The platform seems to be converging on a Reddit-like culture complete with arguments, rage bait and trolling as the normies pour in.
I’ll take the normies over people who unironically uses normie as an insult
But yes, I saw one post in particular earlier to day from your typical right wing shill that was baiting people.
Thankfully, the community is small enough that I can, so far, just block them and go about my day.
we need to have freedom of speech. unlike fascist reddit where all non-normies are shut down and abused, kbin is about freedom. Here the TRUTH SHALL PREVAIL ! Gods, don’t block people just because you don’t like what they say. then you end up living in an echo chamber just like Trump. Are you a Trump??
Ahahaha, you had me at first, well played.
This is rage bait. And it’s like the third post identical to this in as many days. The others were by right wingers pissed they weren’t on truth social.
Fully agree. Like there was another post today that basically equated anyone disagreeing with them as evidence of a hive mind (no mention of why people agreeing with them wasn’t also a hive mind…)
I’m ready to see more fun “you are bias”-whiners.
Like, yeah! Obviously my opinions have bias, you moron. I’m still not sorry that I made them feel offended by wanting nothing to do with their wannabe–dictator.
Obviously my opinions have bias, you moron.
Exactly! Everyone’s got a bias one way or the other, it’s looking past those and acknowledging reality. And I find the bias whiners tend to have trouble with that.
“there’s too damned much ragebait”, cried the ragebait…
Where? Every comment section I see is still a ghost town.
It just takes one person posting a comment to start a conversation. No one wants to be the first to comment, but once someone gets it started others chip in.
Yeah! (spirit noises)
Right? This is the most comments on one post ive seen in a while.
oh look another techbro hipster whine
No positives?
More users means more content, which is a positive of course.
Yeah, more means more nice peeps and more dickheads, cest la vie
My big hope with the fediverse is that stuff like that can be contained. lemmy.world is the big instance where most anything goes. If you’re looking for quality curated content, then you’ve got places like beehaw.org. Similar to /r/AskHistorians, but that was always an awkward system. Is /r/AskPlumbers or whatever up to the same standards, or just some rando subreddit? Now, if you find a community like ancientegypt@askhistorians.org, then you can explore the other communities on the instance and be reasonably assured that they’re also up to snuff.
Also, I think the memes and other easily-ingestable content is a healthy sign. It draws people to the fediverse, and then they can discover more niche communities that make them stay long-term. The memes aren’t for everyone, but the memes help everyone get good communities.
My hope is the opposite, I’d like to see instances become more transparent. Make communities able to migrate instances, and merge. Hosting instances should be more like bit coin mining Which miner that does something shouldn’t matter, it’s all about keeping anyone from having a majority stake and the whole thing just works for users.
Arguments are not a bad thing!
Eternal September perhaps? As the population grows, the culture changes. It’s unavoidanle to an extent (if Lemmy keeps growing… But don’t we want that?).
it is avoidable (or at least it can be slowed down enough to be manageable) if there is a pre-existing culture. lemmy simply didn’t have one beyond a vague foss/privacy focus and whatever’s going on over at lemmygrad, so the reddit migration brought over a lot of people who then set it up to be exactly like what they were used to (being reddit).
if you go look at mastodon (or the microblogging fedi in general) for example, the biggest instances still have their fair share of “twitteriness”, but as you get to the smaller, tigher knit, and stricter moderated instances, you’ll see a culture that’s significantly more laid back (and yes, very gay).
i think what’s happening is that the big instances act as a “firewall” of sorts. catching the people who just want a twitter 2. and the people who want more and vibe with the smaller fedi culture will then self-select and migrate out into the smaller instances after realizing all the cool people (and in lemmy’s case, communities) they follow are on those smaller instances and all the interaction they get on the large instances are boring reply guys (or worse, actual bigots that go unmoderated because no large instance can keep up with moderation and .world has inadvertently doomed itself even if it has not realized it yet)
over time i expect lemmy to have it’s own share of these tight knit instances - and as the hype dies down and the trolls start getting bored, communities start migrating, moderation tools improve, and yes - the occasional defederations that will inevitably happen - .world and it’s ilk will be the reddit 2 some people want to have (with the good and the bad), while a different, unique, culture will slowly but surely form across instances that intentionally keep themselves smaller and more focused. and of course you’d be able to talk across communities in these separate “sides” of the threadiverse thanks to federation.
hell, i’d say it’s already getting started.
