It is objectively a lot more male than Reddit or other social media. Reddit has many issues, but lack of women is not one of them.
This is like an echo champer of tech people, hard to find non-tech aware people here.
That was reddit when it first started it just takes time the problem is reddit people want to speed run this and created a bunch of communities then abandoned them or filled them with AI Slop. Only making it harder for stuff to grow organically. I do wish Lemmy and Piefed had a network global name space for communities like how IRC does channels.
it just takes time
It takes more than just that, though. Reddit’s UI and mod tools are more powerful, and the Fediverse as both a concept and a practical entity are more demanding and trickier to understand and use.
Agree. I like tech and I’m subscribed to tech communities. But not a whole lot other than that here.
We’re here, we’re just self-aware enough not to make it too obvious. I just don’t even interact with half the content in all because I have no fucking clue what a “distro” is, is it like a mix between a disco and a bistro? Sounds fucking awesome actually, I’m in.
I am forced to see posts in communities I am banned from for having an anti-ai stance AKA a working brain. I didn’t block all of them soon enough.
What I am saying is that you should still be able to block communities you are banned from. Seeing them in my feed and being unable to get rid of them is like seeing cockroaches in a kitchen.
You should be able to add them on the Blocks tab of this page. There’s a text box you can fill in with the community name. It’s more annoying than pressing a button but maybe less than continuing to see the content.
You are a genius.
Honestly, they should just automatically be blocked if you are banned from them.
Which is also not good because people are usually banned from channels they like and want to see the posts.
Sounds like it would be a good bug report.
If you get banned from your own instance, all your posts and communities you created are deleted. Lots of posts get deleted because of this.
How would someone get banned from their own instance? Do you really own it if you can get banned from it?
Other meaning: “If you get banned from [the instance where you created your user account]” might clear it up. It’s not their own instance in the sense that they are in control of the system but it is the one they might consider “home”.
Compare this against a case where a lemmy.world user gets an instance-wide ban from the admins on lemmy.ml, for example: user can’t participate in .ml communities but it doesn’t nuke their account.
No way! Why should I get banned? It’s the ai slop communities full of no-talent ass clowns who should be banned.
Yeah that’s crazy
having an anti-ai stance AKA a working brain
Judging from this comment that doesn’t seem to be the issue with you
Did chatgpt write that comment for you?
This is the issue with Lemmy ^
Are you out of tokens for the day already?
There’s also a vocal minority of just really pessimistic people on here. Politics I don’t mind as long as it’s a discourse about not only what is bad but what can be reasonably done about it.
I’ve been in several discussions where I add “look at community, we are strong together” and it’s immediately beaten down with “the world won’t change things are shit and always will be, be mad and angry about it, I’m mad and angry at you”.
It’s the internet, I’m not surprised. But I’ve definitely had to disconnect myself for a bit some days after severe reactions from people just to remember it’s just strangers on the internet.
It’s not all the time, but for some discussions that promote inclusion and understanding to be met with the hard “I don’t agree so you are human garbage” can be an awful whiplash sometimes.
reading the top comments on this post, strikes me they reflect the founders of lemmy
maybe we’ll get more joy from the piefeds
I don’t know, pessimism seems to be the norm. IRL I live in one of the richest zip codes in America… and pretty much every convo I have or overhear is people whining about how life sucks and how hard it is and how mean everyone else is to them.
We live in a ‘victim hood’ culture these days. People aren’t proud of things anymore or optimistic, it’s an arms race to see who can the most pessimistic and whiny.
The only time I hear or interact with people being positive it’s mostly them talking abotu self-help crap or whatever ‘therapy’ they are using to ‘help them cope’.
I was gonna say something similar, like the amount of times I’ve wanted to look into some political topics and seeing comments encouraging violence make it hard for me to feel motivated just to stay informed. I get being angry, but damn, cue Mr. Rogers “what do we do with the mad that we feel?”
Definitely the amount of politics, it gets brought up in far too many places where it is unnecessary, I avoid political communities and stuff like that, yet I keep getting it in communities with 0 relation.
That may be true, but the context is… “politics” is kinda the only show in town right now.
