I come on here every so often to see what’s going on, and every time I leave disappointed. This is my top 3 grievances at the moment:
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This place feels dead. It’s usually quite, but lately it really feels like a ghost town. Idk what the actual stats say, but I feel like the amount of comments, posts, and variety seem to have gone down quite a bit over the past few months.
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The amount of genuinely hateful content has gone up. I feel like Lemmy as a whole used to have better moderation even just last year compared to now. Every time I get on here, I’m seeing more and more gross content that’s either racist or bigoted or just downright gross. This content doesn’t get taken down even when reported. As horrid as Reddit’s moderation is, it’s still not this bad.
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Outside of the tech communities, there’s no information hygiene anywhere in sight. The news subs publish the most questionable of sources, sometimes outright misinformation… and nobody cares? People don’t criticize weak sources or call out false claims or even value accuracy. I’ve seen multiple instances of users saying something false and getting upvoted for it and a person correcting them getting downvoted for it. Like, what’s even happening?
I don’t know, I feel like when I joined a couple of years ago Lemmy was so much better. It felt more active, the community felt more down to earth, kind, and friendly, and the content was higher in quality. There was much optimism surrounding the Fediverse that’s not there anymore. Now it feels like a more left wing version of Voat than a genuine Reddit alternative. Am I the only one feeling this way or do other people feel the same?
My two main issues are that I don’t want to keep seeing the same post repeated again and again as I scroll, and I want to be able to find a topic and not have to wrestle with all the different communities around the same thing. I just search for a simple topic and often there’s 20 with the same name and I have to find the one that everyone’s using.
Sounds like you should adjust your subscriptions?
It’s like Reddit a long, long time ago before it started going to absolute shit.
So I’m liking it.
Personally, I’m experiencing the opposite as far as activity. I joined about 1.5 years ago and there’s definitely been a noticable increase in activity in that time. I’m seeing more upvotes and comments than when I joined.
It’s not bad! But it requires a learning curve to actually find stuff vs having the algorithm find stuff for you.
But without active community posts and stuff, it does feel more slower paced. But the price of no corporations and ad free experience is hard to beat.
I’m surprised there aren’t more links to substacks. I don’t expect lemmy to be a news aggregator but to be more like a source of opinions instead.
Cant expect a reddit alternative without corporate interests involved.
Unsubscribe from every community and build your feed again
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So how often do you post and make the change you want to see?
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Hmm.
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Can you give an example of this “weak source or false claims” in the news here? I see the usual suspects when I look: Reuters, guardian, AP, BBC, Al Jazeera, etc.
I never browse all though, I only go to the 50 or so groups I belong to, and remember to sort by scaled once in a while.
I do believe there are more bots or at least propaganda accounts, or maybe people causing friction. Don’t know if its state sponsored or just a sign of the times.
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There are too many unhinged nut jobs who are only here to cause drama and stir controversy, and way too much emphasis on their pet issues. They suck and if you get in their cross hairs they will harass you for days due to their intensive sense of personal victimhood and moral righteousness.
I want more reasonable laid back people with interesting things to say who are decent to each other. But it doesn’t seem like the numbers of those folks are growing, more just a consistent number who probably have massive block lists or have de-federated from the problematic/extremist instances.
There is also a new influx of really really dumb people who spam stupid content, who on the surface seem to be teenagers? I don’t know what is up with that. I have blocked a bunch of accounts that are doing this, who ask this community and others like it, really dumb stuff like ‘why doesn’t my poop smell?’ 6x a day.
I basically feel the same. Not sure if it’s just a side effect of how scary things are in the world right now, but I feel like the amount of escapist content has dropped a lot lately. By escapist I mean enjoyable things that aren’t focused on the real issues of the day. We all need that kind of thing to stay sane, and it’s in shorter and shorter supply on here I find.
