Warning: This is a rant.
I don’t really know how to describe it but the content isn’t quite where reddit had been for me. Also the comments are kind of weird at times, like they type of person here doesn’t quite seem as ‘normal’ as what I’m used to from reddit.
There’s a lot more open source and privacy focused people and conversations. A lot of people seem to hate on big tech and big companies in a sort of toxic-ish feeling way to me (not to say the other relationship isn’t toxic… just saying). Random conversations go into: “omg your privacy is lost cause you used a Google service.” Then we have the ‘if we don’t defederate with Meta the world ends’ conversations. I personally would like to see what Meta does in the fediverse… maybe it will make it more normalized…idk. Then the: “if your app isn’t open source its awful and terrible for the world” people.
Like that stuff is all fine, but it just isn’t quite my cup of tea.
These things remind me of that one person in my comp sci classes in college who I just couldn’t stand talking to. He would try to make you feel like an idiot by trying to sound all self righteous and smart. (Honestly he would fail and would generally look like a dingus).
The bulk of the content that gets comments seem to be mostly meme atm. At least on all (7/10 of the current top for me are memes). I like my memes, but would like some more breadth/depth.
Like I hope Lemmy continues to grow and hope it gets better, but it leaves me missing reddit at the moment.
In a perfect world I wish reddit corp wasn’t such assholes and this whole thing didn’t happen the way it did.
I’m completely skipping the UI and stuff not being as familiar and the various outages/bugs/etc since that’s to be expected with something at this stage.
Please don’t hate me :) Just sharing my unpopular opinion. Though I genuinely wonder if others feel the same way.
/Rant
It’s mostly the technically adept people here, we’re naturally more aware of security/privacy issues present in tech spaces and are angry that the masses are so oblivious or uncaring of the problem. Especially when that problem keeps ruining our online spaces or putting us at real world risk by letting apps use their cameras/mics/locations all the god damn time
Not everyone that is technically adept agree with your statements.
Not everyone but probably most people that are technically adept, and even more so those that have switched from reddit to lemmy
True. Not everyone agrees. Since I’m just me, I can only speak for myself.
With this in mind, I would like to hear reasons why you or others don’t agree. I ask in good faith.
Having an opinion is as natural as being human. I see the world through my eyes, think about in my brain, color it by my life experiences. So there’s always the possibility that I might be missing something important. Perhaps you were persuaded by some strong and much valid point or points.
If that’s the case, and if you’re willing, can you please share why you disagree?
To start with, I don’t think privacy is that important. I think that most open source end-products aren’t good and they are only made better when money gets involved.
To start with, I don’t think privacy is that important.
It makes more sense when we start talking about privacy in concrete forms. It’s about not giving any entity more information than it really needs in order to perform the service they claim to provide. For example, imagine how much better credit cards would be if the number was randomly generated, only valid for a single purchase and only the credit card company knew your name and address. Credit card scams would mostly be dead in the water and card readers would be rendered useless.
It’s not like it doesn’t make sense though. It makes sense that a credit card works the way it does because real-time authorization isn’t always available, and because there is a lot of legacy/backwards compatibility going on. If you wanted to “fix” credit cards you would get rid of them completely and switch to an identity service that allowed you to “federate” your identity with a lender’s service.
It sounds great, but in practice getting all of the ancillary parts working with each other is tough. Look how long Apple Pay (one of the better implementations of a better credit card) has been around and there are still a lot of places that don’t accept it.
Thinking about privacy as a 1:1 exchange with a service is already thinking two steps behind. Services have been using your info to create targeted ads since the beginning of capitalism. It really stepped up their game when computers and databases got involved, and as the internet became more prolific it got even more precise.
We’re at a point where your info isn’t even being used to target you. It’s valuable on its own.
And that’s the trade. You trade something of value to a service so that you can use their service.
Privacy is not important because we lost control of it a long time ago. It will take an act of Congress (in the US) to make it better, and there’s so much money involved that no one wants to tackle it head on.
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Privacy is always a trade off. You have to find a sweet spot that fits your convenience and willingness to share.
A good example is home automation. I can get a camera from someone like Nest and it’s cheap, feature packed and simple to use. But it’s going to harvest all your data and videos.
Instead I could go with Logitech and Apple. Now the price is 4x higher but the videos only exist on my Apple cloud. This is more secure but still could have security concerns, and increased costs and effort.
Lastly I could go with something like ubiquity. Another drastic increase in cost, with less features for remote access. But you host your videos locally and are in complete control. This option is by far the most complex to set up as well.
None of these are inherently bad if you understand the trade off. I am accomplished in tech and I choose the middle option because it best fit my lifestyle even though I could have went with the last option.
Yup, the privacy-convenience trade off is the best explanation, and not everyone goes the extreme route. I too went the middle route with Apple.
not to be a dick, but good riddance to anyone implying meta isn’t an unethical, monster of a corporation that is defined by it’s opportunism, serves only it’s own interests, and has forfeited any and all good faith it may once have had. trust them at your own peril, and go back to reddit.
