Warning: This is a rant.
I don’t really know how to describe it but the content isn’t quite where reddit had been for me. Also the comments are kind of weird at times, like they type of person here doesn’t quite seem as ‘normal’ as what I’m used to from reddit.
There’s a lot more open source and privacy focused people and conversations. A lot of people seem to hate on big tech and big companies in a sort of toxic-ish feeling way to me (not to say the other relationship isn’t toxic… just saying). Random conversations go into: “omg your privacy is lost cause you used a Google service.” Then we have the ‘if we don’t defederate with Meta the world ends’ conversations. I personally would like to see what Meta does in the fediverse… maybe it will make it more normalized…idk. Then the: “if your app isn’t open source its awful and terrible for the world” people.
Like that stuff is all fine, but it just isn’t quite my cup of tea.
These things remind me of that one person in my comp sci classes in college who I just couldn’t stand talking to. He would try to make you feel like an idiot by trying to sound all self righteous and smart. (Honestly he would fail and would generally look like a dingus).
The bulk of the content that gets comments seem to be mostly meme atm. At least on all (7/10 of the current top for me are memes). I like my memes, but would like some more breadth/depth.
Like I hope Lemmy continues to grow and hope it gets better, but it leaves me missing reddit at the moment.
In a perfect world I wish reddit corp wasn’t such assholes and this whole thing didn’t happen the way it did.
I’m completely skipping the UI and stuff not being as familiar and the various outages/bugs/etc since that’s to be expected with something at this stage.
Please don’t hate me :) Just sharing my unpopular opinion. Though I genuinely wonder if others feel the same way.
/Rant
It’s mostly the technically adept people here, we’re naturally more aware of security/privacy issues present in tech spaces and are angry that the masses are so oblivious or uncaring of the problem. Especially when that problem keeps ruining our online spaces or putting us at real world risk by letting apps use their cameras/mics/locations all the god damn time
Asshole about open source anti big tech here. Point taken. You can choose your communities you see on your home feed. Seriously, use the block user feature too. Block me if you want. It is not personal. I have a half dozen people blocked just because they have been negative and I don’t want to see it any more. With around 150k people here rn the total communities are still developing. There are several I miss but don’t want to mod or churn content by myself to get started. This is still mostly unsettled early adopters. Everyone here is going through the same series of breakup withdraw emotions, and everyone is a weird asshole user to someone. Most of us mean well. You are able to steer the conversation too. Post, and help making the conversation you want to participate in.
trailblazers are always ‘weird’. Open source and privacy people BUILD all this software for everyone. As soon as millions of people rush in, you won’t even notice the weirdos anymore
The weirdos… being us?
The whole purpose of Lemmy and the feddiverse is to be anticorpate.
I have been a foss fanboy most of my life so it’s a welcoming community and concept. But I get how weird it would be to suddenly join a community that basically says the mainstream way of thinking is wrong when it comes to the Internet.
That said I think Twitter Reddit and Facebook have all proven that it is. Centralized homogeneous platforms are just bad. Once you’re passed the fomo effect it becomes clear that they are not necessary. They are just tools and should be thrown away when they are no longer useful. Reddit could of maintained its status quo and we would all be there. Instead they felt they were “essential” to our lives so they could do what they wanted. It’s just not and this instance of Lemmy is just as disposable.
Lemmy will become more mainstream and more like old reddit with the addition of ppl like you. Variety is the spice of life so I think that’s a good thing. As someone who has lurked on Lemmy for years I can tell you it’s changed dramatically in just a couple weeks. Mostly for the better.
I will reply as someone who in 2015 had 340,000 followers overall in the big social media of the time (tumblr, insta, fb, flickr etc). I was the world’s most popular collage artist at the time (not an exaggeration). I even got selected by NYTimes for having among the “best book covers of the year” in 2016, among other works for many magazines etc.
