I know that recent drama has caused a bit of uneasiness in the community for this platforms future, but I am optimistic for lemmy. It might be helpful to look to mastodon to learn how to move forward.
I know that recent drama has caused a bit of uneasiness in the community for this platforms future, but I am optimistic for lemmy. It might be helpful to look to mastodon to learn how to move forward.
cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/641633
I was never extremely active on Mastodon until recently but I followed it's development relatively closely from its infancy. And I will say that it's really strange to watch lemmy face nearly identical issues that Mastodon did when it was in a similar development stages. (Though, some of the drama thus far have been essentially a speedrun of what mastodon went thru over a gradual amount of time.)
The fediverse as a whole is essentially a return to the Internets roots, and with that comes new problems that OG internet communities did not have to grapple with due to the changes the internet has faced in the past few years alone. When building communities, most large internet communities have been largely corporate since the rapid centralization of the internet of the mid 2000s. There is truly no blueprint for this, and the volunteers that are making these communities from scratch are going to make mistakes (as we have already witnessed more than once, even this week alone.)
A large issue that has resulted from the corporate centralization of the internet that is really hard to break from is the expectation of an extremely smooth streamlined experience on emerging platforms like lemmy from new users. And you aren't going to get that in these early days. You just aren't. Things are going to be messy, we are just getting our feet on the ground. And this results in a lot of frustration and just generally a feeling of walking on thin ice with a user base that has been largely built initially from the exodus of an already established platform. To many regular lemmy users there's this expectation that tends to be "well, if other social media platforms can do it, why can't we?" and to admins and those building these communities it can be frustrating and feel like the users are being entitled to things that just aren't possible from volunteers at this time.
With recent drama and inter community issues, the honeymoon phase of this place is officially ending and how we move forward is entirely dependent on how we respond as a community as well as what people using this platform as a whole want from it. You get what you put in.
I don't say this to discount the drama that lemmy has faced these past few weeks but if you honestly think that this place has been toxic so far, the early days of Mastodon would have seemed like pure hell in comparison. Early Mastodon drama was like, doxxings, entire instance admins quite literally being chasing off their own sites over petty nonsense, things like that. It was bad. Really bad. And despite the existence of fedidrama, that stuff has stabilized. Why? Because the community stabilized and gradually formed their own cultures and the community volunteers building communities learned from their mistakes. People moved to smaller communities and stopped being hostile to decentralization. The necessity of defederation was embraced by most who began to understand its importance.
Some of the biggest issues lemmy has right now aren't easy to solve, but we have a blueprint to what solutions worked and what didn't from Mastodon. There's also the issue with lemmy having a generally different culture from Mastodon, and that's OK. We want our own community identity, not the same as Reddit or Mastodon or Twitter. In many ways that is already being built as well.
Right now, the biggest thing is just sticking with this place and persevering the growing pains. It is so easy to get burnt out, and the Mastodon instances that got too big for the admins to actually deal with are clear examples of that. I know it's easy to look at recent events and feel disappointment as well as feel that just generally the most toxic Redditors migrated over, but doing that is just giving up before we even began. If you used Mastodon in it's early days, it fucking sucked so bad. We have a leg up here that it's overall easier to navigate communities and discussions out of the box (and with the current development, it's only going to get better.)
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Don’t know if I’m out of the loop but what drama has there been recently?
Toxic generally extremist instances both left and right finding out that not only can people de-Federate from them but that they will. And that it is their right.
Mostly explodingheads and hexbears. If you search for those two you can read about it all to your heart's Delight.
Ahhh hexbear. I was there at the beginning, and left after a few months. It's strange to see their dysfunction become more widely known. There were some nice features on their fork though.
They are not alone in their dysfunction. Even lemmy.ml and especially lemmygrad get quite toxic. The biggest difference is they tend to keep to themselves and stay in their echo chambers. And this can generally be pretty easily avoidable. But people still accidentally straight and upon them. I don't remember how I was browsing the other day but a post from their instance came up. And I clicked on it out of curiosity not realizing. Only to see someone inside there making cogent rational arguments getting down voted pretty hard. At which point I took a step back and looked at everything that was going on and realized with horror where both of us had wandered into. I specifically made a point of just informing him of where he was and what to expect. Which got plenty of down votes. I think I only said one more thing in the thread in response to one of the denizens and cut my losses.
The only thing different really about the hexxbears was the constant brigading outside their domain. And I say all this as a socialist myself. Just very anti-authoritarian. Those places are all fanfiction and charismatic hero worship.
Ooh what features?
I don't really see much EH, mostly shitposting about chris christie. Mostly HB brigading.
There was a significant amount of transphobic content coming from Exploding-Heads. You might be able to find some of it if you go to their meme communities
Hexbear. They're tankies, and they brigade and spam a shitty meme. You can recognize the users because they all have pronouns in their username when no one else does. Just asshats, and I feel bad for the coder than fixed it so they could refederate, because almost everyone defederated with them. What a waste of his time.
And they often use those huge emojis in their comments.
Apparently the huge emojis are more of a bug within lemmy itself. I'd love to see a fix because they can be annoying, but I believe there's other things on the priority list first... like individual users being able to block an entire instance would be a great feature. But the giant emojis getting fixed is also up there; I just don't know enough to say what the underlying issue is
It's a single line of CSS. It's very easy to fix on the Lemmy web UI (not so much on Jerboa). At one point I even considered fixing it myself and making a PR but then other stuff came up and I had to disable emojis on my instance, so it's no longer a problem of mine unfortunately.
I just bought my first domain and am already starting to dive-in to self-hosting. Even if my server isn't used for the fediverse (at first), I'm excited to stumble my way around a new adventure lol
Best of luck for your self hosting adventure! Great choice, it's well worth it.