I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but threads or comments about Lemmy or the Fediverse get downvoted a lot on Reddit and trolls who claim that it’s “dogshit” and “not going anywhere” get systematically upvoted.

Some of those trolls get then exposed when you ask them what Lemmy instance they tried and one of them with whom I had a surreal exchange answered with something like “yeah ofc I used Lemmy, this is the instance: join-lemmy.org 🤦‍♂️

It’s frustrating that these trolls keep contributing to the big lie that “Lemmy is not ready yet” and that there’s “no viable alternative to Reddit”.

This and the overwhelming number of comments being “against the mod protests” just prompts me to question whether there isn’t some brigading being organized straight from the Reddit HQ.

  • @Zebov@lemmy.world
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    312 years ago

    Probably bots. Reddit has been using them for some time, but recently got caught using chat gpt or something similar to argue against the blackouts.

  • @Wander@yiffit.net
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    112 years ago

    Unfortunately there’s probably a large amount of users who simply don’t care.

    But that’s okay. What matters is content creators, not content consumers. Anyone with half a gram of decency and self integrity will have realized that they need to take steps to move away from Reddit.

    • YolkBrushWork402
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      32 years ago

      When the content creators leave and go to Lemmy/Kbin, eventually those content consumers will leave and go with them too. Will be a bonus for the Fediverse

  • NRVulture
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    62 years ago

    Of course there’s no viable alternatives to Reddit. Why would someone create another dumpster fire?

    • Fredselfish
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      12 years ago

      Lol best comment right here. We don’t want to be Reddit we want to be our own thing.

  • @Raveena@sh.itjust.works
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    52 years ago

    redditors always find another way to disappoint. whether it’s going back to use the site after 2 days of “protest”, or the moderators giving in to reddit admin pressure instead of resigning.

  • @XanXic@lemmy.world
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    42 years ago

    It’s sort of an asshole problem. All the cool people are walking away from Reddit, or at the very least trying to support the blackout/boycott. So all that’s left are the chronically online people, apathetic lurkers, and assholes who purposefully don’t care. The assholes are now seeming more vocal because all the logical voices are burned out or gone. Provided the good contributors/commenters stay away. Eventually lurkers won’t enjoy a ton of pissy comments on everything and look for more interesting discussion to peruse. Then the assholes will just be being assholes to each other, then be like man this place is full of assholes, and go look for a healthier community to be an asshole too because they don’t want people who fight back like they do lol.

  • @PortugalSpaceMoon@infosec.pub
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    42 years ago

    As a tech savy person, I can confidently say lemmy is not a viable reddit alternative at this stage for an arbitrary reddit user. The UI and clients are just terrible and full of small bugs, annoyances and inconsistencies. Sure, it will eventually get there, but negative opinions about lemmy are not completely unmerrited. Just as I’m typing this, I get screen tears and flickering elements. It’s just very, very bleeding edge and I can absolutely see how someone trying it for 5 minutes would be turned off. If you want to capture the masses, the user experience has to impeccable.

    PS: my first try at submitting this response timed out. This is my second try.

    • killick
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      32 years ago

      It doesn’t have to be impeccable. It doesn’t need corporations to buy ads. It just has to keep getting better and not die. Look at Linux. It never did overtake MacOS & Windows on desktops. But it keeps getting better and it didn’t die and it took over server rooms. Look at Mastodon. It’s nowhere near as popular as Twitter and maybe never will be, but it’s 5 years old and is steadily growing. I like hanging out there. Oak trees start as acorns.

      • TheDudeAbiding
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        22 years ago

        That’s the thing though, criticism of lemmy does not necessarily mean hate. We can acknowledge and be honest about the problems without shitting on the platform. My experience over the last week with kbin would have been way beyond the technical know-how of say, my sister. It’s ready for the average user. It will be, devs are kicking ass, but we’re not there yet and that’s okay. I would rather people know what they’re in for here than to show up expecting a polished, bug-free interface.

    • AlexanderESmith
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      22 years ago

      Thing is; I don’t want the “arbitrary reddit user”. I want the low-effort user to get irritated and leave.

    • HawkMan
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      12 years ago

      you only need to move the more techie knowledgeable user base here. The ones that mod and post content.

      The average user provides nothing to the site but dead traffic. They’ll come when the content is here.

    • XGC75
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      -12 years ago

      Here’s an example: how can I subscribe to the topics I want to follow? I don’t want to see the 198 or whatever it is posts. Nor programmer humour. Lemmy has a great community of fans and users but if I can’t see only what I want I’m not going to use it.

      • hihusio
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        12 years ago

        I don’t know about lemmy but I’m using kbin and it’s pretty easy to subscribe to magazines (aka communities) and block the ones I don’t want to see

  • smokinjoe
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    42 years ago

    Lmao, who cares what they think?

