This site is just way too diffuse and has too few real people actively participating. It is also missing some very basic things that would accelerate engagement. Right now, your profile doesnt tally your upvotes. This should be a pretty simple fix and would promote visibility into who the top contributors are and the perceived quality of their upvotes.
Organized events would also keep momentum going. I remember back when reddit had AMAs that were actually interesting and fun instead of thinly veiled opportunities to plug a recent project while talking to someone’s PR manager.
The aesthetic could also use a revamp. Nothing tailored to smartphone usage (blech), but maybe something that fills the screen by default, and improves readability? Comment sections are less easy to follow than on pre-IPO reddit. Native hoverzoom would also be nice. Is there anywhere to actually have an exchange with the people running Lemmy?
You will find that there are reasons behind all of this. For one thing Lemmy is developed using Rust, which even experienced C++ programmers do not enjoy using, and for another there’s tankies and only slightly less relevant, the amount of time that the developers spend moderating their tankie instance leaves little time to actually make changes to the software. Requests go unmet for YEARS, while other requests actively move backwards in functionality, if by forwards you mean democratic principles and backwards is towards greater levels of authoritarian control and less freedom by the end users.
Seriously, as others are saying, try PieFed. It releases new features practically every other week, and has a way better interface. You can even help by designing themes or your own custom CSS. And you can still access the entire Threadiverse, exactly as you can with Lemmy, except with better control (more functional, e.g. more fine-grained) such as the Topic/Feeds that are user customizable and shareable.
Thanks, that was a helpful reply. I am not exactly a tankie, but I am actively trying to avoid the more right wing pockets of the internet that are actively avoiding reddit. The venn diagram is small, I think.
One problem with tankies though is that they basically are right-wingers, just on the left, i.e. they are in form if not content.
And then both sides of that extremist divide drives away the 80% or so in the middle somewhere, leaving the platform empty due to the “Nazi bar effect” (you may choose to ignore the actual Nazis as you sit in your own little corner in a bar, but how can you invite your friends, especially Jewish ones, to come to such?)
Purity testing will continue until morale improves (i.e. short sighted thinking does not realize that certain modes of treating especially newcomers to a place will effectively kill it off, eventually leaving solely the “pure” remaining - except nobody is truly pure so realistically it will leave almost nobody).
There are many true leftist places here on the Threadiverse btw including slrpnk.net and dbzero. And there, I just did purity testing myself:-), although due to the Intolerance Paradox this must be done in order for any type of community to be made.
Maybe I dont actually know what a tankie is. What is commonly understood to be a tankie here on this platform? I thought it was specifically the subset of ML who thought that stalin was right to send in the tanks? Am I missing something?
A tankie is generally considered someone so immersed deeply into their echo chamber of alternative facts that they can deny not merely the morality or the consequences but the actual and literal validity of occurrence of events such as the Holocaust or the Tiananmen Square Massacre (the tanks were there but killed nobody on that day, etc.). They tend to be exceedingly pro-authoritarian, even while claiming to be “communist” or “leftist”, but redefining those terms to fit their particular worldview. So e.g. Ukraine invaded Russia rather than the other way around and so on. A hallmark of a tankie space is that nothing bad is ever allowed to be spoken about Russia, China, or North Korea.
I suppose claiming that Stalin had the right to kill people is a technically accurate form of tankie by the standard dictionary definition of that term, but that is fairly tame compared to what goes on across the Threadiverse, so much so that such a person would barely qualify unless they acted to prevent anyone else from holding an opposing viewpoint. Also, while some instances are legit tankies (namely Lemmygrad.ml and Lemmy.ml), troll instances such as hexbear.net only appear at first to be anything other than argumentative echo chambers, see e.g. Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net (defederated from on both of our instances, bc of the aforementioned trolling
I could link you so many posts to explain further - such as this classic Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem demonstrating how someone can get banned from all communities (in other cases, even those they’ve never so much as heard of) on Lemmy.ml at once - but also there’s an entire community dedicated to this topic at !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works. If you are interested I highly recommend checking it out. It is perhaps the top issue across all of the Threadiverse, after complaining about Reddit of course:-).
Blocking hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml from my feed (when I was on an instance that had not defederated from them yet) improved my experience on the Threadiverse by 99%, and blocking lemmy.ml by a further 99%. It might be the echo chamber effect but whatever it is, the most trollish comments tend to come from those places. Note that you on Lemmy cannot do a true block of an instance - like so many other features that is something that PieFed and very few third party apps offers but Lemmy and most apps lack - but even so it might help a little.
Slrpnk.net and lemmy.dbzer0.com are widely considered actual leftist but not tankie instances, if you need a comparison.
From a practical standpoint, there is a karma system on this site, it just is not implemented - every comment and post has upvotes. That those upvotes arent recorded on the user level is a choice.
