Why does Lemmy feel so fresh compared to Reddit?

As a long time Reddit user, there's something about Lemmy and the fediverse that feels really refreshing and new. I think it has to do with a few things...

  1. People are more respectful of each other and interested in discussion and being social.
  2. Less trolls (users are probably older?)
  3. Due to it not being absolutely huge, I feel like people will actually see my posts and comments instead of being lost in a sea of content. I suppose once Lemmy grows this will change, however the cool thing about the fediverse are the new servers. So you can stick to the server when you want smaller community discussion and go to "all" when you want more populated threads.
  4. The clean UI feels refreshing and clean, almost like the early internet.

What have you noticed? Do you find it refreshing too?

Xer0,

The people aren’t assholes. The place is not that big to be totally ruined.

Che_Donkey,
@Che_Donkey@lemmy.ml avatar

I find it a lot more like old forums, and there is a loooooot less ragebait (post about Matt Walsh and his piss fetish, Tim pool and his homoerotic fascism, etc).

It’s very refreshing and I find myself spending less time on here (searching for interesting content) but more time engaging (instead of lurking)

god,
@god@sh.itjust.works avatar

I like that I can block entire communities. Never gonna see those weird people that obsess over certain public figures, positively or negatively, again 😍

Che_Donkey,
@Che_Donkey@lemmy.ml avatar

But that’s the thing, on R no matter what you blocked they still pop up in other feeds…so many “news”, meme etc. featuing those shits and here…nada. My thoughts are most of thier shit is bot driven, so here it wont get traction (yet) and if they do its easily avoided!

ImFresh3x,

Because I’m here (see username)

pickle_party247,

In addition to what everyone has said, Lemmy doesn't have an established culture compared to Reddit. No in-jokes like the poop knife for example

Kurumatron,
@Kurumatron@lemmy.world avatar

How long until the "broke two arms" story comes here?

goat,

huuuuuuuuuurr, we should make a really clever and quirky comment to identify ourselves. something something narwhal bacon sings.

XD XD ;p

adj16,

But we do have the no poop guy.

Refuses to shit. Refuses to elaborate. Leaves.

Rob,

I also choose this guys poop knife

mim,

It's inevitable with time though.

Maybe to a lesser extent, since not every instance federates everything. If clusters start to form, you'd expect some in-jokes to be limited to certain communities / instances.

Ciari,

The poop knife has already made its way here 💀

Jumuta,

wtf did i just read

datavoid,

Quick someone link the swamps of dagobah, Jolly rancher, coconut, or broken arms

esty,
@esty@lemmy.ca avatar

I haven't read any of these words in years and I'm kind of upset you made me remember their existence

abcd,

TIL about the poop knife!

bigkahuna1986,

You’re one of today’s lucky 10000! Sort of…

jrs100000,
@jrs100000@lemmy.world avatar

Ok so let me throw out some old timer wisdom. This is what the social media/forums/the Internet are like when the cream is skimmed off and the 90% of users who only browse, and the 8% who only vote are gone. Enjoy it while you can. The summer always ends.

sneakyninjapants,

I was a bit late one the social media train, isn't that where the "Eternal September" thing came from?

AnyOldName3,
@AnyOldName3@lemmy.world avatar

That's because way back in the past, every September, a bunch of students who'd never had home internet access would have access via university for the first time. It would take some time for them to pick up the culture, so there'd be a month or so of questionable posts.

Noedel,

Absolutely, my first thought was this is what internet was in the 90s and 00s. Slow, good yarns, and lame jokes.

Tbh there's already too many memes here though. Half my front page is 196 and German me_irl sometimes.

samus12345,
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

You can block those communities if you want.

Noedel,

I guess I want some memes not all memes

jrs100000,
@jrs100000@lemmy.world avatar

Yea but dont be too hard on the kids. We were sticking frogs in virtual blenders and abusing the /blink/ tag at their age, so let them have their fun.

static_motion,

This is exactly it. I haven’t come across a forum where the “summer syndrome” wasn’t permanently present in a decade. I’ll be lurking around here to see if this is going to finally be it.

yads,

The funny thing is on Reddit I was mostly a lurker/content consumer. There was little incentive to actually post because your post or comment was likely to just be drowned out in the absolute torrent of other posts/comments. Here I'm actually able to be heard.

zzz,

Unfortunately some communities don't seem to exist without the froth. The FIRE community seems difficult to recreate here, or local subs. But do you all remember when r/Bitcoin was mostly programmers?

