The lemmings are a squeaky bunch.

  • Zink@programming.devEnglish
    11·
    11 hours ago

    Lemmy is a great place to BS about whatever is going on with the world at any given moment. I think the “small” size of the user base increases the quality of the discussions. You have to jump through some hoops just to get here.

    But that small overall population and the barriers to entry mean we don’t have a busy community for almost any hobby or topic you’d like to discuss. And that’s fine, there are still websites and forums and search engines.

    I think the fediverse should replace the corporate internet long term, of course. For what it is right now though, and especially Lemmy in particular, I’m not complaining.

  • OmegaLemmy@discuss.onlineEnglish
    7·
    11 hours ago

    it’s as varied as it is big, though

    because of that, naturally, people share the same communities

    I see the same person everywhere, and I bet there are some that may even recognise me

  • DoeJohn@lemmy.worldEnglish
    241·
    15 hours ago

    I never understood how people would complain that a site with thousands or tens of thousands of users is “too small”. I feel like that is a real sweet spot, you can have actual conversations and interactions that matter a bit more. Meanwhile, the constant flood of posts, comments and spam on the top social media sites made me feel like nothing I write will even matter, since all the posts will be buried under the information flood in the matter of minutes.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      3·
      11 hours ago

      If you just want to look at and respond to anything there is enough people. If you want to find specific, niche communities then it’s still pretty small.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      14 hours ago

      There’s definitely a difference with scale.

      On reddit, I was never on the default front page or /r/all. I was subbed to a hundred niche communities.

      On lemmy that’s harder in 2 ways. The first is the critical mass you need to keep a community active, and the second is fragmentation.

      For instance, I was super active in the scuba and underway photography subreddits. Not only is the community tiny here, but which scuba sub do i go to? With multiple instances, there’s no default community named “scuba.”

      • MellowSnow@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        12 hours ago

        It would be neat if same-topic communities somehow could somehow merge into a single community view via federation. There are probably some downsides to what I’m considering, but it seems like it could help alleviate fragmentation while allowing the “same” communities to be hosted across multiple instances. If one instance defederated from another, the community posts in that instance would be excluded from the combined view.

        Maybe even a simple opt-in/out of a combined view for communities that truly want or need to stand alone. Not sure if this goes against the core concepts of federation or not. It seems like a nice compromise at a glance, if it could be implemented well.

    • Sarcasmo220@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      14 hours ago

      I would say the population size makes it a little easier to recognize the more friendly responses too. I feel on Reddit the friendly responses are quickly buried by the more spiteful ones.

    • DarkFuture@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      11 hours ago

      Yup.

      Reddit is so big 95% of your comments get buried with no replies. There’s no conversation most of the time. You’re just reading the conversations of others who got in on the post really early and got upvoted to the top.

      I’m also of the opinion that the average IQ on Lemmy is notably higher than the average IQ on Reddit, so the discussions tend to be less clownish.

      This is the opinion of someone that finally got tired of Reddit and jumped to Lemmy just over a month ago. I also feel like I’m seeing more activity on Lemmy just over the last few weeks. So there’s probably others like me that just got fed up and made the switch.

      I’m kind of crossing my fingers that Lemmy doesn’t get too popular. It’ll ruin this like it ruins every social media site.

    • COASTER1921@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6·
      11 hours ago

      This depends on perspective. Reddit is much better for most very specific communities, but also much more of a time sink than Lemmy due to just how much larger it is. In terms of reclaiming some of your time back using Lemmy is a great alternative to Reddit because you can’t scroll forever, forcing you to stop. This is thoroughly in the realm of a feature for me, not having Reddit on my phone or PC is much better in terms of how I use my time.

  • Vespair@lemm.eeEnglish
    10·
    16 hours ago

    Fr. I’d say a comment I leave on reddit has like a 3% chance of meaningful response that might turn into even a brief meaningful interaction.

    I think that conversion rate is vastly higher on Lemmy, much closer to like 30-40%.

    That’s a difference so profound so as to be nearly incomparable.

    So do I wish Lemmy was a bit more active so the front page was always fresh? Sure. Is it a very small price that I am enormously willing to pay for the significantly better experience here? Yeah, abso-fucking-lutely.

  • chappedafloat@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    2·
    11 hours ago

    I dont think its so active at least not topics i’m most interested in. Privacy has only one lemmy instance that is active. Security has only 1 instance but no one ever discusses there, it’s just sharing Security news and 0 comments. Talk about crypto is pretty much completely dead as well which is strange.

