I know that we NEED more content at Kbin, Lemmy and all the Fediverse in order for them to grow and substitute Reddit and other networks, but sometimes I just feel really happy that I can open my app and read almost everything that was posted in the last few hours without being suffocated by a billion of new posts.
It controls my anxiety, helps me keep up to date and even makes me want to search for new content and post/interact more.
EDIT: For example, at Instagram, there’s so much content being posted every second, that I never spend more than 5 minutes with the app open.
I’d go further - I think that as of yesterday (literally - it’s not “sometime in the past couple of days” - it was like a switch was flipped between day-before-yesterday and yesterday), there’s too much content.
Up to two days ago, I saw pretty much nothing but sporadic threads obviously started by people just trying to get a discussion going. And it was wonderful - it was like the early days of the internet all over again - just people being people.
Yesterday, and even moreso today, mostly I just see an ocean of the same sort of botspam that dominated Reddit - insipid garbage, thinly veiled promotion, ideological ragebait and bland pabulum, with a bare handful of interesting threads like flotsam on that ocean - briefly bobbing above the surface, only to be sucked down into the depths and disappear.
Edit to add: about five hours later and the fediverse, and kbin specifically, has impressed me again.
I assume that somewhere in the background, whoever has the authority to do so defederated from a bunch of botfarm instances, because the garbage is just… gone. And this place is looking good.
Meanwhile, I just checked in through my lemmy.world account and the garbage there is so deep and coming in so fast that my browser hung trying to load it all. It’s still just a vast ocean of insipid clickbait, all posted by names like “renivy948” and “sparjun472” and all somehow magically coming pre-equipped with upvotes.
Maybe there’s people who like that. They’re welcome to it. I’m just pleased and impressed to be broadly in the same internet “place,” but specifically via an instance that proactively blocks that garbage.
It’s funny, because it’s really the fediverse just working as it was meant to work. I guess I’ve just become so cynical that I don’t expect anything to actually do that.
Now I just wish the post field would stay where I put it on mobile instead of insisting on jumping all the way up to the top of the screen, so all I can ever see as I’m typing is the current bottom line…
Yeah! I think that’s the feeling I was trying to describe: the old days of the internet, where the content really mattered and people were trying to create meaningful discussions!
I haven’t been.
I don’t think downvoting is a solution. At best, it just moves the garbage lower down on the page, and since the botfarms mass upvote their own content, it likely won’t even do that. And as you say, real people get hit in the crossfire.
The solution, as I mentioned in my edit, appears to already be happening - the admins defederating from the botfarm instances, so the bulk of the garbage doesn’t show up in the first place.
I presume that over time, a fair amount of it’s going to seep in anyway, as people and corporations and governments get shills and bots in place on the more reputable instances, but it wont be the sudden deluge that’s hit over the last couple of days, and hopefully by then there will be enough other content that I can just avoid “All” and sort by “Subscribed” and get all the content I might want.
Exactly my thoughts! I don’t have any fear of missing out here. It can get overwhelming trying to catch up on posts when there’s just too many. I subscribed to a lot of communities on the fediverse after joining, but I think I’ll have to leave a few soon as they become more popular…
Edit: it also keeps me from wasting too much time on the internet lol
Eh, yeah I can agree with the manageable amount of content! I even try to leave kbin.social set to Federation: Off, so that it’s just the local community stuff to look at lol.
I do miss my niche hobby subreddits though, it’s hard to live vicariously through other people’s projects right now haha
It’s a fine balance. I’d say we definitely need more niche content. It’s suffocating to get 500 technology posts per hour, but if we instead got 5 posts per hour under 100 subtopics we’d only need to read the ~15 we’re interested in. Right now we’re in the “general content” phase of Lemmy, where we need to band together under a larger topic in order to keep the community alive and active without getting bored. When things start getting too active, we’ll shard out into smaller subtopics to keep this balance.
(There is something to be said about the sweet spot where you feel like you can have a conversation with a small group of people, instead of shouting into a hurricane of 800 comments)
(There is something to be said about the sweet spot where you feel like you can have a conversation with a small group of people, instead of shouting into a hurricane of 800 comments)
This is my favorite thing about where we’re at right now. It’s neat to see the same names in different threads across different instances… it feels more personal, more like the “early internet” did. Compare this to Reddit where you only recognize names because they’re names of people who make 100+ posts a day and you can’t avoid them even if you want to. Positive recognitions are a lot more fun than negative ones.
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