I literally came home from work an hour ago, and told my partner we should think about turning on the deep freezer in the garage and stocking it up, because I just heard that fuel deliveries to farmers in the region have been put on hold.
Sure, something as mundane as what we will eat for dinner shouldn’t be “political”, but thanks to the yanks it really is.
Yeah I understand here, there’s a lot of knock on effects from political decisions that eventually cause stuff like this. I was more focused on people coming into comment sections and spouting political ideology and partisan politics rather than stuff like what you’ve said here.
I just wish it wasn’t all American politics. Like American politics is just shoved into evert random niche community even if its not even remotely relevant
To understand why there’s so much politics, it’s worth taking a step back. Lots of people in Lemmy understand that politics is simply how political goods are distributed.
What are political goods? Anything that people value: material resources, labor, ideas, attention, significance, etc…
So, if attention and significance are political goods, can you come up with a single thing that is not a political good and therefore isn’t political?
“Everything is politics” is an “um ackshually.” It’s technically true but you know damn well they’re talking about partisan politics or ideological politics.
You’re running apologia for people who can’t go on a thread about cake without posting a Trump joke or a Communist slogan. Mainstream social media proportionally does not have nearly as many of these people.
I agree that sometimes “everything is politics” might lead to unsavory conversations. My goal is not to defend that.
I think our goal in places like Lemmy is to communicate and understand each other, and, because of it (in the best of cases), live better lives.
How could “everything is politics” possibly lead to better lives? We may learn how our everyday actions —so-called “apolitical” actions— actually ripple out in ways that we actually care about.
For example, we may stop buying Awful Corp.'s bread and instead buy from our local bakery. We may stop assuming protein in our diet means misery-filled and climate-unfriendly meat and instead eat more healthy lentils, beans, and pea protein. We may stop buying purebred dogs from suffering-inducing puppy mills and instead adopt dogs. We may stop being brutal with ourselves because we didn’t turn out as the media says we should’ve turned out and instead hold ourselves wholly and kindly while we ourselves choose what kind of life we want.
Saying “everything is politics” opens up a door. We walk into a room in which we can choose. We can choose what kinds of stories we want more of and what kinds of stories we want less of.
Sometimes we cannot do anything about the things that hurt, but we can hold them in our hands as precious, fully aware of what it means to be human. Other times we can indeed get closer to the things we care about, and we can take steps toward it, confident that we are living lives worth living.
I’m glad there aren’t many apoliticists here, I hate talking about politics with apoliticists. They always want to complain and demand that policy change to ban the things they don’t like. I’m sick of all their political activism.
You can still keep up with politics while wanting the occasional break. If you don’t take breaks, all you’ll accomplish is burnout or straight up losing your mind. Neither of which helps anyone except for the fascists.
No, I don’t believe in that, I think everything is political. I have lots of fun with politics. Lately I’ve been watching Babylon 5 for fun and playing Subnautica Below Zero. Those are political. One’s about the politics of peace, one’s about the politics of capitalism and environmentalism. If I thought My hobbies weren’t political, I’d be far less aware of the interconnectedness of the world around Me. You need to know that everything’s connected. Everything has an impact. Everything matters. I don’t ever forget that, I don’t ever act without thinking of the consequences. I don’t go to the shops and buy some mincemeat without thinking of the cows that died to make it. I think of the cows, and so I don’t buy the mince. I don’t forget about politics. It’s in everything beautiful around Me. It’s in nature, it’s in love, it’s in identity. I’m goddessgender. That’s a gender defined by politics, defined by My relationship with others, just like the genders of man and woman are. I’m gay, and I love politically. When I caress My partner’s head, I take extra delight in how I’m committing an act of defiance against the patriarchy. That’s what recharges My batteries. I don’t agree with living the kind of lifestyle where you can forget that what you’re doing is always political.
Don’t think I was demanding much here, I’m trying to say that people who want to talk politics should talk in the communities meant for that, not in the non political communities and make it everyone else’s problem. But sure, I’m demanding policy change to ban something.
