Gonna just say it. As a longtime Lemmy user I’m really not a fan of a lot of the people coming over from Reddit. It’s probably just a small but vocal minority and confirmation bias on my part, but I get the impression that they are trying to turn Lemmy into Reddit, toxicity, entitlement, stupid challenges and all.
When we’ve had two major debacles before Reddit even opened back up, one about “how dare these unpaid admins try to lessen their workload with sign up questions”, and the other about “how dare instances block other instances that are being used as proxies for forwarding spam and bot content into their own instances.” The people from reddit seem to still think they’re on Reddit and any perceived inferiority that Lemmy has compared to Reddit is seen as just as bad as Reddit’s corporate decisions. A few people even trying to go to an instance with the intent of “converting” the existing users who may be socialist or communist, by commenting abuse on their posts of course, just like how they presumably do it on Reddit.
People also seem to be refusing to learn what federation is and how that works, despite it being literally the most important aspects of Lemmy. This is evident in people telling instances who block spam or troll ridden instances to “mind their own business” as if that content doesn’t get forwarded over to and show up on the main pages of other instances, you know, what the fediverse was designed to do.
FYI, Reddit has opened back up. Spez has made it clear that he will never tolerate subreddits shutting down and inconveniencing you again. If you’re so unwilling to even adopt a different mindset and perspective when coming to Lemmy, I think it’s best if you went back. Plenty of us came here because we didn’t want to be on Reddit.
Last thing and a pet peeve of mine: stop calling yourself a refugee. You left a meme website for another meme website because you didn’t like one aspect of the management, the entire decision and migration probably took less than an hour of you sitting in your comfortable house in front of a computer. To compare that to being a refugee speaks volumes about your entitlement and privilege. And it’s especially ironic considering what real refugees go through to save themselves and their families, that you won’t even answer a few registration questions.
I think a really important thing to consider here is how much of Reddit’s culture was a result of bots and dark patterns. I think people will actually adjust fairly quickly and once sign ups start to settle a sort of diffuse equilibrium of cultures and attitudes will form that will generally look very different from Reddit. All that said, I think the foundational culture that we establish now will prove to be incredibly important. I think this is a great argument for why existing communities may choose to stay in the medium-weight class. Thereby avoiding the growth boost that comes from being the largest community.
EDIT: Also important to note, I feel like this is gonna be a slow, slow process. We really have no idea when sign-ups will settle and could be looking at months or days of Reddit hemorrhaging users. I think we’ll have a better idea after things kick off on the 30th.
I think you’re onto something with Reddit culture being driven by bots. I went on Reddit for the first time in a few weeks yesterday and the front page just felt so… Fake. Especially compared to a place like Lemmy that feels more like the old-school Internet - Real people having real conversations, instead of just trying to meet a status quo and a particular tone of voice. It’s refreshing here. I don’t want it to become Reddit 2.0.
(Disclaimer: I came here recently from Reddit.)
Me too and I don’t want Lemmy to be Reddit. This place as some bugs and it will take me time to get used to the way this site works vs Reddit.
But I love it here and don’t want any harm to come to it. And I loved the difficulty of signing up. To me that was the best part to be approved.
That’s exactly how Digg felt after the major exodus from there to Reddit. All that was left was advertisers and advertiser’s bots gaming the Digg system to fill up their front page.
The rot is deep and once the real people leave it becomes much more visible.
I agree with this 100%. That affects both the types of interactions, and the types of users.
When Reddit really took off 12 or so years ago, it was primarily a forum for discussion. I loved it because there would be in-depth, respectful, quality discussions on almost every page. I spent hours debating science and politics and technology and relationships and other things of substance with other intelligent respectful open-minded people.
For a few years now, Reddit has been trying to become a quick content scroll app- bombarding the user with page after page of memes and videos and low effort crap that only holds attention for 12 seconds but results in another page load and thus another ad impression. In ‘new reddit’ and the apps, there’s very little focus on discussion or comments. Just quick content to flip through.
And that affects the discussions on Reddit (quality discussions are now the exception rather than the norm) and also the people who join and stay at the site. There’s a lot more animosity, assumption of bad faith, etc.
But I also think that because Lemmy’s design DOESN’T push people into quick content, but IS focused on discussions, that trend can reverse. People who want quick content will quickly grow bored here and leave. And we can keep the discussions respectful and open-minded.
I also think that the ‘welcome to lemmy’ posts should talk more about community and culture; what sort of interactions users should and shouldn’t expect here. That should include an explicit warning that if you’re going to start arguments and assume everyone else is an idiot, this probably isn’t for you, but if you want to have good respectful discussions this is your new home.
THIS THIS THIS. A lot of folks call the migration to Mastodon from Twitter a ‘failure’ because Mastodon didn’t immediately jump to 100 million monthly active users lol. There was a spike, but a lot of folks went back to Twitter. But we now see more spikes every week or so when some stupid shit happens on Twitter, and with every spike, more and more people stick around. We get about 2000 new users an hour on Mastodon across all servers. Now at 12 million MAUs, up from wayyyyyy less than that earlier last year. Growing slowly is the key, a migration won’t be instant.