And to those that have been here for a while, how has your experience changed over the year(s)?
What has worked for you?
What do you see needs improvement in your chosen platform?
I gave Lemmy a dedicated year. A few notes:
Very few people click through.
Lots of rage bait.
Communities split over instances make it pretty hard to know where to post things, what with defederation and such.
I didn’t miss much “news”; lemmy was functional for reporting what people were talking about.
No notification of moderation actions taken against you is a choice.
Those who post small websites that do cool things: thank you! I did discover several other cool places and tools.
I found that about 1/10 of the top lemmy posts (after filtering out jokes and sports) are links to AI slop that nobody bothered to check, comments just take the headline as real if they affirm. Pointing this out in the comments did not reduce engagement or drop the posts.
Cutting it out of my routine, at last for awhile.
One thing I really hoped for from the social Internet was access to people and data that could correct me/fill in gaps. But lemmy doesn’t do this, as people see what is upvoted and upvotes are used for affirmations to the reader.
Communities split over instances make it pretty hard to know where to post things, what with defederation and such.
Piefed can help mitigate this a bit. If there’s a link thats been shared across multiple lemmy instances it will consolidate all the comments into one post
I found that about 1/10 of the top lemmy posts (after filtering out jokes and sports) are links to AI slop that nobody bothered to check, comments just take the headline as real if they affirm. Pointing this out in the comments did not reduce engagement or drop the posts.
Can I see where/how you found this out?
The ratio is a vibe, and I kinda regret posting a precise one. The case I checked carefully is this one: everything this guy posts
which I noted in November, and blocked very shortly thereafter. I vaguely recall finding a handful more examples of ‘too good to be true’ headlines, which were in fact not true, but I did not save links.
What made me sad is that even bereft of the algorithm and bad incentives in system, if the headline is ‘directionally correct’ still seems like the most important thing. Very interested in a social media where correct is ranked over good feels.
(and then there’s the regular examples like this, which are not slop but are heavily disputed/recontextualized by the top comment. Correction highly upvoted, yet the OP itself is still doing well))
I was wondering why do I only see a single post and no comments for that user, but it looks they were banned on my instance.
since I came from reddit in the first wave, I have read others observations multiple times that lemmy.world has bad moderation, in several ways, and not only because they don’t have the capacity for their large server but some other reasons.
you said you had enough for now, but if you come back later, try an account on my instance, slrpnk.net or some others like these that are smaller but not too small. maybe you would like it more. I don’t say lemmy.world was a bad choice, I think still better than reddit in recent years, but you get the idea.
but that this user you linked has been banned for almost 2 years by now on my instance makes it look like that it’s indeed moderated better.instances have a lot of moderation power, to make the experience with them better or worse, by choosing which users or sometimes complete instances to ban, so that’s a reason other instances could feel different
(and then there’s the regular examples like this, which are not slop but are heavily disputed/recontextualized by the top comment. Correction highly upvoted, yet the OP itself is still doing well))
what was the post? I can’t load it now, maybe it was deleted.
honestly the thing I hate the most about lemmy is that deleted posts just give an error that’s more generic than anything microsoft windows could show, and that deleted posts make all the comments inaccessible too.
Claiming some old public figure was a newly discovered pedo, and including a quote of them saying terrible things.
Except the quote was 5 years old, not from the Epstein files, the figure had apologized and been publicly forgiven by the victim, and the files revealed nothing new.
I don’t understand the politics. .ml, hexbear, etc. It’s like going to Christmas dinner with your girlfriend’s family for the first time.
I don’t understand the broader structure, something about Mastodon being part of all this? How everything interconnects, etc.
I’m happy enough here, I read, I make comments, I move on. Just like I did on Reddit. It’s a bit empty, so many of the communities are ghost towns. I get that I’m supposed to help with that, but I’m not much of a poster.
Learning recently that apparently anyone can track my upvote/downvote stats was offputting. I’m going to stop upvoting and downvoting now, I don’t want people making inferences from that, but I’m fine with what I write, because there I always say what I mean.
Votes technically being public and viewable however does mitigate voting manipulation and brigading and overall keeps the fediverse more honest and transparent.
I don’t feel good about being on mainstream social media any more. Any time I spend on Reddit or YouTube is minimal and with a sense of distrust.
I’ve been on lemmy for a few months now and it’s grown since I joined and grows more every day as people hear about it.
Never looking back.
What pine-person meant was:
Welcome! Many of us here are capable of greeting new peers without going on a pedantic tangient.
So anyway.
Welcome!
It does feel much better to participate here. Particularly after blocking a few specific users.
You do realize Reddit always was and has been a forum right? Understanding the difference between social media and forums is an “early use”learning moment.
That we still can’t use a single account to comment and post outside of our home instance is the most frustrating part of the fediverse and the main contradiction to “you just need one sign up”.
I am posting outside of my instance right now by replying to you
I guess i butchered my complaint. I was thinking of migrating accounts or one account for all instances or something like that. Multiple signups are still a bitcannoying. Although it only matters for defederation corner cases and instances closing up.
Hello from wherever the fuck I am.
You can definitely do that lol
Ok i butchered it.
