People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement. Not in this article so much. I’m sure there were fewer posts in the past too. But what I found is that there are real people on here and you don’t have to wade through bots and shills which makes this community feel much more whole to me.
Fediverse
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
While that's true, I don't believe it to be a fundamental property of the medium or federation in general. I think what we are experiencing is the result of lack of mainstream attention and traffic.
The people here are much less demographically diverse than the public at large, and have intentionally sought out this space and others like it, so they have more of a sense of ownership and community about it. The more attention it gets, the more the demographics will change to reflect the broader public, and the more it will become like a public space, complete with all the ills that come with that, like advertisers vying for attention, shills posing as enthusiasts, and influencers saying what will get them the most followers, rather than what they think.
I believe it would take extensive moderation and amazing tools to keep places like this the same as they gain users. I haven't ever seen a community survive that kind of growth and retain its original spirit, but I also haven't seen one with no profit motive. If we can get the moderation tools where they need to be, there could be hope!
True, Lemmy feels this way almost exclusively because it's small and hasn't been noticed by mainstream media enough. The second that changes this place will become what reddit was pre-ipo.
We take it for granted that as the fediverse grows in numbers and nodes that it will continue to stay mostly contiguous.
While Lemmy lacks those, PieFed already has both advanced automated mod tools plus other features that dramatically increases the democratization of moderation itself.
e.g. if someone wants to see less Trump and Musk content, keyword filters allow someone to personally set that up, without having to rely upon a moderator to make that decision for the entire community.
Another example along those lines is the automated collapsing or even hiding of content that falls below a certain score threshold - personally I have that turned off, but if someone wants that then again, they don't have to rely solely upon the efforts of a moderation team, and can rely instead upon the community engagement. Again: if they want.
Still another example is showing icons next to usernames - e.g. one shows new users that are <2 weeks old, another shows someone who receives ~10x more downvotes than upvotes, and so on. These are not "filters", just helpful indicators so that you know more about someone's reputation prior to responding. Most conservatives for example have warning labels next to their usernames, in these more leftist spaces.
Also - and I cannot emphasize enough how crucial this is - PieFed moderator reports actually federate. This has been a source of huge pain in Lemmy, and tbf I think a future Lemmy release is planned that will do that... but meanwhile as with so exceedingly very many other features, PieFed has had them for months.
PieFed thereby helps avoid some of the major issues that cause community fragmentation. Which ironically PieFed also helps solves that issue too, by collapsing comments (old example of this phenomena), and with the Categories of Communities suite of features, including the user-customizeable and shareable Feeds.
Also PieFed is easier to install, requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources (even sending 25-fold less data to end-users), and so on. So yeah, I don't think Lemmy is capable of scaling up, despite its reliance upon its sourcecode being in the hyper stable Rust programming language, because of all the other issues with it (database issues requiring constant restarts, and especially lack of moderation capabilities), so I am putting all of my hopes into PieFed. Sorry if this reads like an advertisement - I feel like PieFed is to Lemmy what Lemmy is to Reddit, except that analogy does not begin to come close since PieFed has added features that even Reddit never bothered to, plus some others that it continually tried to take away from people by not retaining it in new-reddit despite how it was present in old.
This is the sort of advertisement we actually want
I actually like the slower pace. There's no constant stream of content but I find that helps me to moderate my usage. It also helps me take a more active role because I don't just see what I'm subscribed to. I'll hop over to the top posts over the last 6 hours and find something that's really hot elsewhere, or I'll hop on to scaled and find something obscure. It's slower and cranky but it embodies a lot of the old elements of scrolling that I miss.
The Australian Subreddits got overrun by extremist right wing people who tend to be 20x louder than anyone else, and exaggerate everything.
One even reported me for being racist (successfully) despite the fact that the entire time I was fighting back against the racism
Even worse, you now need to log in to even see it at all in a mobile browser. So f that
I was perma banned for calling someone "A fucking piece of human garbage" as they openly and brazenly advocated for the death of trans people.
I got banned, the person calling for Trans people to be killed did not.
That's unfortunately pretty standard.
Whereas, on Facebook, nobody gets banned. I've literally reported people inciting violence towards others. However, it seems permitted by community standards these days
At least the person who argued with me got swept up in whatever bot was Permabanning people too
Stuff like this is why I banned Reddit first.
The Australian Subreddits got overrun by extremist right wing people who tend to be 20x louder than anyone else, and exaggerate everything.
I don;'t think this is just Australian issue
Probably not. There used to be shitty subs like the Donald and fat people hate too.
the only problem is the lack of niche from like in some reddit subs, not main subs, and people there are unlikely to migrate here. plus the bots therer drum all the engagement to get people interested. when an instance vanishes it takes the content with them and i dint see the last one recover from it.
It takes very little effort to open and run a community here, be the change you want to see. :)
I disagree. It's easy if you want to use a community as your personal blog without any interaction from others. It's hard to get an actual community running.
People are more likely to participate if you are. :) But if the space exists, natural discovery can happen too. You do not have to do much more than open the conversation.
It's also one of the most nitpicky whiny places you can visit. A new open source software/update just got released and it does something cool! "Well it's not {x} compliant so it's trash." Or "If a solo developer or a team decides to use 'AI' then their entire project is AI slop."