  • Kalothar@lemmy.caEnglish
    17·
    19 hours ago

    I feel like I’m even starting to recognize user names throughout the platform

      • Kalothar@lemmy.caEnglish
        51·
        19 hours ago

        There have been so many times I’m in a conversation , and then boom realize it’s FlyingSquid

        They are my homie at this point

        • Murvel@lemm.eeEnglish
          21·
          17 hours ago

          Yeah, but smaller communities mean it’s harder to keep distance from certain users, FlyingSquid being one of those that I’d rather not interact with.

  • GHiLA@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    92·
    20 hours ago

    I decided to stop starting fights here and exclusively drop my payloads of spite upon the denizens of Facebook groups and getting right in rightwinger’s faces.

    As such, I now don’t have much of a use for Lemmy other than news and flicking the occasional Russian apologist off of the bottom of a string of comments like a dangling turd.

    We are growing somewhat of our own, genuine piracy group here, though, which is rather impressive. I wouldn’t be surprised if practical groups like /r/selfhosted moved over here just for ease of use.

  • Mucki@feddit.orgEnglish
    271·
    1 day ago

    It feels much more human on Lemmy. Reddit was mostly bots and training models. Do we have any statistics for Lemmy on percentage of bot users posting to the platform, who pretend to be human?

    Sometimes I miss chatting with the bots on Reddit. The platform always kept you emotional and scrolling. All the gore, violence and other sensationalistic content. All the arguments arguments arguments always against you. It was a plastic experience.

    • blind3rdeye@lemm.eeEnglish
      12·
      1 day ago

      Reddit gets a lot more votes and comments… but I think the number of people actually talking to each other is about the same. Most the comments are just noise.

      • GoodEye8@lemm.eeEnglish
        6·
        20 hours ago

        My last year of Reddit (prior to the API purge) was very much filled with low effort comments. You get a lot of votes and comments but the votes don’t matter and the comments are largely empty one-liners. I doubt it’s gotten better since I left.

        I’d say even the assholes on Lemmy put more effort into the comments than Redditors do. Except tankies who just love to flood the comments with their copy paste list of sources for “everything”.

        • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          2·
          14 hours ago

          You get a lot of votes and comments but the votes don’t matter and the comments are largely empty one-liners.

          The votes matter even less here, so there’s no reason to drop empty one liners you think might get karma.

      • cows_are_underrated@feddit.orgEnglish
        2·
        20 hours ago

        I would deny that. From my experience you’re having much more conversations on Lemmy. If I posted a meme on Reddit I regularly got like 200 Upvotes and 0 comments. On Lemmy I usually get around 100 Upvotes and around 15 comments or so. This is a comparison between the same community on Reddit/Lemmy.

      • jupyter_rain@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        2·
        21 hours ago

        I think you are mostly right, but sometimes I am missing the high quality answers here. You know, the ones where someone really puts in thought or seems to be an expert. Or maybe I haven’t found the right communities yet.

  • TragicNotCute@lemmy.worldEnglish
    145·
    2 days ago

    I kind of feel like Reddit is the biggest bar in the world and having a conversation there feels like it. If you aren’t loud and early, you can’t really participate in a meaningful way. The smaller crowd of Lemmy is a sweet spot for me. Enough people that it’s not dead, but small enough that I can still participate in conversations.

    • Vespair@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      15 hours ago

      Hipster dive bars have always been cooler than the “hip spots” anyway.

    • Albbi@lemmy.caEnglish
      55·
      2 days ago

      Also, on Reddit I felt dread seeing that there was something in my inbox. On Lemmy, I’m excited to see what someone wrote. Just a very different experience overall.

    • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      17 hours ago

      Agreed. On Reddit, if you weren’t there in the first hour of a rising post, your comment won’t be seen by many.

      I love that Lemmy posts have a longer “shelf life,” so to speak. I can see something posted days ago and still find fresh comments, which in turn encourages me to add something if it feels relevant. If I had scrolled a two day old post on Reddit, any comment I add would be rarely seen, or at most responded to with “Why are you commenting on a dead post?”

    • Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      46·
      2 days ago

      Agreed, and it’s kinda neat to start recognizing people’s names across different communities. Really feels like old-school internet forums in that way.

      • Vespair@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        15 hours ago

        Isn’t it crazy how we’re able to connect with each other when our activity isn’t guided and filtered to serve the interests of advertisers? It’s almost like we’re all real human beings with the capacity to relate and connect… What a concept!

        • Vespair@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          14 hours ago

          I once got into a brief disagreement with Flying Squid and to their credit they didn’t stoop to any kind of personal attacks, didn’t behave or speak unreasonably, didn’t flex or mention their mod status, and didn’t penalize me for disagreeing with them with their mod powers in any way. And yes of course all of these very reasonable normal behaviors should be a given, but just fucking try disagreeing with a power mod on Reddit and see what happens.

