And to those that have been here for a while, how has your experience changed over the year(s)?
What has worked for you?
What do you see needs improvement in your chosen platform?
I joined a month ago, and I like Lemmy much much more than Reddit. The federation makes it visible that you’re part of a large community, there’s no advertising, and I find the discussion to be of a generally higher quality. I also like that one can see upvotes and downvotes. Not sure whether it needs to be fuzzified or embargoed to fight abuse in future, but either way, it’s nice.
I’m absolutely sold on Lemmy vs Reddit. I dumped Twitter when Musk took over, and by then I was already on Mastodon, but I don’t actually use it much. Didn’t use Twitter much either. Any comments on Mastodon vs Bluesky?
Not much has changed. I might move to Piefed.
I’ve only been on the fediverse for a total of like 10 minutes, but it seems so far like a perfectly viable alternative to big tech’s data collection schemes disguised as websites.
Welcome!
I am only on lemmy.world so far
I like the people and moderation much more than Reddit. I’ve had a couple interactions with mods, and it’s so weird, it was like they are actually people or something. Very reasonable comparatively.
No advertisements for Jesus is pleasant, also. Thanks!
I’m pretty new.
Lemmy is great. It doesn’t have as many active hyper specific communities as reddit. But there are still plenty of active communities.
There is no attention based algorithm. But the more basic sortings work well enough. I already spend too much time here.I tried mastodon and Twitter a few years back. I still have absolutely no idea how that whole microblogging thing is supposed to work. Am I just supposed to scream into the void? Same thing with pixelfed.
If people link peertube videos from Lemmy, peertube works well. But the feed needs work. I don’t really care about the topic of the video. So the filter by topic isn’t that useful. I’d like to filter by language. And then find well researched videos by someone who is enthusiastic about a topic. Any topic. I don’t know if there simply aren’t that many or if I just can’t find them.
I think attention based algorithms could help retain new users. I think there are many who try fediverse platforms and just don’t stay long. And if we get more users that stay longer, we get more content, and then niches can form.
To not lose current users, and just because of mental health, it would probably be better if the attention based feeds could be turned off in the settings.
I joined two years ago after the Reddit API thing, full of hope and with bright eyes. I even got a couple of doggos in my PMs, which was nice. It got even better after I finally blocked enough weird porn communities so I stopped bumping into them all the time.
Now I only open Lemmy when I’m having trouble sleeping at night. I browse All/Active, and 90% of what I see are bot news reposts about Trump doing something stupid or scary, or some “are .ml tankies” shitstorms.
Also, I got banned on the Linux community at .ml and I have no idea why or even when it happened, which I actually find kind of funny.
after I finally blocked enough weird porn communities so I stopped bumping into them all the time.
That does take awhile. We might need to start adding that to our “Welcome” pages.
Welcome user. Due to the federated nature of Lemmy, there’s going to be a great deal of weird porn. You can block it. Let’s practice now…
I’ve been here for a few weeks now, and I’ve already grown very fond of it. I love the decentralized approach and how things are managed here. It’s the best alternative to today’s mainstream social media platforms. Hopefully this project has a long life ahead of it
I hope so too. I’ve been trying to engage with communites I’m interested in like coffee, and tea.
Personally, I came here because Reddit mods play king when they’re less than a pauper. It is also full of pedos and rapists. Simple questions when people actually need to know are met with mockery and ridicule.
There is less to see here but the vibe is less fucky and I’m staying.
I’m new here and it’s quite a relaxed experience. I think there are more friendly and reflected people. It’s like people here are able to criticise properly and take criticism and also encourage and praise a little. I thought this was lost since early internet. But also very political / activist. I feel like in a bubble of people who want to change things for the sake of people and not capital. As much as I like it we’re not enough. I don’t care there are not many comments. Less comments, less fomo.
Welcome!
I think there are some people here like that, and they are great.
But there are fewer and fewer of them as they get drowned out by the angry miserable people who are only here to harass and grief others who they disagree with. Huge uptick in that type of behavior the past few months, as the politics in the USA has gotten a lot of reddit people banned there and they came here. I have been called more names in the past three months on lemmy that I ever got in the previous 2-3 years I have been using fediverse
I don’t feel good about being on mainstream social media any more. Any time I spend on Reddit or YouTube is minimal and with a sense of distrust.
I’ve been on lemmy for a few months now and it’s grown since I joined and grows more every day as people hear about it.
Never looking back.
What pine-person meant was:
Welcome! Many of us here are capable of greeting new peers without going on a pedantic tangient.
So anyway.
Welcome!
It does feel much better to participate here. Particularly after blocking a few specific users.
You do realize Reddit always was and has been a forum right? Understanding the difference between social media and forums is an “early use”learning moment.
I joined today! I tried to post some images, but could only have one image per post. Then someone was rude, and I wasn’t able to downvote him. I keep refreshing the front page, but nothing happens since there’s no algorithm, the latest posts just stay there.
I think I’ll stick around here in parallel to Reddit. Maybe some day I’ll understand how instances and all of that works.
Then someone was rude, and I wasn’t able to downvote him.
Sorry. The votes don’t do as much here, anyway, since an interested user can read everything, and many of us sort by new to see what’s new.
It’s best to just block rude people here. Some are children, many are bots.
The rude people here have no idea that they’re often just shouting into the void, having been quickly and quietly blocked.
(Unless they’re on Hexbear, where they signed up for fewer rules, so I doubt they’re blocking as much.)
It takes little time until you have subscribed too enough communities so that your home feed feels natural. I use the “Hot” sorting in home, but there are some people who prefer “Scaled”, which is hot but favors smaller communities, so that you don’t only have memes and shit posts in there.
