What do you think is the biggest issue with Lemmy?
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I don't think that in itself if the problem. anyone can host an instance. The problem is lemmy.ml being the apparent default instance, advertising itself as an instance for privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, and not mentioning seemingly anywhere in the description/rules that only red flavour authoritarian dogma is allowed in political discussion.
"America bad, therefore former 'communist' russia and current 'communist' china good."
Edit: it's not featured as prominently as it used to be on join-lemmy.org so things may be improving. they should still mention in the description that western viewpoints on many issues are not allowed due to "rule 1"
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I don't think that in itself if the problem. anyone can host an instance. The problem is lemmy.ml being the apparent default instance, advertising itself as an instance for privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, and not mentioning seemingly anywhere in the description/rules that only red flavour authoritarian dogma is allowed in political discussion.
"America bad, therefore former 'communist' russia and current 'communist' china good."
Edit: it's not featured as prominently as it used to be on join-lemmy.org so things may be improving. they should still mention in the description that western viewpoints on many issues are not allowed due to "rule 1"
wrote last edited by [email protected]I realized .ml was fucking insane and delusional when they glorified Stalin and refused to recognize the atrocities he committed.
No matter what your political stance is, as soon as you deny negative facts and exclusively push the "positives" it becomes a problem and may radicalize you (if that isn't already the case).
What happened to nuanced moderate politics? It seems people unconditionally put the "left" or "right" label on themselves. And ironically these blind followers will have the audacity to call anyone close to the political center, or people who are honest with themselves, cowards.
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Im not your guy, pal!
I'll be your pal
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There is also a dearth of cannibalistic viewpoints here. And Zoroastrians are woefully underrepresented.
I don't come here to change my views (though it happens from time to time), and neither do they. I'm not ignorant of their thoughts; I'm inundated with them every day. I don't need to interact with assholes here. I don't want to come here and watch people scream back and forth at each other, and I definitely am not interested in participating—there is a reason I've left other social media.
You don't have to subscribe to political communities if you don't want to see political discussion. But the dearth of genuine political discussion here is a problem for the people who do want it, that can't be fixed by individual action.
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Or if instances used the word “Lemmy” in their domain names. I can say “go to Lemmy.world or Lemmy.zip or Lemmy.cafe” but if I tell someone to go “sh.itjust.works” they will get confused and wonder why “that site is not Lemmy?”
I don't think we want that. It sets some weird precedent that instances need to be lemmy-dot-something, which is both untrue and restrictive on server hosts as a barrier for entry if that becomes the universal convention.
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I feel like that's an issue that's exacerbated by the predominance of image posts over text posts, and text post only communities.
It's probably an issue with vote-based discussions full stop. Post something funny and it'll get votes because of the laughs; post something everyone in your echo-chamber agrees with and it'll get votes because it's right-on.
Maybe I just want to go back to forums.
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UI/intercations not enough different from reddit, so doesn't make it popular
Moderators .
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“The right” consists of individuals, just like “the left” does - and there’s plenty of bad faith to be found on both sides.
Is this like plenty of fine people on both sides? In aggregate, one side is far more egregious and it's not even close.
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The lack of content compared to reddit. If you look at [email protected] for example, there is only one post this week, and 4 posts this month. How is it that, with all the web developers and AI vibe coding shit, no one is actually asking questions?
When I was on reddit, I had to hide posts because there were 10 or 20 interesting questions every day.
It's a negative feedback loop. There is a good chance programmers asking questions NEED the answer (homework, work-work) so they don't risk asking in low pop forums, making the forum low pop because there are no questions.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote last edited by [email protected]
Issues that would be solved by time/gaining more users
- Not nearly enough people to cover all the niche interest communities that Reddit does. At Reddit you find an expert on almost any topic to help you with your problems and you'll find information on pretty much anything. Lemmy isn't there yet.
- Not nearly enough history. A lot of content is still good and informative after many years. Lemmy doesn't have a library of old-but-still-relevant content to search.
Issues independent of user count
- Search sucks. Reddit's search does too, but reddit is easily searchable via Google. Lemmy isn't.
- Onboarding is difficult, because you have to choose an instance, which is hugely important, but a newcomer has no idea what makes/is a good community to join
Issues that get worse with more users (aka, the potentially deal-breaking issues)
- Lemmy scales terribly. Every larger instance needs to retain a copy of pretty much all other content out there, and each comment/like/delete/update/... needs to be propagated to every other major instance out there. Adding more instances thus increases complexity and cost instead of decreasing it. Running a major lemmy instance is already prohibitively expensive now, with just about 50k monthly active users. If Lemmy was to scale to Reddit numbers (1.1 billion monthly active users, roughly 22 000x the number of users), everything would just break down.