It is always a balance of features. I dont necessarily agree with your framing, but even if I did, the community needs to ask itself if the goal is to be a tiny, uncompetitive alternative to reddit, or do we want to be relevant and deal with the consequences of more diverse participation? Incentives like the possibility of notoriety can motivate positive contributions as well. Some people want to be recognized for their meaningful contributions as much as people do not want to be downvoted for unhelpful contributions.
They could make it optional to each seperate instance in the Fediverse. I could see it being popular on Lemmy for the Dopamine hit. Less so on some of the more focused or political instances.
do we count to profile carma points received from no-carma instances?
If so, people from profile-carma instances would still be prone to cheap attention farming.
How it is now is perfect personaly for me: there are still discussions, less popular, more disagreeaple comments are still at the bottom, and you still can see, how controversial your opinion is. And, as i already said, this system still removes whole cast of cheap carma farmers, making interactions more meaningful on average.
Lemmy is still prettx underground, but let’s be honest, it’d probably stay undergound. This site is a bunch of nerds dreaming of a future without corpo dictature on what should and what should not be. It’s good to dream big, but dreaming about becoming another reddit is kinda stupid if you ask me.
You wanna make lemmy more popular? Talk about it over other social media in a good light (not just fucking tankie reddit), repost screenshots and memes from over there, etc. Profile-visible carma is just not it.
but then, lemmy is foss, you can do it yourself, if you really believe in your idea.
Personally I’m really glad that we don’t have karma farming on Lemmy. It creates a lot of content for reddit, but it’s mostly regurgitated low quality filler.
You might try piefed? It’s a fediverse platform so still links/syncs etc with lemmy and everywhere else but the UI is nice and I think it does a lot of the stuff you mention (except for the ama style stuff.) I followed PugJesus here (and am using Piefed right now) and exported all my feeds etc so the switch was relatively painless.
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions etc. I probably won’t be able to help but uhhh, I’ll commiserate?
The aesthetic could also use a revamp. Nothing tailored to smartphone usage (blech), but maybe something that fills the screen by default, and improves readability?
I don’t get this. old.reddit, whilst functional is dated. People use it because they’re used to it - but I wouldn’t characterise it as an amazing design.
new.reddit is appalling. Piefed and Lemmy are by no means perfect. No site is. I think people really overstate the necessity of having an amazing aesthetic or user-interface.
This site is just way too diffuse and has too few real people actively participating. It is also missing some very basic things that would accelerate engagement. Right now, your profile doesnt tally your upvotes. This should be a pretty simple fix and would promote visibility into who the top contributors are and the perceived quality of their upvotes.
Organized events would also keep momentum going. I remember back when reddit had AMAs that were actually interesting and fun instead of thinly veiled opportunities to plug a recent project while talking to someone’s PR manager.
The aesthetic could also use a revamp. Nothing tailored to smartphone usage (blech), but maybe something that fills the screen by default, and improves readability? Comment sections are less easy to follow than on pre-IPO reddit. Native hoverzoom would also be nice. Is there anywhere to actually have an exchange with the people running Lemmy?
You will find that there are reasons behind all of this. For one thing Lemmy is developed using Rust, which even experienced C++ programmers do not enjoy using, and for another there’s tankies and only slightly less relevant, the amount of time that the developers spend moderating their tankie instance leaves little time to actually make changes to the software. Requests go unmet for YEARS, while other requests actively move backwards in functionality, if by forwards you mean democratic principles and backwards is towards greater levels of authoritarian control and less freedom by the end users.
Seriously, as others are saying, try PieFed. It releases new features practically every other week, and has a way better interface. You can even help by designing themes or your own custom CSS. And you can still access the entire Threadiverse, exactly as you can with Lemmy, except with better control (more functional, e.g. more fine-grained) such as the Topic/Feeds that are user customizable and shareable.
Thanks, that was a helpful reply. I am not exactly a tankie, but I am actively trying to avoid the more right wing pockets of the internet that are actively avoiding reddit. The venn diagram is small, I think.
One problem with tankies though is that they basically are right-wingers, just on the left, i.e. they are in form if not content.
And then both sides of that extremist divide drives away the 80% or so in the middle somewhere, leaving the platform empty due to the “Nazi bar effect” (you may choose to ignore the actual Nazis as you sit in your own little corner in a bar, but how can you invite your friends, especially Jewish ones, to come to such?)
Purity testing will continue until morale improves (i.e. short sighted thinking does not realize that certain modes of treating especially newcomers to a place will effectively kill it off, eventually leaving solely the “pure” remaining - except nobody is truly pure so realistically it will leave almost nobody).
There are many true leftist places here on the Threadiverse btw including slrpnk.net and dbzero. And there, I just did purity testing myself:-), although due to the Intolerance Paradox this must be done in order for any type of community to be made.