Very_Bad_Janet, (edited )

The FIRE community could use the existing Mr. Money Mustache forums. Only hiccup is, I believe, that it is difficult to get a new account (not sure why that is, maybe that's an old problem and it's easier now). I've lurked that forum for years; they seem like a friendly, helpful, well regulated, un-frothy bunch.

neanderthal,

I love The Good Place! To get a Mr money mustache account, you have to know the answers to a few questions covered by the blog. If anyone needs help, PM me. I'm a long time follower of the FIRE community and can assist.

If bad Janet poops because she chooses to and ends conversations with long farts, I'm a bit afraid of what a very bad Janet does...

buckykat,

It's not run to maximize shareholder value

xtratrestrial,

That was my favorite part! Don't you just love being a tiny cog on the capitalist wheel of despair?

krackalot,

I just wish the orphan crushing machine wasn't so slow. JUST DO IT!!! Or preferably don't and stop sucking, but I know that won't happen.

Spacemanspliff,

Even if they were to come out fire spez and go say ‘our bad let’s stop and talk about this’ I’m still not going back.

buckykat,

On reddit I deliberately refrained from up/down voting because I hate feeding capitalist algorithms. I'm trying to unlearn that habit now.

RedCanasta,

At least here there is no algorithm I think?

buckykat,

Certainly there's some kind of algorithm behind sorting by Hot or Top Day or whatever, but it's not trying to sell me stuff or sell my preferences to anybody

Zetaphor,
@Zetaphor@zemmy.cc avatar

The only algorithms here are for sorting posts based on activity and recency, rather than trying to maximize engagement so you see more ads. Also it's all completely open source.

N1cknamed,
@N1cknamed@kbin.social avatar

This is a group of like-minded, technology-affluent users that most likely have a higher average age than Reddit.

CynAq,
@CynAq@kbin.social avatar

As well as higher average IQ, it feels like.

Kichae, (edited )

IQ probably has little to do with it. It's socialization and learned expectation that are acting as a filter currently.

CynAq,
@CynAq@kbin.social avatar

Yeah, of course. It was a tongue in cheek comment that didn't land well.

Kichae,

Ah. I got woooshed!

clobubba,

Barriers to entry occasionally have positive side effects. The current dynamic in and around the Fediverse reminds me of how dial-up bulletin boards self-selected for computer-literate (and typically intelligent) users. I suppose that implies that we should also expect our own Eternal September, too.

CynAq,
@CynAq@kbin.social avatar

If the adoption rate continues and quality of life improvements such as efficient mobile apps keep getting made, I think it's inevitable. But I also think it can be a good thing, especially if the distributed instance culture with semi-independent communities persist. If the culture shifts so much to instances just being nodes into the larger "verse" so to speak, the general experience could shift a lot with it.

In any case, with all the different user experiences available already with Mastodon, kbin, lemmy, Calckey, Pixelfed and Peertube offering vastly different experiences into the same ecosystem, it'll be a lot more diverse I believe as everyone will find their own comfort zone.

tehgamemail,
@tehgamemail@lemmy.ml avatar

I felt like Reddit was plagued by the mainstream user during the pandemic. I used to go on Reddit to lurk subs like r/Carding to understand how people(criminals?) steal credit card credentials and dump the balances.

By reading them I change the way I manage my own OPSEC. I could read just about anything there. Now it’s all banned or tightly moderated. Can’t say this can’t say that. Hope lemmy won’t be the same.

samus12345,
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

If you don't like it, you can always set up your own instance here. That's the beauty of it!

bitsplease,

As much as I’d love to think otherwise, i think a significant amount of the good feeling and comradery that we’re seeing now is due to us being in a bit of a honeymoon phase. You saw the same thing on Mastadon after the Twitter migration, everyone was singing kumbaya and holding hands, but overtime it started to regress a bit (though not nearly as much) towards a more “twitter” feel.

I’m sure over time it’ll stop being quite so feel-good and happy, but the fact that it’s community run and less centralized will help a lot in the long run i think. A lot of the friction and tension on Reddit was due in one way or another to it’s centralization - if you had a popular subreddit that was run by shitty mods, there wasn’t much you could do about it. here, you can just create a new version of the same sub on a different instance, and it’s a lot easier for people to “move” over to the new one.

I think the lower population helps a lot as well, right now the majority of the people on Lemmy are good faith users who care about the platform and want it to succeed. When you have 100’s of millions of users like Reddit does, you’re going to get a lot more bad faith users and people who just want generic content to scroll on

god,
@god@sh.itjust.works avatar

Soon we'll all be strangers and snobs and kick each other in the ribs to say hi

Venutianxspring, (edited )

I think the biggest impact is that the early adopters that have left reddit are the heavy users that respected the flow and community of Reddit. So the good of Reddit has come here, but the general populace and the keyboard warriors haven't figured it out yet, fortunately.

