I was getting tired of Reddit, its America-centric culture and transformation to something Facebook-like. It’s somewhat popular in Finland, which made me concerned of how Internet discussion and meme culture gets too much centered around a platform owned by an American company.
I was also getting tired of many Finnish online forums and imageboards that had lax moderation. When I found about Lemmy, it made me curious. With hosting my own instance I could create something completely new, separate from conventional forums and imageboards, I could be part of a larger network. I could do my part in creating Internet culture!
I was never a fan of Reddit. It was all somehow chaotic and everyone seems to play god in their moderated small worlds. A long time I was active in short message services like Mastodon and GNUsocial, but wasn’t satisfied with constructive, topic based discussions.
With Lemmy, I got that software and forum, where discussions are directly sorted into topics, so I gave it a try and stayed.
Created an account in alpha used it a bit but there was really no content then since the platform was still under heavy development. Eventually got a site wide Reddit ban for poking the anarchist sub too often. Those mods are assholes. 13 year old account (and all my alts) poof up in smoke.
And so now I’m here and elsewhere. Reddit ban was a great thing in the end I recommend everyone do the same.
I’ve seen Reddit devolve since 2014. Look at /r/all and it almost resembles a Facebook feed.
There are several annoyances that made me switch:
More and more people posting low-effort, stupid short jokes that tend to gather lots of upvotes instead of giving an actual answer
The upvote system likely causes subreddits to only have one view. If your opinion doesn’t align with that view, it will be downvoted and hidden. Opinions that align with that view will float to the top.
The stupid new awards system with coins and all that kind of rubbish. When it just was Reddit Gold, it was fine in my opinion. It was simple, it helped out Reddit, you could buy it for yourself or gift it to someone else and most importantly, it wasn’t hidden behind a virtual currency to make the real cost of awards ambiguous and easier to spend.
The enormous focus on growth by making Reddit accessible to people who were thrown off by the old design. I feel like the big influx of new people by this changed the Reddit culture instead of those new people adapting to the Reddit culture that was there.
People writing “I have a question” as their post title. Just state your question in your post title.
People posting a link to an image and then writing the actual post as a comment. Please just make a self-post and link your image in there if it is necessary.
Subreddits starting to require email verification on your account (looking at you, /r/linux).
Combined, these made me search for alternatives. The thing that I liked the most about Lemmy is that it is federated, so that became my main alternative. But I’m afraid that if it gets too big, that it will get the same problem regarding upvotes as Reddit has.
I tried Raddle.me as well for some time, but I lost interest at one point. I don’t know why anymore, perhaps to few users? When I look at the frontpage now, the content on the website doesn’t really appeal to me. It seems too extreme to my tastes.
The side-effects of upvotes (or likes, by extension) are a though problem to solve, I think. You can do without them them, like some image boards. But on some of those, like 4chan, you’ll get people who post not for the upvotes, but for the amount of replies they can get. This simply ends into many flamebaits being posted. Look at /g/, it’s not about technology in half of the threads, but simply about transsexuals in a transphobic way, because people take the bait, get angry or join trolling and end up replying to it. The poster gets their dopamine kick and the janitors (moderators) seem to enjoy it as well. The other half of the post simply are text editor X is better than text editor Y and other similar. And then there are threads baiting with sexually provocative images, again, to get people to reply.
The upvote system likely causes subreddits to only have one view. If your opinion doesn’t align with that view, it will be downvoted and hidden. Opinions that align with that view will float to the top.
This can also happen on lemmy, except that the numbers are not the same.
Its the closest thing to Reddit, and is Open Source. While I was initially put off by all the political content it is still better than Reddit for my Threat Model. And the political content still makes me reluctant to share Lemmy with my friends. (but its still better than wolfballs tbh)
I wrote a post in a small sub that I was part of saying that this monster didn’t deserve to be a reddit admin, let alone to have his pronouns respected (as many were asking because he was a male who transitioned to female).