I was thinking of federated accounts, not participating in posts across the fediverse.
when you want to migrate instances, its annoying to create the same account name again and again.
I stayed permanently since middle of last year thanks to piefed.social. it has a great onboarding system for anyone that might not have the gumption or will to self curate raw lemmy, mbin and now piefed outputs. A.k.a being lazy like myself.
Although for my close online friends I’m likely to suggest other piefed based instance just because tobspread the load around.
It feels like reddit back when it was smaller and before the abhorrent new UI and their aggressive algorithm. Well we all know the fediverse is practically without algorithm for good and bad.
So with this view it semi forced me to be more active in the communities I’m in. I mostly comment though rather than making posts but hey any little thing helps.
And besides I just love piefed has topics i.e. multireddit a.k.a a group feed of multiple communites, where I either I can subscribe to premade topics by the instance admin or make my own grouping of topics/communities.
I still to my chagrin dip back to reddit for some communities or topics but it’s none of the big ones. Things like psychotic people that has way too many x (bags, retro games handheld devices, headphones, fountain oens, paper notebooks, ereaders, knives, pocket trash, etc) and spending way too much money on them.
I created my first fedi account in 2017. It’s still a bit strange to hear people say there’s no content because to me this place is bumpin. It’s the same as anywhere — it what you make of it. With some careful curation, it’s plenty fine for my needs, and the underlying idea of internetworking social networks is something I believe in very strongly.
Thats a long time. 2017 was 9 years ago. What changes have you noticed since then?
Sorry I left you on read for a bit – I wanted to do this one justice. And I’ll start with a disclaimer – I’m not a very rememberful person, so some of what I say may be inaccurate.
I joined fedi when the activitystreams spec dropped. I am a software developer by trade, and I follow the work that the W3C (the group that wrote the spec that details the protocol the fediverse runs on) for professional reasons. I didn’t fully grasp the implications at the time, and so I joined in a professional capacity, using my real name, which is the only social media account I’ve ever done that for. I thought of myself as joining a professional community as a open-source developer, so I thought about it more like my github, which also uses my real name since I use it as a portfolio when I’m applying to jobs.
I didn’t really think very hard at all about what instance I joined, because there just weren’t many options. My mastodon host has been fantastic, and has kept the instance running reliably for lo these many years, for which I am very grateful, but if I were to join again, I wouldn’t choose the same instance. I ended up on an instance that has kinda slow federation because it’s a pretty small instance out on the fringes of the fediverse, and we kinda have a reputation for being lightly moderated that lands us on more blocklists than I’d prefer. I don’t really use the local feed because I mostly didn’t think very much about the community I was joining, I was just looking for a portal into the larger fediverse, and didn’t realize that the view changes based on the window you look through.
For the first few years, my experience was pretty limited to technical discussion. I dropped in and out of mastodon because there just wasn’t much of the content that consumes most of my social media attention – sports. Both because I curated my feed to have technical content, and because mostly only technical users could find it or were interested in it, almost all of the discussion was meta discussion about protocols, or discussion of related software projects, with some personal stuff mixed in. There were a couple of times that you got memes (in the older sense – I still don’t get many image macros with text), but broadly it felt very personal – real people talking about the things they were interested in, rather than trying to get clout or boosts or likes. Things have gotten better, but there still really aren’t a lot of people talking about my favorite topics.
The fediverse, though, has always had a particular flavor for me that other social media has lacked. Certainly, there are still some reply guys (I fear that I myself sometimes fall into these habits, despite my best efforts), but the fediverse has had an actively kind streak in it that I haven’t found in a lot of online spaces. I often find myself in discussions where I am clearly out-classed, a hobbyist asking basic questions of some of the smartest people in the field, and I have always been treated with kindness and empathy. Part of what has been disappointing to me about the emergence of the threadiverse is that this streak of active kindness doesn’t seem to have propagated to this corner of the fediverse.
The thing that has been the most fun to watch has been seeing a thousand flowers grow. When I first read about activitystreams, or even once activitypub landed, I didn’t see the whole vision. I thought they were describing a protocol for exchanging micro-blogging messages, and it was only as the other applications started to pop up that I finally felt like I was “getting it.” When I joined Bookwyrm, I got that by introducing data from other sources, you could have richer social media experiences. When I joined FunkWhale, I got that you could exchange social media in other formats than text. When we were watching the women’s world cup, and someone set up a Friendica group that I could participate in from mastodon, that was when the light bulb finally went on for me. I never joined Friendica, because I don’t really enjoy the Facebook/LinkedIn style of social media, but I was participating with the much larger women’s soccer community from my mastodon instance, despite the fact that I never signed up. I was operating on the social graph directly, and what client I used was a matter of personal preference, rather than prerequisite for interacting with another group of people.
And now, I’m seeing posts that are making it look like the fediverse is going to have real relevance. People are posting about Mastodon as a credible replacement for X and Bluesky, Loops as a credible replacement for TikTok, Ghost as one of the best solutions for blogging. It’s an incredibly exciting time for me, because the argument has always been that since we have long been focused on the administration side of things (thinking of instance owners as the primary customers of activitypub), the platform was too confusing or complicated for Joe and Jane End User, and that perception seems to be changing. Seeing projects like the Forkiverse join the fediverse has been awesome because it seems like we’re going to start having normies in the fediverse, and I think that’s what we need here now more than ever.