It does feel fresh though, like Reddit did when Digg first ate shit and everyone left for Reddit

god,
@god@sh.itjust.works avatar

Ehh I just like people owned things vs corporate overlords dictating what I can do or see. Keyboard warriors are here tho, have seen many an argument around here about whether to defederated this or ban that or nuke some country.

dogmuffins,

I agree. If lemmy continues to grow, inevitably some servers will be shit, but I imagine there will be other non-federated or less-federated instances. beehaw has already started down that path.

Trolls are generally looking for maximum carnage, so I imagine there’s less incentive / reward posting somewhere like lemmy.

god,
@god@sh.itjust.works avatar

As an experienced shitposter, the shittiness of the posting often correlates directly with the inability of moderators to clean it up.

Ignacio,
@Ignacio@lemmy.world avatar

The fediverse is a great system for moderation. I've been on Mastodon for years now and it's stayed pretty pleasant.

drascus,

It's likely all this will change as the user base grows. However there are some distinct advantages.

  1. Having instances focused purely on certain topics or ethics makes it so you can join the communities that align with your ideas. while all these communities federate having a home base that aligns with your ethics is important. Also if any particular instance becomes overly trollish there is the option that your instance can defederate from them. While this is not ideal having smaller instances with a more homogeneous community means that it will be easier to lobby for things like that than a monolithic service.
  2. people at the moment are focused on building something that is community oriented and that people will want to use. Right now we have mods, power users, tech enthusiasts, and community leaders mostly. We don't have a ton of trolls yet. This will change but I think we can adapt to it.
  3. There is a sense of comradery. People are dusting themselves off after the collapse of a former community of bolstering each other. This will wear off. however hopefully by then the service is robust enough that people will have found their new communities and groups that they jive with.
knova,
@knova@links.dartboard.social avatar

RE: #3 - we can all choose to be kind to newcomers. Be patient with people as they make those “Testing from Mastodon - can you see this?” Type posts.

StarLuigi,
@StarLuigi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

How does Lemmy even work with mastodon? I couldn't figure it out when on mastodon.

May,
@May@kbin.social avatar

This is kinda random but till know i always saw "camaraderie" which i guess is more of a French influence spelling, but TIL comradery also an allowed way to spell it! Also ya I agree w you PLUS there seems to be less bots than Reddit atm

drascus,

I am aware of the other spelling. The "comradery" way agrees with my lazy American attitude a bit more. English is a strange language.

samus12345,
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

I've never seen that spelling of it. No sir, I don't like it!

MyMulligan,
@MyMulligan@lemmy.one avatar

The negativity is definitely less. Sure, out of say fifty comments to a post there's maybe two disgruntled souls. Overall it's conducive to discussion.

Over on reddit I kept to just hobby subreddits for the most part to make comments. Only way to not come across the trolls.

Yes, the clean UI is wonderful. It's good to have something simple. It's also fun to watch something grow.

StarLuigi,
@StarLuigi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The hobby subreddits and the smaller subs were the only ones I was sad to see go when moving to Lemmy, I was surprised by how much I didn't miss anything else at all .

GrayBackgroundMusic,

The type of people to leave reddit over the shenanigans going on are certain demographic. The crowd is different, here, bc we're more likely to deal with a new website that's not run by narcissistic sociopaths even if there's less content.

voxov7,
@voxov7@lemmy.world avatar

More left leaning for sure.

SirEDCaLot,

This is absolutely true, and this is how the internet was back in the old days before Big tech and megaplatforms. People would set up little servers on their cable modems using spare laptops. It was experimental, it was imperfect, but it was ours. One side effect of this, was that you had to be at least a little bit smart to get yourself connected to it. Even if that just meant knowing that connecting to it was something that you wanted to do. That weeded out a lot of idiots who contribute low quality discussion. Also, because there is no giant company with a financial incentive to get everybody to use it as much as possible, things were built for raw functionality rather than trying to make them easy for people to get addicted to in 30 seconds. That naturally makes them more usable for anybody with an IQ over 90.

Also, no advertisements. No sponsored posts.

neanderthal,

Also, no advertisements.

It didn't take long for ads to come along. Remember the 90s banners where you would punch the monkey to win $20? Or the text links that were ads? Pop ups?

SirEDCaLot,

Okay that's fair- I'm sure some instances will choose to advertise in some way.

TBH I'm more concerned about spam. Reddit has an army of anti-spam stuff, and that's just one site. As Lemmy grows, it will become a spam target, which will be more challenging due to its open nature (IE spammers will spin up their own instances eventually). I suspect that much like e-mail, some kind of RBL list will emerge.

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