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  • I've seen a few of those anti-Lemmy posts, a previous one was written by AI.

    That one Sounds like a rather confrontational poster ended up arguing with people on .ml which went as badly as you'd expect and soured them to the whole thing.

    However, treating Lemmy as a monolithic thing and making demonstrably false statements (no games, movie, etc communities) is suspect.

  • I wouldn't be on Lemmy at all if I hadn't been randomly banned on reddit without any reason given and they instantly denied my appeal asking what rule I broke.

    There are none of the many game specific subs I would frequent on Lemmy. Even if a sub does exist for one of the games I play it has 2 users and the last post was made by a bot about an update from 3 months ago with zero comments.

    The porn is worse and somehow even more filled with bots not labeled as bots. Lately I have seen a lot of very clearly bots just spamming porn from reddit subs as links to the reddit which just seems comical.

    The general userbase on Lemmy seems to mostly contain people from a pretty specific band of the political spectrum and they are extremely hostile to anyone that even sorta varies from their mindset.

    My reddit account was like 12 years old and have hundreds of thousands of post and comment karma on it. I still have no idea why it was suddenly banned with no way for me to contact any human about it.

    Lemmy just doesn't have the same communities I frequented and there is no fix for that other than waiting until there are so many users that eventually that niche group I used to converse with daily finds their way over here.

    I'm not mad at Lemmy for not being exactly like reddit, but it just doesn't scratch the same itch that reddit did because of it's smaller size and lack of populated niche groups.

    I see posts on the "everything" page on Lemmy from the same handful of people which makes it feel like it's really just a site for those 5 or 6 repost machines to post their stuff 24/7.

    • There are none of the many game specific subs

      Which ones are they?

      • I play a lot of games that arent like SUPER big so the subreddits tended to be smaller, but at least there were people to talk to about the game and the updates. Like Hunt showdown. There is a sub on Lemmy but its basically a ghost town.

        I looked for a couple other games I was playing at the time and none of them had subs or if they did they were dead.

        Nothing against Lemmy. It isuy doesn't have the user volume required to fill out those more niche communities.

  • So many upvotes too, that's crazy

    • Yeah, Reddit probably just messed up with the numbers

    • Just the usual case of survivorship bias. The long term subscriber base of "we need to go elsewhere" gathering points is mostly comprised of people that either don't vibe with the majority destination for whatever reason, disagree that there was ever a reason to leave in the first place, or don't actually want to leave but just want to complain about the current place.

  • While I think he's overreacting a bit, I could absolutely see how he'd come away with that opinion. I mostly agree with him, as a broad assessment of Lemmy.

    In terms of content, 90% of whats active is politics. That leaves like, 10% of the already small content pool for users who aren't interested in it. At the same time, this lack of content (and lack of users) centralizes content in just a few, broader communities.

    In terms of his assessment of users, I could definately see this too - esspecially in the bigger communities he was likely pushed towards (by the lack of content). Lemmy does have an elitism problem, both on the tech side and esspecially on the politics side. Making it even worse, there's a pretty good chance he ended up on .ml or one of the worse tankie instances, or at the very least, was frequently interacting with them due to their size and activity. If he didn't immediately block the tankie instances, I'd be more suprised if he didn't come away with a negative impression.

    In terms of mods, it'd depend a lot on which communities he tried to participate in, but again, I could easily see how he'd end up having this experience. Even ignoring the massive presence of totalitarian bootlickers on Lemmy, as I previously said, the lack of content causes things to centralize. In theory, you can split off to your own communities, but in practice, its nearly impossible unless a mod simultaneously pisses off the whole community at once as happened with 196. Even then, the community needs to be quite large to jump-start the competing community. Until Lemmy gets large enough to have multiple communities running in parallel or for new communities to quickly and easily grow, mods will continue to be a potential problem.

    All that said, I'm still here. I think, despite its issues, Lemmy has a much stronger foundation. Unfortunately its still missing most of the rest of the structure (or rather, content) needed to compete with other platforms.

    • 90% is politics? Where did you pull that statistic from?

      I'll also point out that the statistic, if true, is not at all a universal metric because my All feed and your All feed are not the same if we're on different instances. Over here, I might see 5% political content if I squint just right, otherwise it's pretty much negligible.

      • I don’t agree that Lemmy is 90% politics. But it is pretty political especially since the US election and Elon Musk becoming quasi president means that there is a huge amount of politically related posts about tech. One of the most active topics on Lemmy.

        For the most part I have effectively culled most of the politics I don’t want to see out of my feed but it wasn’t automatic which makes it a hurdle for people who aren’t invested in giving the fediverse a shot beyond the first impression.

        You will be hit with a deluge of leftist thought when first on-boarding to the fediverse. Offering starter packs for new people on-boarding with a no/low politics pack that…

        • automatically filters certain politically charged keywords
        • blocks certain communities and instances
        • includes some of the more popular lighthearted communities

        …would do a lot to improve the experience of people new to Lemmy that are looking for a more casual experience. At least in my opinion I think it would

      • Its a rough estimate, yes, but I don't think its an unreasonable one. I mean, one of the biggest Lemmy instances (.ml) is named for a political ideology. Unless you're defederating from all of the biggest instances, politics will make up a majority of the active content available.

        Regardless, thats besides the point. The point is the lack of non-politics content. I can't find content for Counter-Strike, or War Thunder, or Dota. Even Minecraft gets almost nothing, and its likely the most played game in the world. I know there is some other niches out there, but I'm using those as examples because they're all massive, multiplayer focused games, with content that lends itself to discussion or sharing, that I regularly have to go back to Reddit for to follow. Lemmy is lucky to get a post a week from all of them combined. If users can't find discussion on things they're interested in, at best they'll end up looking at broad-appeal communities from top or active (like politics) and at worst, they'll just leave.

        Edit: I just did a quick check on my instance's active feed. Of the top 20 results, 10 were undeniably political, and two more were debatably so. So for a more tame instance, around 55% of content being politics is a realistic estimate. I also checked Lemmy.ml, since its one of the main instances new users are directed to, and it was 14 political to 6 not, so 70% there.

  • i maintain that reddit is much better for porn than lemmy. lemmynsfw has real "front page of pornhub" energy

    • I never understood why people use Reddit (or even Lemmy) for porn, beyond that I'm shocked there isn't a dedicated site for porn Reddit with how big a criteria for porn existing is on Reddit

      • well, i also mean things like RandomActsofBlowjobs and other hookup subs

    • Isn't Reddit porn mostly people advertising their OF nowadays?

47 comments