Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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It's also not really a place for normal people.
I'd never recommend Lemmy to anyone that isn't used to dealing with tankies and delusional zealots
People having to get used to people is common. If they can get used to their uncle talking about how the earth is flat I'm sure they they can get used to people on Lemmy.
I don't recommend lemmy because I don't have conversations about social media sites with people.
You can get used to everything, most people would probably quit though.
I spend maybe a tenth of the time here that I spent on reddit
People are forced to deal with their crazy uncles. If they didn't have to, they wouldn't.
Yeah, way better to stay on Facebook and Nextdoor and deal with actual literal fascists.
On the subs I visited on reddit I've encountered virtually no fascists. I don't need to discuss politics all day and even then the takes were way less extreme than on here.
It might be difficult to imagine for some of the zealots on Lemmy but I don't want to be stuffed to the brim with Chinese and Russian propaganda. I don't need to hear how bad the west is and how it has to burn, die, whatever. I don't care how superior the communist ideology is and why liberals are the root of evil.
It literally reads like a bunch of absolute idiots and edge lords thriving in their bubbles, be it hexbear, chapo stuff, political memes, etc.
Agreed. During the pandemic, I adopted a policy of unsubbing to any subreddit that made me angry. Usually this came in the form of people bringing up trump/capitalism/whatever out of completely nowhere. luckily the Beehaw people seem to be pretty good about actually having conversations and not just devolving into mocking trump every second. But whenever I venture into some of the other instances, I see some of Lemmy's true colors. Chronically online people completely out of touch with reality kinda run shit around here.
90% of the kind of content you’re talking about can be removed by blocking a couple of domains and a handful of users. I believe that they’ve been defederated from most of the larger instances. You will run into a lot of hot takes on lemmy but that’s not too different from reddit.
I think there’s a few reasons why they may be more prominent on lemmy, though. Communities like r/politics took a while to stabilize and had a large and active moderation team that helped remove the most extreme material, and the community itself was large enough that it was representative of a large swath of the US population. Hot takes would often get downvoted into invisibility, which frustrates people who use forums for trolling, and karma could be used to restrict posting. AFAIK those are not qualities or capabilities currently found on lemmy. I haven’t really read the docs - I prefer to just be a user here - but I have seen discussions that indicate that downvotes don’t get tracked as well as suggestions they be removed altogether.
Also, a new technology - especially one associated with sectors of the FOSS community and anti-centralization - are by their nature going to attract an initial user base that skews in certain directions. I think it was Eric Raymond who observed that hackers, politically, tend to be either socialists or libertarians with very little in between. ESR was being a bit tongue in cheek and the hacker culture back then was different than it is now - or rather computer culture as a whole has expanded so much that the old school hacker types form a much smaller percentage.
I think the most problematic part about lemmy which will ultimately limit its adoption is the chaos that comes in from having dozens of communities across dozens of instances that all cover the same topics. It makes discovery much more challenging than it is on Reddit, and it doesn’t help that many of the clients can make it challenging to identify which topics are actually the most used. One of my favorite clients keeps defaulting to ordering by a most recently created timestamp or something - I’m not really sure. It doesn’t have the support to sort or filter by number of users (although it displays the metric).
The other issue is that I end up having to remain on All rather than just my subscriptions because there’s so few users, so I end up with a ton of random anime, for instance, which I can’t effectively block because they’re all posted in new subs that crop up all the time, and I can’t block using wildcards (which would help a lot).
I do hope that between the lemmy devs and the app devs, they can address those issues.