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?
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.