Ask Lemmy

Haters recently on here. Much more blocking necessary than half a year ago or so

This is like an echo champer of tech people, hard to find non-tech aware people here.

There's also a vocal minority of just really pessimistic people on here. Politics I don't mind as long as it's a discourse about not only what is bad but what can be reasonably done about it.

I've been in several discussions where I add "look at community, we are strong together" and it's immediately beaten down with "the world won't change things are shit and always will be, be mad and angry about it, I'm mad and angry at you".

It's the internet, I'm not surprised. But I've definitely had to disconnect myself for a bit some days after severe reactions from people just to remember it's just strangers on the internet.

It's not all the time, but for some discussions that promote inclusion and understanding to be met with the hard "I don't agree so you are human garbage" can be an awful whiplash sometimes.

Definitely the amount of politics, it gets brought up in far too many places where it is unnecessary, I avoid political communities and stuff like that, yet I keep getting it in communities with 0 relation.

Relative to Reddit, probably the number of users. More users means more posts, more comments, more expertise on various areas, and more niche communities that become viable.

Somewhere down the list:

• Extremely determined negativity. There are a lot of...I don't know how to describe it. People who actively try to take the absolute, most utterly-pessimistic read on anything possible, to the point of having to make crazy assumptions to keep some kind of negative perspective on the thing. I don't know if it's people suffering from depression

which I understand can produce that effect

or doomerism or what, but it's exasperating. I haven't run into that sort of phenomenon, certainly not to anything like that degree, on other social media environments that I've used.

• The low-effort "capitalism bad" venting comments. I'm not really into far-left views, but that's not what irks me. I've seen people on here who you can at least talk to about left-wing positions. Like, some random user who is interested in, I don't know, adopting universal basic income and wants to talk about different proposals. But about 99% of the comments I see that contain the word "capitalism" don't amount to that. They're just venting. They aren't constructive. They don't reference any material. They aren't proposing any improvement or ideas or anything. All they want to do is to vent. I mean, it's like someone wanting to complain about their ex or how their sports team lost or something like that. And not only that, but a substantial percentage of those comments are complaining about something that has little to do with capitalism. Instead, it's virtually anything to do with the political or economic world that they don't like relative to some sort of idealized paradigm that they hold. You could use that "everything I don't like is woke" meme about the right, swap "woke" and "capitalism", and I swear, it'd apply to a lot of the comments. And I get that, yeah, one purpose of talking to people is to vent, and so you'd expect that occasionally when people talk to each other, sometimes they're gonna vent. That's human nature. But holy cow, as low-effort venting goes, the "capitalism bad" comments show up as a high proportion here.

  Occasionally I do talk about things, write larger comments about communal ownership. Like...okay, I know that on at least a couple of occasions, I've talked about the fact you've had communal ownership work at small scale, like families, say, or that there have been smaller organizations that have practiced communal ownership of property, and that maybe it'd be interesting to try working up in scale from smaller organizations to try and identify where any issues might crop up. And I have never had anyone actually respond with discussion when I do write something like that. No engagement. Like, it's not as if people have some raging unmet desire to talk about any of that. They just want to complain.

  I don't even see people who are writing "capitalism bad" comments engage in discussion with each other. Like, this isn't Marx and a bunch of activists in a London cafe throwing around ideas with each other. It's just one-off complaints, leaf comments in the thread.

1. Lemmy is by and large populated with ex-Redditors, who bring with them some of the same hivemind on certain topics. Eg: Lemmy is very anti-AI or nuanced discussions thereon. Nuclear is bad, etc. Makes bad faith discussions on certain topics almost certain.
2. As everywhere else - there's too much "you're either on my team or you're against me" - though notably less than in other spaces
3. Upvote / downvote counts: these should be yeeted into the garbage pile of history.

Things Lemmy does well

1. Less performative engagement.
2. Less American (but arguably that's still too much for some).
3. Despite it all, a measure of civility still exists. Rare.
4. You can create your own instance and be ungovernable :)
5. No algorithmic engagement bullshit (so far)
6. I don't feel like I have to walk on eggshells every time I post something.

I personally find Lemmy a great deal more pleasant to interact on, with strong pre 2010 forum vibes and I feel that's a good thing. YMMV

TL;DR: There's a lot less "look at me, look at me!" on Lemmy and it's all the better for it.

There could be more activity in the arts and crafts communities. I want all of you to pick up a nice creative hobby like knitting or stitching right fucking now! And then post all of it!

The fact that it's mainly just a FOSS and Politics forum.