The amount of politics leaking into every sub is also increasing rapidly it feels like. I block accounts that only ever post doom scroll content, but some of the bigger meme/entertainment posters have also started to mix in more politics and doom scroll lately.
I’d love to see more regular people on here with diverse interests, but I imagine it’s not going to increase due to the prevailing types of posts these days. I’ve honestly considered stepping away from here myself, but I don’t have another place in mind to go to yet.
It’s an affect of people’s warped social media brains that think nobody else can be different than them or think different than them. Who read everything through a distorted lens due to their anger issues.
I mean, I can’t even say ‘The Jewish population of the USA is 7.5 million’. Without random people telling me that is anti-semantic, and others saying it’s pro-genocide, and both groups reporting the comment until it gets removed. That’s how messed up these folks are, that they can’t even allow statements of basic facts.
Or they will say it’s ‘fake’ or ‘conspiracy’ information… lol
It’s an affect of people’s warped social media brains that think nobody else can be different than them or think different than them. Who read everything through a distorted lens due to their anger issues.
The bad news is this predates social media. The even worse news is social media makes it louder.
I think it’s a reaction to feelings of powerlessness and frustration at the world. Social media is an easy way to get that energy out, even if it’s a very toxic way of doing it.
Major issues and inequality aren’t new, but our ability to get a 24/7 fire hose of info about it is. I don’t think anyone’s figured out how to healthily handle it yet. Consuming it all the time destroys our mental, but hiding under a rock isn’t great either I feel. I’ve been struggling to find that balance more and more these days.
the irony is you can 24/7 fill your life with stuff that isn’t that, but people choose to do so.
Just like you can be informed with a quick google query, but people totally ignore that option and embrace ignorance.
I think you’re right, but it’s also true that it’s much easier to find the bad stuff. News in general reports bad news much much more frequently than good news, even though good news is happening too.
There’s a newsletter I subscribe to called Fix the News that only reports good news, and it’s kind of startling how major some of the stuff on there is each edition, things I don’t hear about at all outside of it.
So I think you’re right that people should try and seek out better stuff, but also I have a lot of empathy for not doing so because the machine wants us to be sad and hopeless, and you really have to try to avoid that trap.
I have only encountered number 3 but I don’t really use this or any social media as a news source. For me its like hanging at a bar and maybe someone has something interesting and maybe then I might look into it.
I’d say it’s sort of the opposite. When I first looked into the Fediverse, Lemmy.ml was the juggernaut sub. They were and sort of still are filled with tankies (literally stands for Marxist Leninist). Now there is more variety of instances, Piefed has better moderating tools and combines cross post comments which is why I used that, and user base is slowly growing over time as Reddit and everyone else continue to fuck up. Sure there is still a lot less content, but that’s infinitely more preferable to liking a comment and then someone pointing out the comment was stolen from an 11 year old post by a bot.
There’s so many variables to each persons threadiverse experience that its difficult to quantify another’s experience. I don;t think there is an objective default experience. It depends on what instance your on, which also might dictate which software as the two main players don;t have feature parity, it then depends on how you use the available tools each software type has, how you sort your feeds, which communities you’re subbed to, how willing you are to simply block and move on, what your own beliefs are and what sort of experience you expect.
You’ll only think its a ghost town if you are someone who spends the majority of their time on social media. The flip side of that is that there’s also a sizeable amount of people who might simply check in once or twice a day. To them, its not a ghost town at all.
You’ll only think its full of hate if you’re not prepared to be on an instance that curates the hate away and you combine that with liberal use of blocking tools when some gets through.
And there are lots of other wider societal issues going on too - Westernised countries (which includes the majority of users I see on here) are largely descending into right-wing, xtian-fuelled, uber-capitalism, bigoted hellscapes and lots of people are understandably scared and angry about that. Scared and angry people lash out. Doesn’t excuse it a as behaviour but I don’t think growing fear and anger is a threadiverse-specific issue at all.
