I think that's an strong statement and overreaction on your part, but to that point mass adoption isn't always a good thing.
I find that the content on Tildes are generally more respectful, thoughtful and higher quality. Much better signal to noise ratio. Lemmy does have quality stuff but there is also a lot more low quality / low effort content to wade through. Just look at the state of Showerthoughts / AskLemmy if you are looking for examples.
But is it though? By definition moderation and adminstration means a certain set of standard and rules to keep the community / site runs well. Tildes simply has their own set of standards that so far I think is working well.
Lemmy has mods too and there are plenty of powertripping drama. Does that make Lemmy elitist? Or less so simply because it allows shitposts and memes?
And the best part about Lemmy/Reddit is that I can look at that low effort content if I want (it's a fun time waster) and ignore it if I don't (I don't sub to any large communities).
With Tildes, there's fewer people so I have less to choose from.
And that's totally fine. I have both and use both on a daily basis.
I just find it strange that people shitting on Tildes despite that it's overall a healthy and well run community. We should really be glad that other communities are coming up, they are not mutually exclusive after all.
Absolutely! I just find Lemmy is more interesting to me than Tildes. I'm glad both exist, and I'm glad RIF supports both. Maybe I'll give it another shot at some point.
The real issue with Reddit is a lack of real competition. Ideally, there would be several similar services and people would pick and choose between them. That way, if one goes down or otherwise becomes less attractive, there's a backup to flock to that already has the capacity to take on those new users.
That's exactly how I feel about Twitter and Facebook, so I avoid all of that. Reddit was great because there wasn't really any benefit to getting "popular" on the platform, and Lemmy is scratching that itch for me as well.
I haven't actually looked at Tildes seriously because when I first heard about it years ago, it just didn't have much content and was invite only, so I bailed.
Lemmy is good enough for me, so I'm here. I could probably go through the effort of getting an account at Tildes and Lobsters, but that's effort I should be spending not being on SM, so I just don't bother. I go to SM to escape, and any barriers just remind me I should be doing something more productive.
Reddit was great because there wasn't really any benefit to getting "popular" on the platform
Strongly disagree. The whole Karma / award / Gold system combined with algorithms ensures a certain type of posts are favored, and comments / discourse of certain type gets upvotes and visibility. There is a pattern under the most popular Reddit posts and comments and it's not hard to see.
Lemmy has sort of a half-hearted voting system which I feel is actually beneficial to the experience and the fact there is no algorithm messing about is another big plus.
Sure, it favors types of posts, but not specific users. It still led to karma whoring having a certain value, but overall it seemed to have fewer of the problems of sites like Twitter and Facebook where followers matter. I'd rather have higher quality/popular content float to the top than popular contributors.
It certainly wasn't perfect and I never claimed it was, but it was way better (for me) than most other social networks because people seemed a lot more genuine, especially on smaller subs (e.g. anything under 1M subs or so, preferably 50-100k).
And yeah, so far Lemmy's solution seems to work well, and I guess we'll see if the continues as it grows.