I love what the technology is trying to do but the thing is, the platform's main selling point being the liberatory potential of it's technology, is that it's mainly used by people who are interested in politics and technology.

I am forced to see posts in communities I am banned from for having an anti-ai stance AKA a working brain. I didn't block all of them soon enough.

What I am saying is that you should still be able to block communities you are banned from. Seeing them in my feed and being unable to get rid of them is like seeing cockroaches in a kitchen.

I have a few things.

This place has groups that are singlemindedly bloodthirsty and happy to see people hurt, particularly in the US, and don’t have a problem stating so.

Tangentially - the far left extolling the virtues of governing systems that have never really worked due to weak protections against takeover by bad actors and ignoring that those systems are just as corruptible as any other. Humans are f’d up and someone always games the system for personal or tribal advantage.

Linux. Yeah, it’s great. No, it cannot do everything Windows does, and we’re going to ignore that and deride you for playing AAA studio games that have anticheat that linux breaks or other software that doesn’t work on the OS. That’s your fault, we’ll be smug about it, and still recommend ditching Windows.

Conspiracies. This place acts like it has some superior thought or logic but as soon as something happens the conspiratards immediately make it a conspiracy and can’t be told otherwise regardless of logic - or accept a far more real but less exciting conspiracy. Everyone jumps on the bandwagon.

Lastly it’s missing the hobby and interest groups. It’s mostly memes and politics. I’d like to see more actual communities of interests and support for hobbies on the Fediverse rather than the constant grind of how f’d up the world is.

4 times the same post in 4 different identically named communities...
I want a global feed, communities can federate with in a sort of sub-lemmy.

Mostly just the ratio of news/politics to fun/hobby posts. It's stuff I could already find on any other news platform or social media, and there's seldom discourse about the topics. It's often just negativity or some type of leftist gatekeeping. I'd rather just go to the AP news page and read it there.

I like seeing everyone's art, woodworking, 3D prints, origami, nature photos, and all that other good stuff way more. I like learning about you guys and your interests and I think having a small platform allows that, but many of us either forgot how to share things online or are too you to have ever been a part of mailing lists or IRC and the like.

It is objectively a lot more male than Reddit or other social media.

Reddit circa 2010 was very male, nerdy, and often misogynistic. As it gained popularity, the community became more diverse. As it got more traction, these issues abated somewhat. Once it hit critical mass and became totally mainstream, the audience was diverse enough to make most people forget how it used to be. I miss when Reddit was at the “sweet spot” of being pretty diverse, yet not corporatized to shit.

Lemmy/Fediverse is still in its “early Reddit” stage now. It shows great potential but its basic premise and design probably prevents absolute mainstream adoption. Which is probably a good thing, but I would like to get closer to the sweet spot.

North Korea shill. Seriously. How absolutely dumbfuck do you have to be to actually believe there is even the slightest good in that regime? It hurts me personally that I'm Korean and that I've seen countless people, some I've met in person, who lost their families in that hellhole. And yet people who can't even spell Kim Jong Un or Juche are celebrating that prison of a kingdom.

Nothing about them are "left" or "progressive". To me, they're worse than MAGA shitheads.

Absolutely disgusting. Hope they all rot in North Korea.

Having to block 30 different communities because they're all literally the same community.

It's even worse for NSFW communities. We don't need eleventy billion communities for the same super niche porn content.

That and people posting the same things on multiple communities because it technically fits even though there's already a niche community specifically for that topic.

One thing I've found is that people tend to have no chill. I've shared some posts with friends that don't use it and multiple times they've responded with "why are they so serious"

The fucking politics oh my god, in every fucking community good lord. No way to filter it out either.

There is a lot of computing and a lot of politics, but not very much else.

Way too much US-defaultism.

Tankies, no niche subs; no gearheads here either.

Also you annoy the hell out of me with your constant anti-AI and pro-Linux bullshit.

Yes I use Linux. Yes I understand why you don't like AI. I'm not the biggest fan myself. I just don't make it my entire personality.

Probably the lack of diversity among instances.

Everyone is still afraid of defederation, so we don't truly embrace what the fediverse is capable of.

The seemingly constant multiple posting and duplicates. There are people on here who find a link and post it individually to multiple communities without comment and without cross posting. Three or four times is bad enough, but I blocked someone a while back who posted the same link to about 15 separate communities one after the other. Other people then posted the exact same link to some of the same communities.