    But also, Lemmy isn’t ready, which isn’t a bad thing at all.

    What it is, is viable. And that should scare the shit out of reddit

    • @jpenczek@lemmy.world
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      32 years ago

      My biggest issue with Lemmy is lack of userbase… which is fixable by signing up for Lemmy.

      Figured best case scenario other people make the switch, worst case I’ll forget this service even exists.

      Also does anyone know how to enable dark mode, or if there is a dark mode?

      • @Aurix@lemmy.world
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        22 years ago

        There is a lot of activity to spend many hours here. Discover more communities here. There is a dark mode, go to the settings page. You will find it in a drop down menu.

      • @ImDonaldDunn@lemmy.world
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        12 years ago

        Once there are good mobile apps in the app stores, I think we’ll start seeing a surge in adoption. The other big piece is moderation tools. If Lemmy can manage to build better mod tools than Reddit, it would be a big draw for power mods

      • Mintyytea
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        02 years ago

        yeah that’s what I’m struggling with too, like it’d be great if we could encourage people to try these, but at the same time I don’t want to give them a bad first impression to turn them off forever if they can not stand it’s still a baby project (understandable). I honestly don’t think it’s that hard to start using these fediverse products though, and I feel like the posts saying “lemmy will never take off”, “kbin is too hard to use” only gave me barriers to start using it. And then when I did start, I was like oh this is great, everyone’s talking, it’s a close community

        • moon_matter
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          12 years ago

          The biggest issue is how easily people are taken “off-site” when linking to another instance, leaving them essentially logged out and unable to subscribe or otherwise participate. Users should be presented an option to be redirected to the relative view within their instance or go external. With the “external” link in much smaller font below the preferred option. Kind of like how Steam or Discord has a pop-up asking if you “trust this site” whenever you leave their spaces.

    • BOMBS
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      12 years ago

      Exactly! It’s like getting upset over what an ex thinks. That’s their problem. We’re focusing on ourselves.

  • chiisana
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    32 years ago

    I think there’s truth to some of the “not ready” claims… and this is coming from someone who really tried to get into Lemmy, ended up creating their own instance (as demonstrated by my user handle).

    A few issues I think Lemmy dev team really need to address ASAP, from least technical (thus affecting most users) to more technical (this affecting less users) are:

    1. UX/Discoverability – Finding communities are a huge pain in the backend right now, and with multiple communities on different instances serving same purpose (i.e.: !reddit@lemmy.ml and !reddit@lemmy.world). Sure, Reddit had same issues (the example I’ve heard is /r/meirl and /r/me_irl), but Reddit offered solution (multi on old reddit, community+community on new reddit). There must be a way to streamline it with meta-communities or lists on Lemmy such that the contents can be viewed in a unified fashion. I recommended !community@ (note the lack of domain) to streamline all of user’s subscriptions with same name on different instances as an example; and perhaps we can use #list$user@lemmy.domain for users’s maintained lists to unify !homelab@lemmy.ml, !datahoarder@lemmy.ml, !homelab@lemmy.world, etc.).

    2. Trigger happy defederation hubs – a certain instance has unceremoniously de-federated a couple of other larger instances. This is not the way, but here we are, with users on those instances not able to access the broader Fediverse, and vice versa. Until discoverability gets taken care of, it will be challenging for users to find a good home – this leads to next point:

    3. Authentication – The Fediverse at large needs to separate authentication out from instances. Instances may provide their own authentication, fine, but there needs to be better way to authenticate against something else other than an entire new instance of Lemmy. The ActivityPub protocol has clear definitions on what is an actor, and users shouldn’t need to deploy a Lemmy instance to identify themselves, separately from a Mastadon instance to identify themselves, separately from a… etc. This is because frankly…

    4. Deployment of Lemmy is utter garbage. The official documentation’s getting started guide gets users setup with an instance where the UI container cannot talk to public, but the lemmy backend can? Why bother shipping an nginx container if the backend will just expose itself to the whole wide net? Also, let’s just pretend postgres container isn’t open to the whole world with a basic password… Trying to get it up and running with Traefik was a pain, just do a quick Google and see how many people have asked and gave up, as well as how many different ways people have tried to go at it (something something xkcd 927; I’ve contributed to a new one of my own per linked post on top!), and the dev basically just straight up going ‘we don’t support traefik’… also, each approach is not without problems…

    5. Federation is a bitch. I am pretty proud of the way I’ve used override to not edit original docker compose, and locked my setup down a little. But, I’m not ready to have the instance open to the whole wide web without CloudFlare in front… but allegedly, Federation doesn’t work with CloudFlare… why? Good luck trying to get to even a popular sub’s scale without getting hit with DDOS when someone disagrees with something someone else posted.

