Today has been especially bad, and was inspired sadly by about 6 straight posts of only negativity here.
I want to say that being negative towards something is not a bad thing, it's very valid to critique things. However, a community becomes toxic when the majority of it's content is negative.
Gaming is an obvious one. It's very obvious all around the internet that gaming communities are negative generally, and Lemmy certainly takes the cake. In the case of GTA 6 coming out this month we can (and have) had multiple stories about Rockstar's unethical practices, the pricing, ownership, and to be clear I agree with all of it. However, there is also valid positive things that people want to discuss but are immediately downvoted to hell, or have comments brigaded on with responses like "Don't you know about X, Y, or Z??"
I've been in comment threads where people have told me that they are afraid to post here because of the responses they might get. Now this is absolutely true everywhere, and we will often respond "You just have to tune them out" but the scales are shifting to the majority of responses are negative.
New users will not simply block/tune out the majority of commenters. New users will see that a community is toxic and turn around and go back to where they felt it was better.
This is the root of my frustration - that Lemmy is no longer a geeky place where people can talk about Star Trek and Linux - but that it's becoming a toxic place where if you aren't talking about why Star Trek and Linux are the only good things on the planet that it should be called out over and over.
Worse is that the scales a tipping to simply being "If it is popular, it is not good" which is a huge red flag for toxic community. To be clear it does not mean that if something is popular that it must be good, but instead we are falling for the same trap that is on corporate social media.
Anger and toxicity are fun, they are dopamine hits. So when there's a huge post about <> and everyone dogpiles, everyone has that dopamine hit and it spreads, and it makes people want to dogpile more. Unfortunately I think this has left individual posts, and this is now driving a large part of our comment sections, that people feel included when they are all dogpiling on a popular thing. It's addictive.
It's incessant and exhausting being here some days.
Some examples to think on:
- Harry Potter fans (who have already said they will not buy anything from Rowling again and are aware) who still want to enjoy the books/movies they already own, but are shouted down and downvoted
- Sports fans posting about football, to have jokes about "sportsball" made to them.
- (Is that really any different from nerds being made fun of by jocks in highschool, only this is in reverse and worse yet, we're supposedly more mature now?)
- Freaking pumpkin spice. The world is on fire and people get a tiny bit of joy out of cinnamon and allspice, can we let them just enjoy that?!
I think that sums it all up, I wish people could just enjoy things here without having the majority of comments be about why they shouldn't enjoy it. I think this attitude has already lost of a good chunk of users who could be adding to the fediverse, instead now back on corporate social media.
It's anecdotal but I've shown the fediverse to 3 other people who are trekkie nerds like me. They gave up in less than a week not because the fediverse was complicated, but because they felt like they weren't wanted here.
Be the positive change, be encouraging. Don't belittle for someone for liking a popular thing if you like something more obscure, instead post about obscure thing and why you like it and share it! Inform users of things like Rowlings insane shit-headery, but don't demean them for still enjoying the books. If you don't like sports that's cool, but let them cheer on their team.
Thanks for listening. I'm going to have a pumpkin spice latte now.
I've joined Lemmy in 2023 after the reddit API changes, and to be honest I've noticed an overwhelming amount of negativity and hostile discourse since the first week I was here. I don't know if it's because of the instances I'm on or the communities I frequent, but I've found it almost impossible to talk about things here without literally everything turning into a huge toxic debate.
I can never find entertaining/worthwhile discussion here about silly, simple stuff like TV shows, cinema, music, celebrity gossip, internet culture, games or tech gadgets. It's a platform where its users take themselves way too seriously and the self-righteousness and moral superiority have reached insane levels lately. You mentioned HP and sports. As someone who works in tech I could add "not de-googling your phone", "not running Linux" and "having to use AI at work" as things that make you an absolute worthless piece of shit to lemmy.
What's funny is that while I could see the point in "educating" people or getting occasionally political on a huge platform like reddit, here it's mostly just preaching to the choir: I already am aware and agree with most of the takes. So we're adding nothing but negativity that just feeds on itself. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people only lurked not because they have nothing to say, but because the potential reaction to anything posted here makes them nervous.
It also doesn't help that for some reason people just flock to the main community posts that are just political or general news to comment on those but never comment or post on more specific or niche ones. Reddit has a subreddit for almost any tv show, band, underground culture, movie genre or game you can think of, and those tend to be very active hotspots for entire fandoms. Here it's very different, and I suspect it's less about the amount of users and more about the KIND of users. There's just this off-putting vibe of "nothing is worth my time except reminding people that everything they've ever liked, said or done makes them slaves to capitalism" that's seriously holding the fediverse back.
I too started using Lemmy shortly after the Reddit API fiasco. They took my redditisfun app away from me and wanted me to use their garbage first party app. I don't want your achievements. Lemmy.world was cool for a while. I thought that only the weird instances like hexbear and lemmy.ml and beehaw were problematic. I've been donating to lemmy.world to keep it going for years.