This does not put you in the good guy column as far as I’m concerned. Purposely using different pronouns than when someone’s asking as an intentional means of denigrating them because you don’t like them is like ground zero of stuff that is bad to do when it comes to the whole reason that pronouns exist.
I don’t know anything about the situation that’s a seriously bad indicator.
When you don’t use someone’s preferred pronouns, you marginalise the whole trans community – even if the person you don’t want to respect is indeed a monster.
People have certain characteristics about them that are immutable. That Challenor is a pedophile does not change the fact that they are trans and uses she/her pronouns. We can attack her on her actual crimes, and not on perceived crimes (of not being trans enough or, as it seems in this case, that being a pedophile forfeits any validation towards gender identity).
I lost you at “let alone to have his pronouns respected”.
You disrespect somebody by refusing their identity and then you cry about being disrespected. In Norway we have a saying “den som er med på leken, må tåle steken”. Those who join the game, must accept the grilling.
Falun Dafa = the spiritual practice (although new age and not traditional like they claim, just inspired by)
Falun Gong = cult that invented the Falun Dafa, alike to Scientology, whose founder believes aliens will visit us any year now, who believes gay people are the devil incarnate, who wants to see China fractured and sent back to the stone age, who makes a ton of money scamming his followers out off their money with the Dafa practice (that he claims is ancestral but he invented it), who is salty because Falung Gong is banned in the PRC for these exact reasons but Falun Dafa isn’t so what is the problem? If it was about the practice then he can still practice.
Shen Yun = their anti-communist theatre troupe that romanticises Imperial China before the revolution. Those songs you hear in the background of their shows? They’re all about anti-lgbt stuff lol
I sincerely hope Falun Gong gets yeeted off this instance asap. You must be part of the cult because I can’t imagine anyone would do this freely.
Edit: this account, it seems, also engages in vote manipulation. It was sitting at +3 -3, I downvoted, and a few minutes later upvotes go up to match my downvote.
This is so interesting since I never thought of reddit as some kind of hacker website with open-source code and good standards. For me it has always been a big corporate social media site. Maybe this is because I joined pretty late.
I was getting tired of Reddit, its America-centric culture and transformation to something Facebook-like. It’s somewhat popular in Finland, which made me concerned of how Internet discussion and meme culture gets too much centered around a platform owned by an American company.
I was also getting tired of many Finnish online forums and imageboards that had lax moderation. When I found about Lemmy, it made me curious. With hosting my own instance I could create something completely new, separate from conventional forums and imageboards, I could be part of a larger network. I could do my part in creating Internet culture!
I was never a fan of Reddit. It was all somehow chaotic and everyone seems to play god in their moderated small worlds. A long time I was active in short message services like Mastodon and GNUsocial, but wasn’t satisfied with constructive, topic based discussions.
With Lemmy, I got that software and forum, where discussions are directly sorted into topics, so I gave it a try and stayed.
Reddit becoming public
Centralization == Corruption
Curiosity.
Created an account in alpha used it a bit but there was really no content then since the platform was still under heavy development. Eventually got a site wide Reddit ban for poking the anarchist sub too often. Those mods are assholes. 13 year old account (and all my alts) poof up in smoke.
And so now I’m here and elsewhere. Reddit ban was a great thing in the end I recommend everyone do the same.
I’ve seen Reddit devolve since 2014. Look at /r/all and it almost resembles a Facebook feed.
There are several annoyances that made me switch:
Combined, these made me search for alternatives. The thing that I liked the most about Lemmy is that it is federated, so that became my main alternative. But I’m afraid that if it gets too big, that it will get the same problem regarding upvotes as Reddit has.
I tried Raddle.me as well for some time, but I lost interest at one point. I don’t know why anymore, perhaps to few users? When I look at the frontpage now, the content on the website doesn’t really appeal to me. It seems too extreme to my tastes.