Okay, you go subscribe to !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social and unsubscribe from all the normal communities like this one where we talk about politics. I won’t go and bother you there, so you stay in that one and the other non-political communities and leave us normal people alone.
Would like to point out politics is not actually the primary content on the fediverse and based on the downvotes you’re getting, you seem to be in a minority, not the majority. Now have a good day and bye.
Everything is political. That’s like saying text and images aren’t the main content on the fediverse.
- Lemmy is by and large populated with ex-Redditors, who bring with them some of the same hivemind on certain topics. Eg: Lemmy is very anti-AI or nuanced discussions thereon. Nuclear is bad, etc. Makes bad faith discussions on certain topics almost certain.
- As everywhere else - there’s too much “you’re either on my team or you’re against me” - though notably less than in other spaces
- Upvote / downvote counts: these should be yeeted into the garbage pile of history.
Things Lemmy does well
- Less performative engagement.
- Less American (but arguably that’s still too much for some).
- Despite it all, a measure of civility still exists. Rare.
- You can create your own instance and be ungovernable :)
- No algorithmic engagement bullshit (so far)
- I don’t feel like I have to walk on eggshells every time I post something.
I personally find Lemmy a great deal more pleasant to interact on, with strong pre 2010 forum vibes and I feel that’s a good thing. YMMV
TL;DR: There’s a lot less “look at me, look at me!” on Lemmy and it’s all the better for it.
I have seen no people rail against nuclear on here or reddit.
They rail against my right to own personal nuclear weapons
Bastards!
Upvote / downvote counts: these should be yeeted into the garbage pile of history.
Still not exactly sure what “yeeted” means, but I like how upvotes & downvotes tend to bring quality content to the fore, and I even like them as a permanent record. They’re not very useful of course, but having the motivation to permanently increasing my totals is useful for sharing good content and communicating in good faith. At least for me.
Right - that’s me trying to hip and cool (“how do, fellow kids”).
Yeet - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Yeet
I completely disagree about the upvotes / down votes thing btw. I think, platonically, that’s what they were supposed to do.
Pragmatically, they’ve end up being more a social proof / opinion suppression / brigading tool.
That - and infinite scroll - are among the worst sins introduced by social media. ICBW and YMMV.
Nah I think you’re on the money. As someone with ADHD, those worthless little updoots and infinity-scrolling are almost as bad as any algorithm!
ICBW and YMMV
YTMND. 👍
YTMND
I understood that reference.
Okay, thanks. I can never seem to remember it, maybe because it feels so unnatural. Maybe it would help if I knew where it came from, though. *shrug*
Pragmatically, they’ve end up being more a social proof / opinion suppression / brigading tool.
That seems exceptionally pessimistic to me, but maybe you have more insight in to all that than I do. Personally I think multiple things can be true about upvotes / downvotes, some useful, some harmful perhaps.
In any case, there is no debate that upvotes are useful and valuable to me when it comes to posting and commenting.
Well, I remember ye olden days of Usenet - we mostly got along without them, and without some of the issues they seem to cause.
If they’re helpful to you, thumbs up (ha). I do wish they were an optional extra instead of proxy dopamine button (based on the way some seem to use them). There’s actually a good read on why they (and reddit in general) skew toxic -
https://jacobdesforges.com/you-should-quit-reddit-distribution-wide/
Well, I remember ye olden days of Usenet - we mostly got along without them, and without some of the issues they seem to cause.
Things change, though. Upvote/downvote was one of the many things Reddit and other places trialed over the years, and based on the success, stuck with it. Me, I barely spent any time on Usenet, but it occurs to me that the userbase was probably smaller. A much, much larger userbase probably fits better with upvote/downvote, so the comparison there is likely skewed, methinks.
‘Dopamine rush’ is exactly right, and I think it’s useful and informational, similar to the way that people react to your statements and ideas in real life. I do think they can have an ‘echo chamber’ effect and help promote the problem that a popular thing or opinion can be completely wrong, but to me that just means that upvotes/downvotes aren’t perfect, not that they should be completely discarded.
https://jacobdesforges.com/you-should-quit-reddit-distribution-wide/
Not sure what you want me to do with a link to a book, but I don’t even agree with the premise of the title sentence. Reddit is still very useful to me, and I know of no other place that replicates the variety of content, there.