The answer is that there is no one-sized fits all answer beyond finding the best fit for yourself in terms of instance/software/tools/feeds and posting/commenting on more of what you personally enjoy and maybe lessen the time you spend on here and social media generally. It doesn’t have to be always on, just something you do alongside other things like reading a book, going for a walk etc.
Imagine social media as an upsidedown parabola (like an arc), where the x axis is time, and the y axis is quality.
The start of a new social media platform would be towards the bottom left. As they grow and add new features, their quality improves. Over time, however, they will ‘peak’ in quality. Then, they begin to introduce anti-consumer practices, such as API restrictions, ads, sponsored posts, etc. Their quality dwindles until either the platform shuts down or becomes a horrible echo chamber.
Using this analogy, Reddit right now would be in the latter half of the graph, as it has become an echo chamber filled with bots, ads, and API restrictions.
Lemmy currently is more like approaching the peak for the parabola. It’s great for now.
Sure Lemmy is open-source, self-hostable, but it’s potential downfall would be its userbase. It’s starting to have the same issues as Reddit: Don’t comply with every else’s opinions, get downvoted to oblivion. Of course, downvotes don’t mean much on here, but getting banned would.
In its own way, Lemmy is starting to become an echo chamber for tech/Linux enthusiasts, radicals, and those exiled from Reddit.
The issue I’m starting to get, which drove me off reddit, is the stalkers. People who go around stalking your posts not only to downvote, but to repeatedly reply and report and try and ban you because they believe you are their enemy, or took your comment on their comment as some sort of personal insult/attack.
Sure you can block, but the determined ones will have alts and just will take your block as further fuel to harass you.
God on reddit I had people do this crap to me for just talking about my cat, or playing ps5, or whatever they found offensive and they would just spend hours targeting me for the ‘offense’. Or once when I cracked a joke about trendy IG travel destinations and one of the mods DM’d me about it and then banned me for not deleting the comment because they had just traveled to Santorini to take IG pics and i was a total horrible asshole for making fun of that trend.
It’s fine. There’s enough activity to keep me in content (as much as I need content), and I don’t see the hate as much as you report.
The only thing wrong with it from my perspective is that Trump and American politics is poisoning it, but they’re poisoning the entire world so…
First of all, no, does not feel dead to me at all.
Secondly, be the change you want to see. You’ve been here 2 years and 8 months and according to your stats you do not even make a comment a day. The more people like this, the more dead the place feels.
OP has commented 800+ times though, which, is modders of magnitude more than 99% of people in the world.
Maybe there was a less spiky way of making your point?
be the change you want to see
I’m absolutely guilty of it too so this as much for me as you but if we want more folks to engage, maybe we ought to try to be kinder to those who actually do.
I see this thread has many people saying that they don’t see a problem and it must be because of the local and personal blocklists.
I see comments saying it’s because they are using Lemmy or Piefed.
I’ve blocked nothing. I scroll through /c/all every day and I don’t feel like there is a hate or dodgy content problem.
Likewise. I think people are forgetting what it was like on reddit. Shits kind of popping here now and running into the odd tankie or chudd is nothing like having them in a full brigade or admin team like reddit
This place feels dead.
I’ve been here every day for the last few years and it doesn’t really feel that way.
The amount of genuinely hateful content has gone up
I haven’t really encountered any “hateful” content. There is however a lot of far left teenage dweebs who can be just relentless. Over time I’ve become more trigger-happy with the block button.
no information hygiene
I suspect you may have encountered this on posts from some of the instances I have blocked. They’re very well known and many instances have defederated from them. the news communities on lemmy.world don’t seem terrible ?
All of that said …
I don’t particularly like the fediverse myself. I find I spend an equal amount of time on a redlib (reddit) instance. There’s more content, it’s more engaging, and news seems to drop there first.
As a tangentially related aside… switch over to piefed. The lemmy devs are supporting all three problems you’ve mentioned IMO.
