19h ago

Yet the folks at Reddit told me there's "no activity here"

42 comments

I wonder if all the bot activity on reddit makes it look so busy that people are confused when they come somewhere with far fewer bots around?
I notice significantly more positive interaction with (at least what I believe to be) real humans here than I did on reddit in my last couple of years there.
- People always talk about wanting to grow Lemmy, but honestly I like it a lot more the way it is. You can comment on a post that's been on All for 6 hours and still get plenty of thoughtful responses. On reddit, there was so much noise - especially on major threads - that commenting was like pissing into the wind.
  
  The solution on that on Reddit has been, retreat into more niche communities, remove default subs from your feed. Right now the way to make Lemmy usable is to browse All, because otherwise there isn't enough content, but I bet as it grows it will go the same way.
  
  For Lemmy that's what I used to do yeah, bc there was no better option.
  PieFed offers numerous additional options though, most especially categories of communities, including user customizable and shareable Feeds. You can even have your cake and eat it too - like subscribe to no political communities to avoid them showing up in your Subscribed, but then it's a click away in the News and Politics Topic area. Or, the keywords filter options (for e.g. "Trump", "Musk", or whatever you want) include All, None, and Some, allowing you to refine your Subscribed feed to meet your interest level in a particular subject.
  And then for very low-volume communities, you can even set up Notification triggers upon every new post (I also use this for a community I mod using a Lemmy alt) - e.g. poetry tends to not be highly upvoted so super difficult to catch organically on either All or Subscribed (you might have more luck there sorting by New, but this requires blocking a TON of communities like for sports and individual locations and such).
  PieFed really is an entirely different experience than Lemmy! Maybe as it becomes successful, the Lemmy devs may start to port the features over? But it's doubtful, as existing requests have languished for like 5 years already - PieFed's being written in Python rather than Rust really makes a difference in such matters.
  
  So you can easily subscribe to everything but exclude certain topics, is that what you mean? I have a subscribed feed but there's too many new communities I might want to see and too much work to subscribe to everything, so I do it the other way by blocking things instead and browsing all. The main thing I don't like about PieFed on first glance is that the image thumbnails are quite large and only one or a few posts are shown on the screen at once if they are image posts, seems very mobile focused, is there a way to change that in the settings? I prefer to only open images after reading the title and deciding I want to look at it, then closing it again so there are more posts simultaneously on the screen.
  It's cool that it uses Python, I like using Python and dislike working in low level languages.
  
  i can see the same thing, things that have been published for hours see steady activity, even some which are lively for a good few days, it feels less like flitting between a bunch of new things which is useful
- I've noticed the same. I've also noticed it become slightly more combative and strawman-y with the influx of new folx, but maybe getting better again lately? Anyway, this is just going by anecdotal/vibes, and it's definitely better than mainstream/commercial socials.
  
  I've also noticed it become slightly more combative and strawman-y with the influx of new folx, but maybe getting better again lately?
  I'd like to think it's because the mods here are a lot less likely to aid and abet that shit. I don't know if it is, but that's what I'd like to think.
  
  I think it's the same phenomenon in multi-player gaming - community hosted servers tend to have less garbage flying around compared to centrally hosted company servers.
  If you run your own server, you're far more likely to care about the user experience. And if you run your own server, you make your own rules and can manage how you'd like - no obligations.
  
  Yeah mods and admins around here put in some real good work protecting their users.
  
  have you looked at comments on an instagram post? you'd absolutely never be allowed to to say half what gets said there here
  
  What I like about fedi is that while we usually give people the benefit of the doubt, we don't tolerate dog whistles, sealioning, or other ""subtle"" methods of spreading bigotry and intolerance.
  Whereas the big commercial platforms we on't do a thing unless it's blatant harassment, or matches one of the 12 slurs on their no-no list.
  
  and if your admin allows that shit you can go find a new admin. no one's the only game in town out here
- No wait... don't you see?
  The robots have already breached our defenses.
  You've seen what they've done to other websites!
  And worst of all, they could be any one of us...
  
  Are you one?
  I am 🤖BEEP🤖 definitely not one!
- Probably slightly controversial but I'm actually missing getting into arguments with strangers. I feel like I need some conflict in my life.
  
  On Reddit though, mostly what they offer is arguments with robots? 🤖😜

42 comments