Ok, but I think you’re conflating two separate things; the usefulness of Reddit as a content index (which I agree is still unmatched) with whether the upvote/downvote mechanic is net positive. One doesn’t need to quit Reddit to acknowledge that the voting system consistently produces pathological outcomes at scale. “Brigading” is a literal Reddit phenomena
The Usenet comparison wasn’t really about scale. It was about the incentive structure. Upvotes/downvotes don’t just surface good content, they gamify participation in a way that systematically advantages emotionally resonant, tribally safe content over nuanced or contrarian takes. That’s not a flaw in implementation , it’s a feature of the design.
And “people react to your statements in real life” isn’t really analogous. In real life, social feedback is contextual, bidirectional, and has friction. A downvote is anonymous, effortless, and carries zero accountability. The asymmetry matters.
The link is to a book (available via Libby if you don’t want to pay for it) in case you wanted a primary source. In summary: Desforges’ core argument is that Reddit exploits operant conditioning to keep users chasing high-value posts through a flood of mediocre ones and that even people who claim not to care about karma are still shaped by it. It’s worth a read.
Justin Rosenstein - one of the engineers who actually built Facebook’s Like button - has publicly said it produces what he called “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure,” and has since restricted his own use of it. Leah Pearlman, who co-created it with him, has said the same. These aren’t outside critics; these are the people who built the thing.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/years-on-creators-of-facebook-like-button-give-idea-thumbs-down/
End of the day: if you find it personally useful, I believe you. I think the problem is in aggregate behaviour. Apes together…dumb.
Ok, but I think you’re conflating two separate things
I feel like they’re distinctly separate things, and I thought I’d communicated as much. Oh, well.
…the voting system consistently produces pathological outcomes at scale.
That seems like… a little much. I do agree that upvotes/downvotes indeed gamify the system, but on the whole would say that the end-effect on Reddit results in a big bunch of hoomons acting in typical hoomon ways, which is with deep undercurrents of fickle, ignorant, selfish, feel-good behavior.
The Usenet comparison wasn’t really about scale. It was about the incentive structure.
Yeah, I get that, but I do observe that there are advantages to upvote/downvote that indeed work better on a larger scale. I’m not sure they’re really needed on a smaller scale.
I’d say I agree with most of the things you wrote, but remain unconvinced that upvote/downvote is so absolutely toxic as to merit tossing. And of course, I don’t think it’s going to happen, anyway.
Aggregate behaviour amongst naked apes? Yeah, I would tend to agree. Now what?
Depending on the topic, I know that if I sort by top, I’ll find my people at the top, or the bottom. So, it’s useful for that reason. This was more true on Reddit, but it happens here, too.
Paying too much attention to the numbers I think will push people toward the normal take, whether we like to admit it or not. So, it’s best not to track your own stats too seriously. Just say your piece and let the chips fall where they may.
On a side-note, I think the past tense of yeet is yote. Good analysis nevertheless.
eggshells
Many, especially political and news communities ban opinions that are mainstream in the Democratic Party because they aren’t left enough. If they are powermods, they will happily ban you from dozens of communities and instances.
There is a lot of computing and a lot of politics, but not very much else.
4 times the same post in 4 different identically named communities…
I want a global feed, communities can federate with in a sort of sub-lemmy.Relative to Reddit, probably the number of users. More users means more posts, more comments, more expertise on various areas, and more niche communities that become viable.
Somewhere down the list:
-
Extremely determined negativity. There are a lot of…I don’t know how to describe it. People who actively try to take the absolute, most utterly-pessimistic read on anything possible, to the point of having to make crazy assumptions to keep some kind of negative perspective on the thing. I don’t know if it’s people suffering from depression — which I understand can produce that effect — or doomerism or what, but it’s exasperating. I haven’t run into that sort of phenomenon, certainly not to anything like that degree, on other social media environments that I’ve used.