          Lemmy; even our powermods are better.

      • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
        8·
        1 day ago

        Humans work better on the tribe model. Having diverse communities and even fractured topics covered by multiple communities on different instances promotes this model.

        It feels like a properly social media that isn’t trying to exploit me, and I think that’s something special.

        • Vespair@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          14 hours ago

          I don’t disagree with you on the scale/tribe point, but I do question if the larger factor at play isn’t the invisible hand of advertisers and corporate interests guiding and manipulating the landscape for their benefit rather than ours (which you touch on, I just think it’s a point worth really hammering)

    • Sabata@ani.socialEnglish
      10·
      1 day ago

      It’s small enough to recognize names. Big enough where running into a furry with an unreasonably flashy emojis in their name, or someone from some place you never herd had the knowledge of its presence forcefully injected into your brain through an unspecified method of perception is common place.

      Edit: Typo.

    • cRazi_man@lemm.eeEnglish
      12·
      2 days ago

      You can always be heard on Reddit. Reply to the top level comment with a sex related joke or the popular meme trend and upvotes will roll I’m fast. You could also make a post that allows others to be judgemental, like relationship advice or am I the asshole; and again you’ll get lots of attention. Or pretend to be a girl and comment of weed and sexuality. There are lots of ways to get attention.

      • Shortstack@reddthat.comEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        All of those ways get you attention, yes, but they’re all vapid dopamine hits. Which is probably a positive for the right person I suppose.

        If you want meaningful engagement you will never find it in the larger subs, only in the super niche interest subs. We don’t really have many niche anything here on Lemmy save for a few vocal minority communities but the great thing is the engagement with the larger community is a real draw for a lot of us.

  • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    1 day ago

    Lemmy is my doom scroll and I feel like its much healthier. Took my time to build a decent plock list and functionally I get 2 long lists of stuff per day. If you want more, get people talkin or get back to work. Reddit on the otherhand will go on forever. Plus the lack of global updoots score makes all the conversations have actual opinions instead of chasing imaginary internet points.

  • spector@lemmy.caEnglish
    231·
    1 day ago

    The fediverse doesn’t need perpetual growth. That’s VC investor bullshit. You don’t need to be posting on a platform where the whole world is present. Again more corporate bullshit. As is the “digital town square” thing. It sounds profound but it’s pompous.

    What made the internet so good was variety. Which is what reddit seemed to offer in a time when the older paradigms namely message boards were becoming antiquated.

    What we got with the oligopoly of social platforms is watered down to memes and politics. It’s right wing cultural imperialism quite frankly. People have been battered into fear of being who they are online because in this age of centralized internet has made it a war to remove anything unacceptable (aka “woke”). There’s no variety. There’s nobody being themselves.

    The fedeverse will have arrived if it manages to achieve distinct varieties. On a technical basis it’s perfectly positioned to achieve this. Right now it’s largely just reddit clones offering little more than an extension of the cultural/political wars embroiling the handful of centralized social media platforms.

    • blind3rdeye@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      The fediverse doesn’t need perpetual growth. That’s VC investor bullshit.

      I reckon this is key. So many people seem to take the view that since such-and-such site is very small compared to Facebook or Twitter or whatever, then it must be failing; As if maximising the number of users is the ultimate goal.

      Maximising users might be the goal for investors, so that they can monetise and maximise profits. But for people actually using the service, it’s totally beside the point. We don’t need to be in conversation with 100,000,000 people at once. More people doesn’t always make it better. In many cases it actually makes it worse.

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        14 hours ago

        Having the giant userbase does make it more likely there are enough people into whatever weird niche you are to have a reasonable community though. I mean, how else are you going to get a community going for, I don’t know, hyper-realistic simulations of underwater basketweaving or w/e?

    • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      The only thing I miss about the sprawl of reddit is the activity in niche subreddits. Hopefully, the variety implicit to the fediverse enables us to toe the line between VC expansionism and rich communities for obscure interests.

  • Supervisor194@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    1 day ago

    Yep, better quality engagement all around. I still visit reddit for some niche communities that aren’t represented here but I always come back and I’m spend an increasing amount of time here. People are smarter and nicer in these parts.

    • patacon_pisao@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      Same, though I primarily just lurk on Reddit, I got tired of the hive mentality and the bots. Lemmy has grown quite a bit since I joined, which makes me come back for more

    • balderdash@lemmy.zipEnglish
      31·
      1 day ago

      True, but reddit is better for niche interests. For example, we don’t seem to have any serious philosophy or history communities here. (I am happy to be wrong here, someone please let me know.) On the other hand, r/askphilosophy and r/askhistorians regularly get interesting questions answered by actual professionals.