Before I met my boyfriend (seahorse) I hadn’t heard of Lemmy or the word Fediverse. I didn’t know there was this world of federated servers people could host independently that communicate with each other. I am by far not a techy. He told me he ran an instance. My response was exactly, “What is Lemmy instance? Idk about such things.” I gave this silly response because I felt a bit stupid due to my ignorance. Hosting. Servers. What? During my short time here I have seen a stark contrast between Lemmy, and FB and IG. I feel sort of a sense of leveling up (thanks to him). I still have my accounts on the latter two social media platforms, but dislike them for several reasons. I like that Lemmy isn’t a popularity contest. People don’t post pictures depicting a fake perfect life, there is no competition for followers/friends, and no one is trying to sell me something. I hope this sticks. I hope to expand my use of Lemmy and my knowledge.
Great to hear! I hope you have a good time :)
I like that Lemmy isn’t a popularity contest.
One thing I quickly noticed in contrast to sites like reddit was that profile pages don’t show a total score. It’s not about trying to build some imaginary reputation score or seeking approval, there’s been someone even today where we disagreed strongly in one community and constructively talked to each other in another half an hour later. It’s good to see this isn’t becoming a reputation-centered site. I’m pseudonymous: if I say something here that rubs people the wrong way, it won’t come back to hurt my life.
An interesting thing about FB and IG in particular is that they lead people to show the highlights of their own life, not the whole story, so it creates a kind of hyperreality where ‘normal’ is being out doing big things and happy all the time, and just living life can make people feel inadequate. Then you get into the fake editing leading to impossible beauty standards. If I didn’t need one of them to keep in touch with some in-real-life people, I would have left them years ago.
Agree with all you say! I personally would welcome a change like on HackerNews where the post score is only shown to the poster themself, and others only see whether the score is overall positive or negative. Of course this is harder to achieve in a federated setting because you’ll either propagate votes (in which case an instance may make them public) or have the originating instance hand over the current score but then it has to be trusted with it (one instance could ignore downvotes to pretend their content is always cool).
Welcome around @Redpandalovely@midwest.social i hope you have a great time arguing about a topic of interest to you ;)
Thank you! I can see that as a positive change for the poster to see the upvotes.
You can also hide votes altogether, which is a good thing. This limits expectations and helps fighting against addictive behaviors related to social rating.
Good point on the addictive behavior!
Yes, this 100%!
I am not sure that what perceived improvement in quality of content on lemmy is due to the platform, and not due to it’s “newness” (Smarter people might tend to try new platforms), I like lemmy showing upvotes and downvotes and not just the sum, but otherwise it’s just basically reddit accept you don’t seem to encounter really knowledgeable users (even for open source, i didn’t see any devs here but you see plenty on reddit), and you can’t use RES .
I think the users here are plenty knowledgeable but that’s just my opinion. I feel that quality posts are easier to find on Lemmy because it doesn’t use karma system like reddit that buries everything that doesn’t immediately get tons of upvotes.
I agree, with the additional thought that “[rarely] encounter really knowledgeable users” is more about the small community rather than anything else (this platform is not gatekept for tech experts anyway).