You’ve described what Reddit went through. I think that’s basically the process of maturation of any social platform. Reddit attracts (I.e. automatically subscribes) users to the default subs and so those are the biggest mainstream areas. Most people who want something more (and how I have used reddit for many years) move to smaller subs and find a much better environment there. Or communities break out to make smaller versions (true gaming, true movies, true fitness, etc).
Basically I don’t think any of this is platform specific, it’s just how things evolve online. Certain features judge development in a certain direction, but in that regard Lemmy should be much better without bullshit algorithms and disguised advertising posts… For now.
Yah dude. I am a super newcomer to Lemmy, but when I started up it was refreshing that it was cerebral and different and marched to its own beat. I never even really noticed how much image / meme content had taken over reddit, until I saw a place without it. I didn’t agree with the tankies. But, there are tankies! This place is great. It’s different and authentic. I like it. And now, over the last couple of months I’ve been carefully attempting to keep my subscriptions on Lemmy to the factual stuff and eliminate from the feed stuff that’s memes or “Hold my whatever, I’m going in!” just kind of time-wasting.
And yet, even in the “good” parts I’ve been seeing this takeover of people who are… I don’t even know what they’re doing. I think it’s just sort of this dopamine loop that they want to come on and yammer. I’m sort of assuming that this is maybe a problem only on the big instances, that may be better on Mastadon or on more form-a-community type of instances? Maybe? I hope so.
I wish there was a way to identify and fully block out bad faith actors.
You can block users; what else do you mean?
My guess is they mean doing it at scale. Some sort of registry or something so that you don’t habe to individually block everyone. At least, that’s what I’ve been wondering myself. Some sort of “well, I trust Billy and Janet so if they block someone they’re automatically blocked for me too” style system.
I can’t see how to make it practical or scaleable but something along those lines.
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And sew the star somewhere, like on their chest…
Lile this…
There’s an interesting good faith argument to be had about how to separate russian shills, trolls etc from people with whom you disagree but are worth engaging with. And then there’s the “WELL THAT’S JUST LIKE NAZI GERMANY WHY DONT WE PUT STARS ON THEM TOO!” silliness.
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I wrote something so I’m triggered?
Neat.
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I’ll agree. When I first came here it reminded me of being part of 4chan back in 2005 when pranks and memes were partially cerebral and relied on you having some basic intelligence. Even if they were dumb, you had to appreciate the majesty of mass-calling GameStop to ask if they had Battletoads in stock. 4chan slowly devolved into a cesspit, and it didn’t occur to me until I joined Reddit 10 years ago that the people I had cut my teeth with regarding internet culture had moved on.
Over the years Reddit became slowly more, and then radically less interesting. I gravitated toward more niche communities or ones that challenged my worldview to maintain my engagement. It could still be engrossing, but I noticed more and more that Reddit just filled the gaps when I had nothing better to do, like reading on the toilet.
Early in the divergence I jumped to kbin and rediscovered the kind of intelligent discourse I had been missing all over again. However, I’ve already seen fascist apologizers and trolls migrating as well.
To borrow a phrase: “But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.”
4chan was a cesspit even in 2005. Something awful and FYAD were better examples of quality Internet troll culture at the time (which makes sense because 4 Chan were banned goons).
Ok.
True. But I’m just glad there are enough people to have conversations. Hopefully some of the smaller subs can exist soon.
Before I left Lemmy I saw lots of threads with people calling each other “comrade” and saying that “uKrANiAns R nAzIs!”
I’d take the crappy memes over that any day. It’s not all about personal entertainment folks, those people are toxic.