There are so many moments where I'm like "just shut the fuck up and enjoy the software/news/updates these strangers are providing for free."
It’s full of leftist purity testing, that’s for sure. And, you can’t say certain things even if they are actually true.
People are far less aggressive with their opinions compared to reddit. 90-95% of people here are decent people though with strong opinions. And as long as I can have a civil discussion with someone I think it's a decent enough place to be, no matter what bias.
I really would like to somehow convince more people to adopt the idea that, like, Facebook and friends are run by bad people and you can choose not to use their products. Just stop. Find another way. Be uncomfortable for a little while.
But people aren't up to the challenge.
Honestly people are more likely to just quit those websites rather than join new places. I support that though. And I am seeing a lot of people around me are going away from these platforms recently.
People are fucking addicted to instagram and I'm the annoying "get rid of that shit" preacher to everyone I can. My gf has reduced her usage, but still checks it from time to time.
I always ask "Do you really need to use it?" - and almost always, their answer is "not really, but it's the only place I can find X". Some of my gf's friends use it to find new places to go. Some of my boardgaming friends still use it, mostly to "know what events are coming up" or what new games are being released.
Instagram is essentially this age's yellow pages of a telephone list, small businesses are super dependent on it and they're forced to post fucking stories everyday or get erased by the algorithm
It's one of those self fueling problems. Businesses post on Instagram because people go there, and people go there in part because that's where they found out about businesses doing stuff.
Better options are possible, but the big money is backing this hell. Less money to be made from RSS feeds , web rings, and email newsletters.
I don't use any social media other than this. I find out about bands I like playing from their email lists or bandsintown. I'm on a couple "things happening in the city" email newsletters. It doesn't demand my attention.
There are no bots making empty arguments or basing the news.
We want, we post, we dont, we dont.
Simpleverse.
We donut

See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.
Spot on.
I’m having a blast here.
Not only because it gives you the content that you choose. And there’s no shorts, no ads, …no superfluous bs (god I hate fb, I fucking loathe it).
But also, everything is within reach. The options are within the options. Done.
Good read, but I think the author touched on something that is way more troubling. Sure, you can get reliable information from regular people who are living in other parts of the world, but spreading that information with any kind of veracity is almost impossible due to the collapse in public trust of mainstream media.
If I say something with any degree of authority or confidence, someone in the comments will inevitably chant the ancestral magic spell "Source?!" and suddenly my evidence of a conversation with a stranger on the internet is reduced to merely anecdotal at best. Able to be dismissed outright without thought or care.
However, if I post a link to some legacy media rag, existing in the modern day as a mere husk being puppeteered by corporate oligarchs, wearing the skin of a legitimate and trustworthy news source, the credibility of the information is then called into question by anybody reasonable - knowing full well that right-wing governments have managed to capture most of the remaining independent reporting, or at least have threatened them with who-knows-what in an attempt to influence their press releases that would otherwise paint the government or any of their cronies in a negative light. If someone decides that the provided source doesn't line up with their narrative, it's hilariously easy to attack the reporting itself as being "fake news".
The brain shuts off, and information gets siloed. Objective reality is no longer shared. We are still living in a state of simply believing whatever we want to believe and the few people who are able to break out of that are not going to be influential enough to have an effect on anything. We can pat ourselves on the back for not being a group of people concerned with being brand-builders, I guess, but in the end it's a meaningless victory.
Welcome to the post-modern era of truth. Where objective reality doesn't matter, only personal truth and reality. If what you're saying doesn't fit my personal truth, you're using fake news or making it up. Even scientific research is fake news if it doesn't fit my narrative. Just look at who funded the research.
Honestly, idk what we're going to do. It feels like with all the age verification laws being pushed, the mass surveillance, and the quelling of dissenting opinions, the world admins are looking at 1984 as a guidebook. Are we going to get a Ministry of Truth established soon to "verify" what is accurate and what is not?
Not sure I understand your point. Your self reported experiences, as a random internet stranger in a sea of bots and malevalent actors, IS only amecdotal at best.
i love lemmy for what it is now. it sadly doesn’t have some communities as active here as reddit may, like stuff for soccer in particular for me, but it’s solid for everything else
To me it feels like Reddit mini
The whole "look" of lemmy seems to be an homage to reddit but the hate levels are really dialed down here and there seems to be more reasonable people.
Even better.
Most instances have human moderation, gating for bots, and yes, and you actually have to take 5-10 minutes to figure out how it all works, so the stupid people are automatically excluded by sheer complexity.
I fucking love Mastodon.
People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we're nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win. This is adorable. It flies in the face of literally all of human history, where the more convenient thing always wins regardless of technical merit. VHS beat Betamax. USB-C took twenty years.
Hopefully, unlike betamax and laserdisc, the fediverse will trudge on despite the megacorporate protocols
FOSS dominates by sheer persistence growing slowly as everything else burns bright and extinguishes until it's the best remaining option.
It's the slow way, but it's the right way.
This was a great read to start my day, thank you!
@ekZepp funny, I thought this is what Google search is nowadays:
"Threads was worthless because it’s the most boring social media website ever imagined. It’s a social media network designed by brands for brands, like if someone made a cable channel that was just advertisements and meta commentary about the advertisements you just saw. Billions of dollars at their disposal and Meta made a hot new social media network with the appeal of junk mail." @matdevdug