Maybe I dont actually know what a tankie is. What is commonly understood to be a tankie here on this platform? I thought it was specifically the subset of ML who thought that stalin was right to send in the tanks? Am I missing something?
A tankie is generally considered someone so immersed deeply into their echo chamber of alternative facts that they can deny not merely the morality or the consequences but the actual and literal validity of occurrence of events such as the Holocaust or the Tiananmen Square Massacre (the tanks were there but killed nobody on that day, etc.). They tend to be exceedingly pro-authoritarian, even while claiming to be “communist” or “leftist”, but redefining those terms to fit their particular worldview. So e.g. Ukraine invaded Russia rather than the other way around and so on. A hallmark of a tankie space is that nothing bad is ever allowed to be spoken about Russia, China, or North Korea.
I suppose claiming that Stalin had the right to kill people is a technically accurate form of tankie by the standard dictionary definition of that term, but that is fairly tame compared to what goes on across the Threadiverse, so much so that such a person would barely qualify unless they acted to prevent anyone else from holding an opposing viewpoint. Also, while some instances are legit tankies (namely Lemmygrad.ml and Lemmy.ml), troll instances such as hexbear.net only appear at first to be anything other than argumentative echo chambers, see e.g. Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net (defederated from on both of our instances, bc of the aforementioned trolling
I could link you so many posts to explain further - such as this classic Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem demonstrating how someone can get banned from all communities (in other cases, even those they’ve never so much as heard of) on Lemmy.ml at once - but also there’s an entire community dedicated to this topic at !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works. If you are interested I highly recommend checking it out. It is perhaps the top issue across all of the Threadiverse, after complaining about Reddit of course:-).
Blocking hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml from my feed (when I was on an instance that had not defederated from them yet) improved my experience on the Threadiverse by 99%, and blocking lemmy.ml by a further 99%. It might be the echo chamber effect but whatever it is, the most trollish comments tend to come from those places. Note that you on Lemmy cannot do a true block of an instance - like so many other features that is something that PieFed and very few third party apps offers but Lemmy and most apps lack - but even so it might help a little.
Slrpnk.net and lemmy.dbzer0.com are widely considered actual leftist but not tankie instances, if you need a comparison.
no carma is a deliberate feature
makes the comments more of a sensible people talking, less of a standup show.
From a practical standpoint, there is a karma system on this site, it just is not implemented - every comment and post has upvotes. That those upvotes arent recorded on the user level is a choice.
It is always a balance of features. I dont necessarily agree with your framing, but even if I did, the community needs to ask itself if the goal is to be a tiny, uncompetitive alternative to reddit, or do we want to be relevant and deal with the consequences of more diverse participation? Incentives like the possibility of notoriety can motivate positive contributions as well. Some people want to be recognized for their meaningful contributions as much as people do not want to be downvoted for unhelpful contributions.
They could make it optional to each seperate instance in the Fediverse. I could see it being popular on Lemmy for the Dopamine hit. Less so on some of the more focused or political instances.
then, e question:
do we count to profile carma points received from no-carma instances?
If so, people from profile-carma instances would still be prone to cheap attention farming.
How it is now is perfect personaly for me: there are still discussions, less popular, more disagreeaple comments are still at the bottom, and you still can see, how controversial your opinion is. And, as i already said, this system still removes whole cast of cheap carma farmers, making interactions more meaningful on average.
Lemmy is still prettx underground, but let’s be honest, it’d probably stay undergound. This site is a bunch of nerds dreaming of a future without corpo dictature on what should and what should not be. It’s good to dream big, but dreaming about becoming another reddit is kinda stupid if you ask me.
You wanna make lemmy more popular? Talk about it over other social media in a good light (not just fucking tankie reddit), repost screenshots and memes from over there, etc. Profile-visible carma is just not it.
but then, lemmy is foss, you can do it yourself, if you really believe in your idea.
Personally I’m really glad that we don’t have karma farming on Lemmy. It creates a lot of content for reddit, but it’s mostly regurgitated low quality filler.
There are apps and other frontends to choose for the websited. There is also https://piefed.social/
You might try piefed? It’s a fediverse platform so still links/syncs etc with lemmy and everywhere else but the UI is nice and I think it does a lot of the stuff you mention (except for the ama style stuff.) I followed PugJesus here (and am using Piefed right now) and exported all my feeds etc so the switch was relatively painless.
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions etc. I probably won’t be able to help but uhhh, I’ll commiserate?
I don’t get this. old.reddit, whilst functional is dated. People use it because they’re used to it - but I wouldn’t characterise it as an amazing design.
new.reddit is appalling. Piefed and Lemmy are by no means perfect. No site is. I think people really overstate the necessity of having an amazing aesthetic or user-interface.