to say the least. What he actually thinks is unrelated to this discussion as it’s about what he said. You’d call people out for twisting your words so hold yourself to the same standards.
Not believing lying sociopaths is not bad faith, and I’m having trouble accepting that you’d actually think it is. I’m not sure why you’re so hung up on mango mussolini anyway, as this discussion started when I claimed that the right lied way more than the left. The president wasn’t responsible for all the lies the GOP has told for the past 50 years, although he sure does have more than his fair share.
You are appearing more and more bad faith, or just plain grossly ignorant, and willfully so… If you won’t accept the truth, the truth that is being handed to you, with references, by other people, then prepare to not be part of this “echo chamber” for much longer…
Note that this is the second statement he made, which he had to make after being called out by the media for seemingly supporting the neonazi protestors. Which, given his history at that point and subsequently, it’s pretty obvious that the media was right and he was just back tracking due to bad publicity.
This is where the “fine people on both sides” quote originates from.
Snopes article on the matter.
Yeah, and it specifically ignores that the statement you posted was the second, clarifying statement days later. Snopes is going off what he said he meant, not actually what he said. Check the United the Right wiki page for the actual timeline.
Stop letting other people think for you.
Trump did not respond to the torchlight parade on Friday night or the demonstrations on Saturday morning until 1:19 pm on Saturday, August 12, when he tweeted, “We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!”[284][33]
At the bill-signing ceremony, Trump said that “we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides”.[284][33][288][289] He added that it had been “going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. A long, long time” and that “a swift restoration of law and order” was now vital.[289]
A statement attributed to an unnamed White House spokesperson was released the next day, asserting that "The President said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry, and hatred. Of course that includes white supremacists, KKK, Neo-Nazi and all extremist groups. He called for national unity and bringing all Americans together
…
After the backlash for his remarks, Trump read a statement from a teleprompter two days later at the White House.[310][292] He said that “anyone who acted criminally in this weekend’s racist violence, you will be held fully accountable.”[287] and that “[r]acism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the K.K.K., neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”[311]
The closest they have is the unattributed statement, again after the fact, trying to clarify what he said wasn’t what he meant. Like they always do.
Thank god you can point to ONE SINGLE instance where Trump isn’t actively supporting white nationalist christofascism.
“The right” consists of individuals,
Every last one of them who voted for trump has decided that bigotry (of multiple sorts) and steamrolling our constitution in the name of authoritarianism are somewhere between just what they wanted and not a dealbreaker.
What else do I need to know about them?
What else do I need to know about them?
That people identify on the political right outside of US as well?
Heh, I’m sure they are much better people than US conservatives, but I’ll quote myself from elsehwere.
The conservatives who “can’t” post to Lemmy are the ones who don’t know how to have an actual conversation and get banned. What fraction of conservatives that represents is an excercise left to the reader. But I’ve got my own opinion on that number for sure.
Maybe you should re-read my original comment? Because unless you think that Lemmy is not a left wing echo chamber then I have no clue what you’re arguing about here exactly.
OK, have crawled up the context tree, and don’t see where you think I’ve misunderstood your point. You think it’s an echo chamber (I do not) and you think that’s bad (I do not) and apparently I’m supposed to feel a little sheepish about not wanting shitty people with shitty behavior here at Lemmy. (I do not.)
Maybe I misread you. I think I’m being told not only that it is an echo chamber, but that I’m supposed to be bothered by it.
Meanwhile I haven’t seen an argument for what we’d gain by having more conservatives here, or what’s stopping those unicorn conservatives who aren’t raging assholes from posting.
Some might say it’s fine because we’re on the right side of history and they’re not, or something along those lines
I say it’s fine because if there’s one thing I’ve learned repeatedly since about 2017, it’s that the single most effective thing I can do to reduce toxicity in my life is to reduce my interactions with conservative family members, coworkers, ‘friends’, and social media accounts.
It’s remarkably effective. I interact with no conservative or known trump voter more than work or family obligations require. Haven’t for years. Best mental health step I’ve taken in my adult life.
Not my fault they have all forgotten that “loudest asshole in the room” isn’t a personality.
would you like to tell me which political side is currently putting people in concentration camps and starting a war
I’d much, much rather be in an echo chamber where BS is questioned and reality is not ignored than a conservative hellscape where basic facts of reality are ignored, like, “tons of CO2 in the atmosphere is totally fine, actually” or, “trans people are corrupting sports!”.
Yea… fuck those at best extremely stupid people and at worst, vitriolic piles of trash.