Now I see increasing levels of hostile, toxic comments toward anyone who disagrees with the hivemind here, just like on reddit. Things you mentioned like having to use AI in any capacity or even driving a car seem to cause a flood of downvotes and angry comments.
I used to contribute to lemmy. Now I come here to lurk because I don't feel welcome. I'll probably stop donating and visiting at some point if this continues.
I feel you. redditisfun was the exact dealbreaker for me as well. I had truly high hopes for Lemmy when I joined and was pretty confident it could eventually completely replace Reddit for me, but users have been making it pretty hard. It feels like it was born at the boom of the culture wars, and then it inherited all of the wars and none of culture. A lot of the people replying to harmless comments here with unneeded hostility further prove that.
I wonder how many of the FuckCars people drive and are just projecting their self-hate.
Or I guess they are all Europeans who live in major metros?
everyone is looking for engagement. that means they flock to the posts with the most engagement, and those posts garner the most negativity because that's what drive engagement. angry people post, they vote, they read comments, get angry, vote and post more.
it's how the internet works. positive silly stuff doesn't drive engagement. people who laugh at stuff don't comment, they might vote at best.
people come here being primed by the rest of the mainstream internet with is predominately driven by algorithmic slop. most of your FB, IG, Reddit feeds are going to be anger inducing misinformation trash. it's inescapable.
I mean I don't necessarily agree that "it's inescapable" although it's getting increasingly hard to escape for sure.
What I do on Reddit that I basically can't do here is only follow (as in literally keep some tabs open on) a few specific communities for things that I like that have nothing to do with the "anger inducing misinformation trash". I can go to r/horror to check out and discuss new horror movie releases, a passion of mine, I can go to r/fauxmoi for some snarky but mostly inoffensive pop culture commentary, I can go to the subreddit for whatever show or game I'm currently obsessing over, and so on. And over there the "positive silly stuff" DOES drive engagement because in those smaller (or not small but simply "targeted") communities the engagement is driven by people being actually invested in the topics being discussed.
I think your view sort of reflects the "negativity" that one finds here. What you're saying is right, but you're talking about algorithms and comment sections like algorithms and comment sections ARE the internet. They are not. In the 90s and early 2000s we didn't have those; we didn't have YouTube or Instagram or Twitter or any of the big corporation "social" agglormerates. And we still had engagement, and a reason to turn on the 56k and wait minutes to load each single image everyday.
The fact that people today can't even imagine an internet without feeds is what's really concerning to me, and probably one of the main reasons why even in a "place" like the fediverse we haven't been able to recreate the internet that was (and is supposed to be).
Your view here is fueled by nostalgia though. It's not the 90s and 2000s anymore. That internet is gone, and it's never coming back. This is the internet we have now, and it's the internet that people enjoy using. In the 90s very few people were on the internet, now 76% of the world's population has an internet connection, 6+ billion people
Yeah, I believe in reality. I argue for reality. That is 'negative' for idealists like yourself, who seem to think we should aspire to exist outside of reality. Just like I argue against idealists who think life in the Middle Ages was blissful and amazing and life is 2026 is horrific... despite them being objectively wrong. If you argue from an idealist perspective and think reality is a negative thing, of course I am 'bad' to you.
I also generally think idealism is self-defeating and socially awful when it's not grounded in realism. A lot of people idealize the 1950s too, but only because of the nostalgic perception that life was 'better' then than today, but only really for uneducated white men. For pretty much every other demographic group it was worse.
Do you think people or doctors in 2026 can imagine medical care without MRIs and all the other imaging equipment we have now that didn't exist a generation ago? You seem to be saying the Fediverse should aspire to your ideal of a hospital that doesn't use imaging equipment and that's somehow going to be better than one that does?
What are you even talking about here? You're literally arguing for the sake of arguing and further proving my point, and OP's point, that the fediverse is fixated on negativity. Literally nothing you said was implied by my comments.
Having a discussion, but apparently you feel that is 'negative'.
What's funny is I see this interact as positive, until now. Where you have decided you don't want to discuss, you just watch to complain and think anyone who doesn't agree with your complaint is 'negative'. any criticism, evaluation, or counterpoint, or data point to your comment is 'negative'. and what is 'positive' then, blind agreement?
Which is precisely where I agree with OP's point. Folks here basically don't want interaction or discussion, they just want blind agreement with their simplistic viewpoints and personally attack any user who doesn't want to circlejerk about 'billionaires bad, ai bad, nazi bad, linux good' etc.
and if you want to discuss anything with any context of depth, they just start insulting you, oftne stalking your comments and repeatedly harassing you, and you just block them because well, that's what they are here to do, circlejerk about themselves and shit on 'bad' people.
it's so bad here sometimes that even when I'm agreeing and supporting someone's comment/argument, they get upset about it... because they are reacting purely emotionally and they think anything sort of blind emotional agreement is attacking them.