Idk if that’s helpful, but it’s what I remember.
Wow thank you so much for this detailed response! It’s great to hear about it from your point of view since you can see the broad trends given the timescale you’re working with.
I’m very pleased to hear that you can see more normies here now. That’s what we need if the fediverse is to ever really break into the mainstream.
I do have one question for you, and it’s a pedantic one:
Certainly, there are still some reply guys
What is a “reply guy”?
Thanks again for taking the time to write such an in-depth response!
I joined two years ago after the Reddit API thing, full of hope and with bright eyes. I even got a couple of doggos in my PMs, which was nice. It got even better after I finally blocked enough weird porn communities so I stopped bumping into them all the time.
Now I only open Lemmy when I’m having trouble sleeping at night. I browse All/Active, and 90% of what I see are bot news reposts about Trump doing something stupid or scary, or some “are .ml tankies” shitstorms.
Also, I got banned on the Linux community at .ml and I have no idea why or even when it happened, which I actually find kind of funny.
after I finally blocked enough weird porn communities so I stopped bumping into them all the time.
That does take awhile. We might need to start adding that to our “Welcome” pages.
Welcome user. Due to the federated nature of Lemmy, there’s going to be a great deal of weird porn. You can block it. Let’s practice now…
lemmy is a mess since the same community can be found on a different server. same news have 2 comments, but 62 on the other. this thing is just gonna stay as an underground social media until someone solves this.
We make a lot of effort to consolidate communities by closing on one instance, and opening it on another.
But sometimes multiple communities for the same topic make sense depending on different local moderation methods and instance rules.
I am wondering if this is presented better in different UIs. I’m regularly using the Summit Android app and there’s at least a button to see cross-posted communities with a comment counter to see if there’s more action traction somewhere else. It might be nice if it had some indicator that there’s a more active thread than the one I am currently on. I am not sure how other front ends handle it.
Or maybe the issue is dual posted content that isn’t cross-linked because it was submitted independently. Not sure of a solution to that that isn’t a lot of work.
PieFed solves this.
This has also been a thing on Reddit since subreddits were introduced so I don’t really think it’s a major obstacle to user retention compared to the amount (or lack) of quality original content and discourse
I’ve been here for a few weeks now, and I’ve already grown very fond of it. I love the decentralized approach and how things are managed here. It’s the best alternative to today’s mainstream social media platforms. Hopefully this project has a long life ahead of it
I hope so too. I’ve been trying to engage with communites I’m interested in like coffee, and tea.
I joined a month ago, and I like Lemmy much much more than Reddit. The federation makes it visible that you’re part of a large community, there’s no advertising, and I find the discussion to be of a generally higher quality. I also like that one can see upvotes and downvotes. Not sure whether it needs to be fuzzified or embargoed to fight abuse in future, but either way, it’s nice.
I’m absolutely sold on Lemmy vs Reddit. I dumped Twitter when Musk took over, and by then I was already on Mastodon, but I don’t actually use it much. Didn’t use Twitter much either. Any comments on Mastodon vs Bluesky?
I’ve been on Mastodon for almost a month, I enjoy it. I started in the mastodon.social instance then moved to mstdn.plus. I’m still trying to get a hold of Piefed, but it has been good.
In my opinion this platform is great. Most people here are friendly, and smart. Although there are a few exceptions.
I’ve been here since a year, i think. And its the first contact i made with “the fediverse”.
All in all i would say that, apart from power tripping mods, and a few weird users, its a great platform i would definitely recommend.
There’s one problem tho, where no android lemmy client, that is compatible with android 7 has avif support
I’m friendly but sadly terribly stupid 😔
Better than intelligent assholes :3
Good! I’m a long time lurker, new user.
If you dedicate a day to figuring out how lemmy works then imo it’s quite straightforward. I appreciate the expansion of free speech (i got banned from reddit for telling an AFD member to kill himself) and generally most people here seem ok. it’s still rather niche but oh well. We can fix that by inviting friends! It’s also much more authentic. A lot fewer covert advertisements and more actual people.
I’m a redfugee came with the big exit about a year ago. I post prolificaly, comment sporadically and have a couple of comms. I love it, it feels more like the olden days of the Internet when everything was smaller and you knew people. I sometimes idly scroll Reddit but not even once a week, it’s fucking dire and atmosphere is shit. Insta I’m on a few times a day for memes and Reels.
Long live the fediverse!
came last april ish after a reddit purge, was on another instance before it was shutdown forever. there has been less content though. and i dont like the tankie, or anything related to “tankie politics”
and i dont like the tankie, or anything related to “tankie politics”
Some of us see how long we can go without blocking those servers, to convince ourselves we’re open minded.
But then we realize that what really matters is how well an instance does moderation.
I found the process self reflective and enriching.
Overall, I’ve learned the “block” buttons are a great part of the experience, here.
Even while using “block” liberally, I still encounter some new ideas here.