Agreed on all counts.
The real mystery to me is what value the echo-chamber residents get out of it. Why would someone join a group of people they already agree with, just to be told that their opinions are correct, and to shout down any interloper who contradict them? How is that not a boring waste of time? Is it that most people are insecure in their views and need validation, perhaps? It’s a phenomenon I still don’t understand.
People often accuse me of being a troll because I tend to voice views that are unpopular on this platform. Personally, I just don’t see any point in talking about things we all already agree on. I’d much rather try to change the views of those I disagree with - or have them try to change mine.
This exactly where I am on all counts. Stick with it!
I find I don’t agree with a lot of people, though there is at least a higher chance that someone, especially from my instance, will share my values and at least be willing to hear dissenting opinions without going right to insincere strawmaning.
To be clear, you join the echo chamber because you won’t be judged there and also because you want to dissent from its party line?
Yes, it’s a matter of gradation. It’s not an echo chamber for me because so many of you have different opinions, but generally we all care about what is true and the future of life on this planet.
So it’s easier to have discussions around the parts we disagree over.
generally we all care about what is true and the future of life on this planet
But (to stay true to the spirit of debate I just defended) is this not itself a straw man? Do you think, say, religious conservatives would say that they don’t “care about what is true and the future of life on this planet”?
Good question, and they might. In which case it would be easier to have a discussion with them.
However, I think much of the time they cleave to a more Kantian morality, where acting correctly / virtuously in accordance with an identifiable authority. They may also believe that the future of life on this planet is trivial when compared to quality of life on some metaphysical plane.
I have this discussion with my neighbour constantly who is nice, but she keeps saying I’ve “got to have faith” and that “they have a plan to fix all this when the time is right” all while real people are suffering and dying, and their suffering is indelible — it can never be made to have not happened — and they will never be coming back.
It’s really hard to have a real discussion about reality with someone like that.
Fair enough about
literal religious nutspeople of firmly held religious convictions. This side of the pond there are very few of those, fortunately. My basic point is that plenty of people who vote “wrong” (Trump, for example) would actually agree with you on most of your vision of the good society. The questions are mainly over how to get there. This IMO is the tragedy of democratic politics today, and specifically the USA. An almost absolute breakdown in communication.
The same issue Bluesky and other app-killer platforms have/had at the start: momentum. Momentum explains everything else. If you leave out the vapid content on Reddit, it’s still the premier place for asking questions and getting them answered by enthusiastic amateurs or actual experts in the field. The moment Lemmy gets the same quality tech support and DIY responses, it will have its place. Or, like with Bluesky, Reddit needs to become as alienating and disgusting as X became after the Elon takeover.
That’s the beauty about Lemmy, it’s not too reliant on momentum as it doesn’t need graphs to go up at all times. The fediverse will always be a refuge when other platforms crumble. We’ll just have to be patient and make sure the platform and the communities are as good as they can be at that point in time.
This is how I see it too. Freedom from the toxic ad-supported business model is a slow-burning superpower.
Reddit is useless for questions. If you’re a subject-matter expert in something, find the subreddit for it and prepare to be horrified.
I had to give my friend this news some years ago, to no avail. Sooo many upvoted “answers” on Reddit are just confidantly incorrect BS. It’s also trivial to find reddit answers from general search results instead of limiting your search to just Reddit.
There was a small window where Reddit could be used to find good answers to things, but that ship sailed long ago.
As soon as the site started to become popular in the mid 2010’s, every “expert” was someone who maybe once took a related class in college, or think sharing their girlfriend’s uncle’s neighbor’s relevant story means they have the definitive answer.
“Hello Reddit, does anyone else catch themselves acting differently between family and friends?”
“As someone who once took a psychology class in college, your symptoms are 100% aligned with dissociative identity disorder, and you should seek help immediately.”
The lack of continuous and backlogged content. For some this is a benefit because it gives them a reason to stop scrolling, but for others who come here to look for answers, find entertainment, or anonymously voice their opinions, this can be something of a downside.
Of course this platform is as anonymous as you make it, but I’ve seen some people say they refrain from commenting more often because they don’t want to be known as a regular, instead wanting to “blend in to the crowd” as one would on more populous sites like Reddit or Twitter.
Communities: People complaining about niche communities, yet they don’t make or promote them. Create a community, promote it, share it with other users, share content.
Politics: I came here to discuss about everything, but I only see new and dead communities, being overtaken and post daily politics.
This is what I have blocked so far, yet more communities are being made, and one article goes on and on and on and on…