    There’s many more problems, and I genuinely want Lemmy to work. But, Lemmy is, lack of better words, “not yet ready” for prime time. It is thrown into the spotlight with Mastadon (which feels a bit more mature, at least from reading the docs) because of bad leadership at mega techs… It will take a lot of work for Lemmy to evolve and mature, before it can be “ready” to really absorb the mass of Redditors leaving Reddit.

    • @pingveno@lemmy.ml
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      -12 years ago

      Regarding #2, I think not defederating might be an easier sell if users had the ability to block instances. Right not it’s just users and communities. Hate lemmygrad? You can block its communities one by one, but it’s kind of a pain. So instances only have the option of a full block.

        • @pingveno@lemmy.ml
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          2 years ago

          Lemmygrad is thoroughly obnoxious. Full stop. Also, you clearly have no idea what western chauvinism is if you’re calling me one.

          Edit: To clarify, I don’t want Lemmygrad being defederated. It breaks up the Fediverse for little reason. But I do want users to be given the option to block instances on either the community or user level. Would I say the same thing about a right wing instance with a history of bigotry and hate? No, that’s another matter that goes beyond mere discomfort.

            • @pingveno@lemmy.ml
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              2 years ago

              You hate Lemmygrad because you hate communism

              I dislike it because it is a personality cult and worships governments that have not earned that praise. Communism doesn’t enter into it. While I’m not communist, I don’t hate it. It has some interesting insights, but it’s hard to ignore that in practice it usually just makes a new ruling class that has no intention of ever releasing power. I’m interested to see where China goes over the next few decades as it shifts from playing catch up (easy productivity gains) to reaching parity (harder productivity gains).

              western chauvinist

              neoliberalism

              At this point, you’re just picking pejoratives out of a hat marked “disagrees with me”. I don’t believe in Western superiority, even if I believe in certain values that are widely espoused in the West (free speech, democracy, etc.). But I’m not shy about being critical of my country when it goes astray from my values. And I’m free to do so because I live in a country where that is a right. Would you do the same for China? Would you feel safe doing so if you lived in China?

              And for the record, my family has a long history of appreciating cultures around the world. I just don’t like authoritarianism, populism, and kleptocracy, regardless of what political brand is associated with it.

  • @lachjeff@lemmy.world
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    32 years ago

    I reckon it’s mostly bots set up by Reddit admins and sad-sack mods who consider Reddit moderation to be a full-time job

  • JWBananas
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    32 years ago

    The people who like it are here. The people that don’t are still there. Not that complicated.

    • FaceDeer
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      02 years ago

      Also, people have a natural tendency to form “teams.” Even if they don’t particularly like what Reddit’s admins have been doing they may identify as part of “team Reddit” and so see other teams as the enemy.

      • GunnarRunnar
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        12 years ago

        Besides, the way to convert isn’t by arguing. You do it by providing a good platform (not there yet), good content (not there yet) and good community (kinda there?).

      • HopeOfTheGunblade
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        12 years ago

        There was a legendary episode in social psychology called the Robbers Cave experiment. It had been set up in the bewildered aftermath of World War II, with the intent of investigating the causes and remedies of conflicts between groups. The scientists had set up a summer camp for 22 boys from 22 different schools, selecting them to all be from stable middle-class families. The first phase of the experiment had been intended to investigate what it took to start a conflict between groups. The 22 boys had been divided into two groups of 11 -

        • and this had been quite sufficient.
        • C_Spinoff
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          12 years ago

          I’ve just read up on that experiment on Wikipedia and the conclusion you present seems to be shortcoming to tell nicely. Reassuring to me was that the two groups occasionally ganged up on the experimenters, being aware they’re being manipulated. Thanks for mentioning this, yet for me it seems to be way more to it than '2 groups will fight inevitably ’

          • HopeOfTheGunblade
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            12 years ago

            Sorry, it was a pithy quote. It’s not meant to fully encapsulate the results of the study, it just seemed relevant and likely to bring some pleasure to people.

            Obviously, people are more complicated than can be fully captured in a single statement, but there is some truth there; look at how hostile people can get over sports teams, which are never going to affect people’s access to food, shelter, medical care, etc, and which are still treated with life of death seriousness by their adherents, who largely differ in which location they happen to originate.

  • Warped
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    32 years ago

    Reddit is known for it’s use of bots. Bots helped Reddit grow in its early days. I’m not surprised that bots are being used now. As more people leave, I’m sure more bots will get used to give the impression of an active community. Just lie they did in those early days.

  • hihusio
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    32 years ago

    I wouldn’t be surprised if reddit admin are inflating upvotes on pro reddit comments or have an army of bots defending reddit.