-
The low-effort “capitalism bad” venting comments. I’m not really into far-left views, but that’s not what irks me. I’ve seen people on here who you can at least talk to about left-wing positions. Like, some random user who is interested in, I don’t know, adopting universal basic income and wants to talk about different proposals. But about 99% of the comments I see that contain the word “capitalism” don’t amount to that. They’re just venting. They aren’t constructive. They don’t reference any material. They aren’t proposing any improvement or ideas or anything. All they want to do is to vent. I mean, it’s like someone wanting to complain about their ex or how their sports team lost or something like that. And not only that, but a substantial percentage of those comments are complaining about something that has little to do with capitalism. Instead, it’s virtually anything to do with the political or economic world that they don’t like relative to some sort of idealized paradigm that they hold. You could use that “everything I don’t like is woke” meme about the right, swap “woke” and “capitalism”, and I swear, it’d apply to a lot of the comments. And I get that, yeah, one purpose of talking to people is to vent, and so you’d expect that occasionally when people talk to each other, sometimes they’re gonna vent. That’s human nature. But holy cow, as low-effort venting goes, the “capitalism bad” comments show up as a high proportion here.
Occasionally I do talk about things, write larger comments about communal ownership. Like…okay, I know that on at least a couple of occasions, I’ve talked about the fact you’ve had communal ownership work at small scale, like families, say, or that there have been smaller organizations that have practiced communal ownership of property, and that maybe it’d be interesting to try working up in scale from smaller organizations to try and identify where any issues might crop up. And I have never had anyone actually respond with discussion when I do write something like that. No engagement. Like, it’s not as if people have some raging unmet desire to talk about any of that. They just want to complain.
I don’t even see people who are writing “capitalism bad” comments engage in discussion with each other. Like, this isn’t Marx and a bunch of activists in a London cafe throwing around ideas with each other. It’s just one-off complaints, leaf comments in the thread.
I totally agree especially with the “everything I don’t like is capitalism” low quality comments. I’m pretty leftist myself and I love quality discussion about how to make the world a better, juster and fairer place, but lemmy is chock full of “capitalism bad” Doomerism. Tons of “the world is shit” and “you’re an evil neoliberal” for trying to make things better instead of just curling in ball of despair and gloom.
Black pill leftism, I guess
I agree with the politics part. I AM leftist but sometimes need an escape from politics because everything is just so bad all the time.
But it’s not even overwhelming politics (though I can understand people being tired of politics, as a separate concern). I’m pretty sure that @LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net or @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com or a few other users I’ve run into could probably carry on a constructive discussion about left-wing politics. I occasionally see, on !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works, good-faith, well-meaning left-wing users who are actually trying to go talk about left-wing issues on lemmygrad.ml or lemmy.ml and are off trying to have a serious conversation. Usually auth-left-versus-non-auth-left, but that’s just what gets submitted to MeanwhileOnGrad, and I imagine that there is probably other conversation elsewhere. It’s just that the “capitalism bad” comments that I’m talking about aren’t from those users and don’t fall into that category. They’re just the largest source of low-effort comment stuff that I see.
Meanwhileongrad is some of the lowest quality slop on here, nowhere near ‘good faith’ or ‘well meaning’
In my experience tankies are very closed minded and ironically against collective action; given how much effort they put to avoid building coalition and elections.
They also like to assume that they are driving change when its not clear where they are outside of the internet.
thank you for providing an example of what I’m talking about
Not everyone is privileged enough to be as apathetic to the election results.
I both agree with you and also kind of unironically believe that everything I dont like is capitalism, haha
It’s not depression. It’s identity politics they believe in and that necessary leads to absurd beliefs.
-
The fucking politics oh my god, in every fucking community good lord. No way to filter it out either.
This is a mostly Western place and two big Western players might have just started WW3 (okay, hopefully and probably not but still), I feel like it’s warranted.
Having to block 30 different communities because they’re all literally the same community.
It’s even worse for NSFW communities. We don’t need eleventy billion communities for the same super niche porn content.
That and people posting the same things on multiple communities because it technically fits even though there’s already a niche community specifically for that topic.
This is the biggest thing, in my opinion. Decentralization is a double-edged sword.