People who post links without any sort of comment too. Lemmy is a link aggregator and discussion forum, but most people ignore the second part. It's especially annoying when it's got a vague title and links to a shitty site with a paywall so that you can't even find out what it's about.

Tankies

My beef is that too many people are grinding Karma by posting the same crap to as many communities as possible, even though there's no Karma system, but they aren't there to discuss anything. So my feed is just all these OPs with no comments on them. Like you want me to read an article, or god forbid a 45 minute YouTube video, but you're not gonna start the conversation? Or reply to the people who do reply to you? Too many people looking for an audience; not enough people looking for conversation.

Pretty much just that.

Community is too small

I think most of the things I find annoying about the fediverse (echo-chamber, lack of interactions overall, no real place for discussing extremely niche interests) stem from the fact that it is not big enough so...

I don't think it is a terrible thing per-se though, small communities have lots of upsides too

So many people here are on a constant hunt for a reason to attack, dunk on, or insult someone. They don't bother reading what's actually being said or giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. Instead they jump straight to conclusions about who you are based on one thing you said, and any disagreement immediately turns into a mud-slinging contest where nobody's even trying to change anyone's mind.

Your options end up being: speak up anyway and take endless grief for it, or start self-censoring and tweaking your views to fit the majority opinion on the platform - which basically means joining the crowd sniffing each other's farts and pretending they have something in common besides shared hatred of the outgroup.

People calling each and every one an extremist, fascist or nazi for no other reason than they are being blinded by their own inability to understand their counterparts viewpoint. As irony would have it causing themselves to become extremists, often proclaiming they wish voilence or sometimes even death upon other people.

That Lemmys's not too different from Reddit.

Clickbait/ragebait gets upvoted to the top if it makes people feel good; hardly anyone even checks the source. Getting called out in the comments hardly affects it.

Niche content gets absolutely smothered by this, too, and the niche posters eventually give up.

These are structural problems Lemmy/Piefed software can improve, but that doesn't seem to be the development priority :/.

I'd argue this is a larger issue of the Fediverse, too. Devs are unintentionally copying structural issues, prioritizing other things when unhealthy attention patterns could kill the whole system. Like it has for previous social media alternatives. Lemmy feels more and more like Voat to me, which has got me really worried.

I absolutely hate the amount of leftist infighting.

I miss polandball.

I would like there to be more activity in a greater variety of communities, which I think will happen in time as the Fediverse grows. The main thing preventing me from posting my own interests and creations is a (probably excessive) caution about sharing personal/identifying things online, so I’m not going to criticize others for choosing the same. More users also tends to bring with it lower quality content, which leads to the next point:

As others like @tal@lemmy.today (who makes a lot of great comments in general) pointed out, there are a lot of political posts which seem more interested in venting their own frustrations and parroting popular opinions than having a constructive discussion and being receptive to different opinions. There is a lack of nuance. It’s possible to criticize the systems and people you do support without it meaning that you support the opposition, and it’s also possible you admit when someone you dislike makes a valid point without siding with them. You could even see a question like “how do I resolve this specific issue with Windows?” and one of the top responses will inevitably be something like “ew, you should be using Linux instead” and while I may not disagree, it does nothing to answer the question.

I’m not bothered by the gender ratios since it’s not a factor in how I interact with others, and users here are pretty quick to shut down rare instances of hostility towards a specific gender.

There is no roaming user system. One where you have the same user in PieFed, PixelFed, Mastodon, ... And if you have to change instance you only have to sign in into another one with that system and can migrate all the data at once.

It's full of ignorant twats, just like everywhere else. The only difference is in what they are ignorant about

Sometimes I don't really want to get into a conversation about trans issues. I find the topic very prevalent on here, as if I've strayed into a sub by accident. Live and let live, and absolutely respect everyone's right to be whatever they want, but it's not a topic I can contribute to - and I certainly I don't want to upset anyone by wading into an emotive topic I have no experience, interest or knowledge on, so I'd rather just leave it.

I'm just saying that it's up there with LINUX as a prevailing topic, which I'm similarly disinterested in.

The total lack of concern for easy on boarding of newbies. There's a lot of big talk about taking on social media monopolies but absolutely no interest in coordinating to actually accomplish that goal.

In the fediverse, the messy interoperability really bothers me. Sure I can follow Pixelfed users on Mastodon but I can only see the first 4 pictures if they post multiple. I can also follow Mastodon users on Pixelfed but I will only see their posts containing images.

This cross follow functionality should simply not exist unless it’s good (like between lemmy, mbin and Piefed) as it will frustrate users and cause them to leave the platforms.