Long story short, for an artist to make it without a gallery (I despise the whole idea of galleries because they force you to make the same kind of art all the time), they must base their business via social media. There’s no other way. And so I did, and did well. Well, come 2017, the enshitification of these platforms started happening. Nothing was chronological anymore. And since I’m not a person who shows what they ate today, or making it all about myself (I was only posting art, not personal stuff), their new recommendation algorithms destroyed my business. I used to make thousands per year to sustain my life, because each time I’d have a sale, people would SEE my post about it and if they liked my art, they’d buy. Now, my posts are served to about 1/10th of my followers, and no new users find me, because hashtags aren’t embraced for finding new users anymore, everything’s just recommendations. Within 5 short years since the big algorithmic, I was now making only about $100/month via my art. And that was not just for me, but 95% of other artists and photographers out there too. The recommendation system of all social media (including youtube now) only promotes a few superstars in any given field, not everyone is getting their share fair of exposure based on chronology. Many online small businesses don’t work anymore because everything is not a fair field anymore. Even buying ads doesn’t make a difference.
So, I have no interest in using things like Threads, where you are literally bombarded with celebrity and brands content, but almost none of the people you follow.
Reddit has followed the same line, it’s just that we see it less, because it’s more discussion-driven. But similar changes have happened to it – in spirit. I still use reddit only for 3 sub-reddits that are too specific and don’t have enough people for here yet. I don’t use the rest of reddit.
On top of that, I’m not interested in trackers, ads, and everything that eventually lead to enshitification of these platforms. So now, I only use federated services. I have accounts with lemmy, mastodon, pixelfed, peertube, nostr, matrix, etc.
No, none of my friends are there (my husband has a mastodon account, and that’s it). And I don’t care if they aren’t. When I’m with my mom next time I’ll install a matrix client for her too, so she can call me for free (so we don’t have to use fb messenger, the only big app I still use, so I can talk to her in Greece for free). Then, I won’t need of these big social media apps.
As for my business, it will never come back (especially now with AI art). But at least, I have MORE eyes here on the fediverse than I have on the big social media. I posted a new painting on my pixelfed yesterday, and it got 17 likes, out of just 27 followers. On instagram I usually get 70 likes out of 3600 followers (that’s on my illustration account, my other, collage account, had nearly 170,000 followers in its hey day). And consider that Pixelfed only has 160,000 users (plus federated via mastodon by some instances). Given that amount of likes on the fediverse, if Instagram was still chronological and hashtags were still bearing importance as they did in the past, my posts there could have about 5,000 likes – given their 2+ bn users. Instead, with their recommendation engine, I get only 70 likes, and no new followers. So proportionally, I get more eyes on the fediverse, than I do on the big social media. So why would I want to go back to big social media? Just to be served Kim Kardashian content that I never asked for it? I won’t.
In a perfect world wish reddit corp wasn’t such assholes and this whole thing didn’t happen the way it did.
A lot of us here, are here and have the opinions you don’t like (FOSS, privacy is important, big tech is bad) because we too wish Reddit wasn’t such assholes.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but it sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too. Lemmy users are jaded. We have come to accept that big tech companies will continue to act the way they do because it is in their nature.
The free ride is over bub. The walls are closing in as venture capitalists squeeze users for profits (especially in this economy). With big tech, you are the product. You don’t get a say in how you use the product. Instead you are cattle, to be hearded. If you want to be a sheep and mingle along with all the other sheep and just keep your head down and accept whatever the big tech companies tell you to do (and that’s fine if it’s what you want), then maybe Lemmy ain’t for you. But one thing is clear Lemmy must shed the ills of big tech and investor interests and privacy harvesting business models if we are to not return exactly where we ended up using Reddit.
Sorry, I don’t have better news for you.
Also a lot of us users are older and this isn’t our first social media company failing us.
Raise your hand if you came from digg, myspace or somethingaweful
And Fark and Slashdot. Hell, I used to run a BBS with a dial-in line. At most I had five or six users and only one wasn’t a direct friend. I’ll go be old over here.
Unpopular opinion: if you miss reddit then get the fuck off lemmy and go back to reddit. Nobody is holding a gun to your head to stay here. I have been on reddit aince 2009 and lemmy is as old reddit as it can get. Fuck this new reddit crowd who grew up doom scrolling as a 2 year old