The side-effects of upvotes (or likes, by extension) are a though problem to solve, I think. You can do without them them, like some image boards. But on some of those, like 4chan, you’ll get people who post not for the upvotes, but for the amount of replies they can get. This simply ends into many flamebaits being posted. Look at /g/, it’s not about technology in half of the threads, but simply about transsexuals in a transphobic way, because people take the bait, get angry or join trolling and end up replying to it. The poster gets their dopamine kick and the janitors (moderators) seem to enjoy it as well. The other half of the post simply are text editor X is better than text editor Y and other similar. And then there are threads baiting with sexually provocative images, again, to get people to reply.
This can also happen on lemmy, except that the numbers are not the same.
I got really tired of this really fast. Reddit is full of overused “inside jokes” that were done to death nearly a decade ago
Its the closest thing to Reddit, and is Open Source. While I was initially put off by all the political content it is still better than Reddit for my Threat Model. And the political content still makes me reluctant to share Lemmy with my friends. (but its still better than wolfballs tbh)
Because it’s foss and distributed. Because on Reddit I would refrain from engaging. Hopefully I can do it more on here.
deleted by creator
The fact that you think something as basic as using someone’s pronouns is a privilege that can be revoked on a whim is an extremely weird thing to say
This does not put you in the good guy column as far as I’m concerned. Purposely using different pronouns than when someone’s asking as an intentional means of denigrating them because you don’t like them is like ground zero of stuff that is bad to do when it comes to the whole reason that pronouns exist.
I don’t know anything about the situation that’s a seriously bad indicator.
Was the script you used a userscript or did it use the Reddit api?
deleted by creator
When you don’t use someone’s preferred pronouns, you marginalise the whole trans community – even if the person you don’t want to respect is indeed a monster.
People have certain characteristics about them that are immutable. That Challenor is a pedophile does not change the fact that they are trans and uses she/her pronouns. We can attack her on her actual crimes, and not on perceived crimes (of not being trans enough or, as it seems in this case, that being a pedophile forfeits any validation towards gender identity).
I lost you at “let alone to have his pronouns respected”.
You disrespect somebody by refusing their identity and then you cry about being disrespected. In Norway we have a saying “den som er med på leken, må tåle steken”. Those who join the game, must accept the grilling.
reddit’s corruption went crazy ~1 yr ago
removed by mod
Falun Dafa = the spiritual practice (although new age and not traditional like they claim, just inspired by)
Falun Gong = cult that invented the Falun Dafa, alike to Scientology, whose founder believes aliens will visit us any year now, who believes gay people are the devil incarnate, who wants to see China fractured and sent back to the stone age, who makes a ton of money scamming his followers out off their money with the Dafa practice (that he claims is ancestral but he invented it), who is salty because Falung Gong is banned in the PRC for these exact reasons but Falun Dafa isn’t so what is the problem? If it was about the practice then he can still practice.
Shen Yun = their anti-communist theatre troupe that romanticises Imperial China before the revolution. Those songs you hear in the background of their shows? They’re all about anti-lgbt stuff lol
I sincerely hope Falun Gong gets yeeted off this instance asap. You must be part of the cult because I can’t imagine anyone would do this freely.
Edit: this account, it seems, also engages in vote manipulation. It was sitting at +3 -3, I downvoted, and a few minutes later upvotes go up to match my downvote.
reddit’s code is closed source now. it was time to move on.
lemmy is nott the last stop either. We have no exit here
This is so interesting since I never thought of reddit as some kind of hacker website with open-source code and good standards. For me it has always been a big corporate social media site. Maybe this is because I joined pretty late.
I was on Digg before, which was created a year before reddit (2005). Digg start to go down hill in (2009?) which is when I switch to reddit.
I think federated networks are the future. Lemmy is a shining example of that.
Saw the Lemmur app in F-droid, tried it & noticed myself come back regularly when bored
Having a native app for all platforms makes it so easy to use, tbh I wouldn’t use Lemmy if it no longer had support for Lemmur.