For the All feed I Dan really recommend “Top of 6 hours”. But, yeah, the Threadiverse is not big enough to spend here hours a day, I usually come here twice a day. What I really like is that you have much more user engagement, where on Reddit your comment usually disappears in the void. Welcome and have fun here, hope you’ll stay a little longer ;)
But, yeah, the Threadiverse is not big enough to spend here hours a day
I spend 3-4 hours on the Threadiverse daily. I’d say it depends on how you use it, how you curated your subscriptions and what you’re interested in.
It’s definitely possible to spend a lot of time here. But to be fair, I’m bilingual and there’s a lot of content in German in addition to English content.
Sorry you ran into those issues and the rude person.
I think new accounts have some restrictions for the first 3(?) days. My understanding is that this was implemented to try to counter an annoying person who keeps making accounts doing shitty things and then deleting that account and making a new one.
I’m pretty sure there’s a way to add multiple images to a post, but I’ve never done it.
For the new content, you may want to try switching your view to “New” or if it’s your first time looking at piefed during the day “Top (x)” [x being how long since you last opened at Piefed]. Those methods usually bring me a bunch of new content.
Hope your experience gets better :)
Edit: It didn’t occur to me earlier, but are you on “Subscribed” feed or “All” feed? If you aren’t on all, I would suggest switching to that until you have enough subscribed communities.
how has your experience been?
Posts and comments cannot be easily deleted, for one.
Otherwise, the general experience is like being at an anarchists’ beer hall.
New-ish (I joined during the reddit hooplah a while back) and my experience has been hit or miss.
I’m on my third instance. First I joined lem.ee and that got shut down. Then I joined midwest.social because I thought hey I’m a Midwest leftist, but that instance has been slow as shit and never loads for me. Tried on multiple lemmy clients with the same result. So now here I am on lemmy.world.
Federation is a good concept but I don’t think it will ever catch on on a large scale. It’s just too user-unfriendly.
No judgement here but what didnt work for you? Just the slowness? Or some other thing that made it hard to use?
Nothing ever loaded. Most of the time it would timeout, best case scenario it took a good 30-60 seconds to load a single comments section. Tried on several different clients and it was always the same for that instance.
I gave Lemmy a dedicated year. A few notes:
Very few people click through.
Lots of rage bait.
Communities split over instances make it pretty hard to know where to post things, what with defederation and such.
I didn’t miss much “news”; lemmy was functional for reporting what people were talking about.
No notification of moderation actions taken against you is a choice.
Those who post small websites that do cool things: thank you! I did discover several other cool places and tools.
I found that about 1/10 of the top lemmy posts (after filtering out jokes and sports) are links to AI slop that nobody bothered to check, comments just take the headline as real if they affirm. Pointing this out in the comments did not reduce engagement or drop the posts.
Cutting it out of my routine, at last for awhile.
One thing I really hoped for from the social Internet was access to people and data that could correct me/fill in gaps. But lemmy doesn’t do this, as people see what is upvoted and upvotes are used for affirmations to the reader.
Communities split over instances make it pretty hard to know where to post things, what with defederation and such.
Piefed can help mitigate this a bit. If there’s a link thats been shared across multiple lemmy instances it will consolidate all the comments into one post
I found that about 1/10 of the top lemmy posts (after filtering out jokes and sports) are links to AI slop that nobody bothered to check, comments just take the headline as real if they affirm. Pointing this out in the comments did not reduce engagement or drop the posts.
Can I see where/how you found this out?
The ratio is a vibe, and I kinda regret posting a precise one. The case I checked carefully is this one: everything this guy posts
which I noted in November, and blocked very shortly thereafter. I vaguely recall finding a handful more examples of ‘too good to be true’ headlines, which were in fact not true, but I did not save links.
What made me sad is that even bereft of the algorithm and bad incentives in system, if the headline is ‘directionally correct’ still seems like the most important thing. Very interested in a social media where correct is ranked over good feels.
(and then there’s the regular examples like this, which are not slop but are heavily disputed/recontextualized by the top comment. Correction highly upvoted, yet the OP itself is still doing well))
I was wondering why do I only see a single post and no comments for that user, but it looks they were banned on my instance.
since I came from reddit in the first wave, I have read others observations multiple times that lemmy.world has bad moderation, in several ways, and not only because they don’t have the capacity for their large server but some other reasons.
you said you had enough for now, but if you come back later, try an account on my instance, slrpnk.net or some others like these that are smaller but not too small. maybe you would like it more. I don’t say lemmy.world was a bad choice, I think still better than reddit in recent years, but you get the idea.
but that this user you linked has been banned for almost 2 years by now on my instance makes it look like that it’s indeed moderated better.instances have a lot of moderation power, to make the experience with them better or worse, by choosing which users or sometimes complete instances to ban, so that’s a reason other instances could feel different
(and then there’s the regular examples like this, which are not slop but are heavily disputed/recontextualized by the top comment. Correction highly upvoted, yet the OP itself is still doing well))
what was the post? I can’t load it now, maybe it was deleted.
honestly the thing I hate the most about lemmy is that deleted posts just give an error that’s more generic than anything microsoft windows could show, and that deleted posts make all the comments inaccessible too.
Claiming some old public figure was a newly discovered pedo, and including a quote of them saying terrible things.
Except the quote was 5 years old, not from the Epstein files, the figure had apologized and been publicly forgiven by the victim, and the files revealed nothing new.
Threads is a Facebook thing and I stay away. The tiny corner of Mastodon that I look at is pretty good. Lemmy, well I’m here and it’s not totally bad, but it leaves a lot to be desired. Too much duplication, too much clickbait, and believe it or not too much centralization. For example, your reading history is store on the server instead of the client.
