Posts on Lemmy feel very ephemeral to me.
It feels like so many posts end up deleted, and then unlike the obvious main alternative reddit, all of the comments, the history of those comments, their trees, and the discussions that were had along the way are gone too.
You could want to recall what someone said a week later, if they for instance, linked to something interesting, or you found more information on a topic or you simply came back late to their response, and you get nothing. No idea what happened, no information about said post, and that’s it.
It feels like this happens to a very far from insignificant amount of posts and it is just one part of why Lemmy feels so short-lived/temporary/ephemeral to me.
Posts being removed means so much more, user profiles are difficult to navigate and unsearchable, there are no accumulated values publicly available, bans don’t have appeals, communities don’t have moderator chats, mod logs only semi work and can be circumvented (eliminating the point of having them), server up-time is a bit shaky, drama means things sometimes break with inter server communication and more.
These all feel fixable, but it just feels like a large number of things conspire to make this experience feel temporary and kind of throwaway.
I just thought, surely other people feel similarly so I pose this question to see what other people think about it.
Why does Lemmy feel ephemeral to you?
Not just bots tho. There are some real users that are just paranoid. Go back to any old asklemmy or NSQ question and you see the (-5) in comments, people run scripts to delete old comments. It’s the norm here.
I don’t blame them tho. If its like older than 7 days, and you haven’t saved the info, I’d say it’s fair game for the original user to delete it.
I just saw an entire train of spam from a commenter that appears to be dealing with … a lot. I’m not naming names, but suffice to say there are definitely some folks dealing with mental issues posting the way being described here.
Still, that isn’t the norm. It probably just feels like more because this is such a small space - when there aren’t hundreds of comments (like found on more popular social media sites), a few spam posts can feel like a lot.
Maybe it’s because I like to focus on the positives, I still think there’s more quality content here (by percentage of overall comments) than on many other sites. There’s a lot more thoughtfulness, and more people resolving disagreements by actually listening to each other and seeing each other’s sides. I’ve been reading Lemmy since leaving Reddit during the API debacle, and I’ve noticed I feel much better about engaging in the community here than I ever did there. I’ve seen countless Reddit arguments that hinge on one (or more) stubborn parties refusing to take in new information. I used to feel dread when I saw messages in my inbox, because no matter how carefully you tried to word your thoughts, there would invariably be some troll intent on misunderstanding your comment at all costs. It was exhausting and discouraging.
I realized recently that I no longer feel that way when I get a response on Lemmy. I mean, I still approach clicking that box with a tiny bit of trepidation, but the more I click it, the more I see rational responses, funny commentary, and simply friendly people responding in light conversation. There are trolls out there, but I’ve come back to see responses already deleted by mods, and other commenters defending my position, all without me knowing what the troll even said. Despite all Lemmy’s flaws, there are a lot of decent people here, and it seems we look out for each other.
We must continue to practice this rationality and kindness, and encourage new-comers to leave their Reddit life at the door. If we want Lemmy to be better, then it’s on us, its users, to build and maintain the culture we want it to have.
For me, I like the peace. Pass it on ✌️
When you can be easily fingerprinted with only a few comments I can understand the paranoid ones.
But I needy community.