- Moderation work scales just as terribly. Not only does an admin need to make sure the communities on their instance are moderated, but they also need to moderate all other communities on all other instances.
- Related to the last point, there's some legal issues as well if an admin doesn't moderate all other instances. Since content is copied from other instances to your instance, illegal content (e.g. illegal pornography, copyrighted works, ...) are also copied to your own server without your active participation. That makes it legally mandatory to moderate all other communities.
- Legal pitfalls in general. If lemmy becomes sizeable enough, all sorts of laws in regards to social media platforms will apply. That's one thing if the social media platform is run by a huge corporation with a legal department, but it's an entirely different story for a tiny group of non-profit idealists running the social media platform.
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Is this like plenty of fine people on both sides? In aggregate, one side is far more egregious and it's not even close.
Speaking of bad faith..
Yes, and just like Trump, I'm not speaking of the white nationalists and nazies.
"So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people -- and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists -- because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
"Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people. But you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets, and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group."
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lemmy.ml and its admins being the developers at the same time.
Lemmy.ml needs to be defederated from all other instances. It's literally an extremist instance of hate and bigotry.
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I realized .ml was fucking insane and delusional when they glorified Stalin and refused to recognize the atrocities he committed.
No matter what your political stance is, as soon as you deny negative facts and exclusively push the "positives" it becomes a problem and may radicalize you (if that isn't already the case).
What happened to nuanced moderate politics? It seems people unconditionally put the "left" or "right" label on themselves. And ironically these blind followers will have the audacity to call anyone close to the political center, or people who are honest with themselves, cowards.
Yeah, well the guy who runs it is a notorious tankie.
You either tow the pro stalinist line or you are punished
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It's probably an issue with vote-based discussions full stop. Post something funny and it'll get votes because of the laughs; post something everyone in your echo-chamber agrees with and it'll get votes because it's right-on.
Maybe I just want to go back to forums.
Forums still exist, but I hard agree with you. I was so excited when the lemmy devs were considering hiding votes counts from the frontend by default. Unfortunately (imo) it got shot down by the community pretty quickly.
I think "likes" as a socials concept are part of a dark engagement pattern we've willfully brought over from the mainstream, and we won't be able to be much better than them until we're rid of it.
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They certainly mislead me. My first year or so was on lemmy.ml @[email protected]
After repeated bans i decided to move to a more relaxed instance. i still interact with lemmy.ml because some of the bigger open source communities are there, but .ml admins now cannot block me from accessing the full lemmyverse, only their diminishing corner of it
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PieFed doesn't have any of these issues
It does, since it still federates with lemmy.ml...
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Yeah, well the guy who runs it is a notorious tankie.
You either tow the pro stalinist line or you are punished
I was on .ml first after leaving reddit, because I didn't know this was the case, until I called out straight up state propaganda and defended capitalism with social and ethical policies once. You can imagine how they responded to that.
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The downvote button. It's a hobby horse of mine. Slashdot got it right: if you're going to tell someone to shut up, there should be a small price to pay.
PS: to the inevitable downvoters. Let's be clear that you are not just saying "I disagree". You are helping to hide my comment; you're literally telling me to shut up. Would you do that in person, without so much as lifting a finger to justify yourself ? Of course you wouldn't. In person you would have manners. This is the problem I have with the downvote button. It incites people to behave like uncivilized infants.
It can be both. Some need to be told to shut up.
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You could just use the Subscribe feed, no?
Yeah, I spent a little time cultivating the communities that I subscribed to when I first got here, and now the Subscribe feed is what I use 95% of the time.
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You don't have to subscribe to political communities if you don't want to see political discussion. But the dearth of genuine political discussion here is a problem for the people who do want it, that can't be fixed by individual action.
What is genuine political discussion? How do you moderate it? Who is going to come when it's moderated? How do you deal with both legitimate and legitimate complaints about biased moderation?
I just don't think it's a thing on social media. I think it can happen in private conversations, but as soon as it becomes more about winning an argument or posturing for readers, I think any hope of earnest discourse is lost. The more public a conversation, the worse it is. It's like trying to argue with a bully in front of their friends. You might be able to reach the humanity in them, but not in that moment.