If I cared about my Lemmy usage more, I might be inclined to build myself a service that aggregates similar topics into larger groups.
Piefed has that feature already.
The nice thing about having an instance dedicated to porn is that you can just block one instance, and that gets you 90% of the way there.
Crossposting the same post is kind of pointless still. You can browse all and won’t miss anything.
The NSFW stuff is mostly automated reposting from somewhere else. It’s low quality and kind of worthless.
There could be more activity in the arts and crafts communities. I want all of you to pick up a nice creative hobby like knitting or stitching right fucking now! And then post all of it!
My roller skates came with a defect, after all, and I lost the momentum. Now I’m drawing. Well, no, actually, I haven’t done that in a while… I think now I’m entering poetry territory. Is there a “hobbies, in general, just tell us about yours” community? We are enough for something like that.
There’s !imadethis@lemmy.zip for any hobby that produces something, but that leaves out the activity-based hobbies
In addition to the “I made this” community, you can also post your writing here !poetry@sh.itjust.works
There are a lot of communities out there with a few regular users who are looking forward to your contributions :)
In case you return to drawing, there’s also an art share community.
Stitching is a hobby?
I really hope the people posting to !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works enjoy what they’re doing o:
there are tons of different stitching arts. they use different mediums, threads, and techniques.
my sister has done cross stitch her entire life. it’s basically pixel art irl.
The fact that it’s mainly just a FOSS and Politics forum.
I love what the technology is trying to do but the thing is, the platform’s main selling point being the liberatory potential of it’s technology, is that it’s mainly used by people who are interested in politics and technology.
Ooo… This. I was trying to think of a coherent way to articulate my thoughts on this and you took the words right out of my mouth.
All things considered, Lemmy is a pretty reasonable viable alternative to sites like reddit, and most problems on the site can just be chocked up to normal problems on the internet: your Whataboutism contrarians always inciting arguments, some instances’ servers are more reliable than others, negative posts get more attention than positive ones, niche subs don’t get enough activity to be communities, etc, etc.
But my god. Every single active post these days is about goddamn Linux and issues with the DNC lol
Or about how much people hate AI and cars
I wish there was an easy solution. Maybe I ought to start sharing some random funny images I’ve got on my devices but I don’t think that’s it. I don’t use it anymore but taking a quick scroll through Reddit the sheer variety in contend from multiple communities (Sooo many posts from r/Ultrakill and r/GeometryDash on my feed) make the timeline so so lively; but here…
Good point. The diversity is really non existent.
There is some diversity… it’s just you get harassed for being different and it takes a really tough mentality to ignore it or a really huge block list.
I find it frustrating that so many communities are just for news articles. Look, I’m terminally politics-brained, but you’ll never get anywhere if you’re always just reacting to the current thing. There’s not really a place for higher level discussion or for people to share thoughtful, original ideas. The result is thousands of the same arguments on the same three topics screaming the same talking points at each other over and over. And it seems like that’s all people want.
Really more of a frustration with people in general. Wish people were more curious about the world.
place for higher level discussion
Create it. If you don’t mind my simple arguments I will participate.
To start, you can invite the 25 people who have upvoted you.
It is objectively a lot more male than Reddit or other social media.
Reddit circa 2010 was very male, nerdy, and often misogynistic. As it gained popularity, the community became more diverse. As it got more traction, these issues abated somewhat. Once it hit critical mass and became totally mainstream, the audience was diverse enough to make most people forget how it used to be. I miss when Reddit was at the “sweet spot” of being pretty diverse, yet not corporatized to shit.
Lemmy/Fediverse is still in its “early Reddit” stage now. It shows great potential but its basic premise and design probably prevents absolute mainstream adoption. Which is probably a good thing, but I would like to get closer to the sweet spot.
People calling each and every one an extremist, fascist or nazi for no other reason than they are being blinded by their own inability to understand their counterparts viewpoint. As irony would have it causing themselves to become extremists, often proclaiming they wish voilence or sometimes even death upon other people.
Seriously, I’m so tired of people here baselessly slinging those insults every time someone has the wrong opinion. I’m tempted to start naming and shaming.