See… this is the type of comment that cements my opinion. I don’t really care about the ‘meta’ of the platform at the moment. Most businesses tend to be this way in this world. There can be a separate conversation on that pitfalls of today’s capitalism. I just want a link aggregator with friendly people that is usable for all.
If those friendly people wind up coming from Threads or whatever, that’s ok with me. It doesn’t have to be ok with others though, I won’t push my opinion on others at least in this context.
I gave my opinion and you gave good riddance. That isn’t exactly welcoming.
I mean, there are dozens of rational and polite comments in this thread, and you’re choosing this one comment to ‘cement your opinion’. I’m a techie, but I don’t know if I’m one of those weird people you talk about, or just a normal person you want. I have noticed less hostility in the comments, and the hostile ones like this one stand out because the friendly ones are most prevalent. I also have been seeing more and more of the text based communities gain traction over the past week with more normal people stories, and hope they gain even more traction in the coming days.
As for Reddit, I have been occasionally visiting some of my niche communities that haven’t migrated over, but have decided not to participate in anything there. I have also noticed that the Reddit front page is now a lot similar to Lemmy, that I often can’t tell if I’m on Reddit or Lemmy. I saw a post there today about some guy playing a song on piano for 3 girls, and the top 10 comments with thousands of upvotes were all the same old Reddit tropes of panties down, floor wet, leave some pussy for us, and so on. I’m noticing them more and more because of how different the comment section on Lemmy is.
You don’t have to feel bad about staying here or visiting Reddit or doing them both at the same time. You have no obligation for either site.
That’s fair. I’m working through comments. Kind of got derailed by a trip to Grocery Outlet. Lots of positive comments in here as well.
Lots of nice response and good people. I guess I sort of made an example out of this one. Not everyone is like this. The idea of using possibly both this and Reddit isn’t really something I had considered since I wanted to protest them being dicks… but maybe that’s a good compromise till things get further along. 🤷
Reddit is somewhat known for being unwelcoming as well though?
For myself, honestly no I don’t miss it at all. But mostly b/c I’ll stay with Reddit, after a month’s hiatus for protest, and probably only check it once a week for an hour rather than multiple times a day as before. There’s a particular gaming community over there that doesn’t post much content here yet, and even while I’m trying to help do my part there, I still want to be informed… which means at least reading Reddit (probably via Teddit to deprive them of traffic). I’m also on Squabbles too. Some people also are saying that kbin.social is more welcoming than most Lemmy servers, especially sh.itjust.works - I don’t know about that b/c wouldn’t you see mostly the same content b/c of federation? - but in any case it could be a thought to try different instances, maybe especially smaller ones.
It depends on what you wanted it for tbh. If you can stand to be on Reddit, then go for it? Maybe also stay here too, if you like certain parts of it, and get the best of both worlds. You can’t force people to be welcoming, you can only find places where they hang out and then you hang out there too. Squabbles is fairly welcoming - it’s being described right now as something like toxically non-toxic, as in activist-level hunting down of toxic personality traits, I can’t really explain it but check it out if you are interested:-).
Good luck, and I hope that you find what you need. Also, please remember to use social media responsibly rather than let it use you: it is addictive regardless of what platform you find yourself on, and maybe you are awakening to that possibility b/c of the switch, i.e. if you moved back you would find that it was no longer “the same” as it was before, b/c of your new understanding of that fact? If so, hopefully these growing pains lead to something better:-).
Reddit wasn’t welcoming to opinions outside the hivemind either, you just didn’t notice because you were inside it.
You’re basically telling everyone to be nice and pretend these same kinds of people who killed reddit for us won’t kill the fediverse when we have every reason to believe they will, and you don’t want us to talk about it or do anything about it?
I don’t really get why you’re here in the first place. If you liked reddit and don’t hate modern social media why not just stay there? People came here to avoid what meta could do to the fediverse and avoid what reddit became. Why are you acting surprised that people are acting that way?
You’re basically telling everyone to be nice and pretend these same kinds of people who killed reddit for us won’t kill the fediverse when we have every reason to believe they will, and you don’t want us to talk about it or do anything about it?
Up to now, I’ve asked probably like 6 times in various different threads on kbin / lemmy / mastadon
Nobody has given a concrete mechanism by which federating with Meta will kill the Fediverse. At most people just parrot out the acronym “EEE” and link the singular article by Ploum and pretend like they’ve said something meaningful
Federation is like email. I’m not going to block Gmail off from my email server because there are millions of people who use Gmail. It would be a disservice to my open standard to be blocking off millions of people from communicating with me. Instance owners are not going to give them their admin passwords. The Lemmy devs aren’t going to close source Lemmy and license it to Meta.
It’s not even like federation is a permanent thing. Instance owners can federate and as soon as Meta brings negative consequences they can defederate. The main risk I see is a large influx of people… which is not a bad thing, especially once it stabilizes. It would mean more people make more subs and all sorts of niche things will start to pop up - the only really nice thing about reddit.
So tell me, what is the urgent crisis attitude for? How is this the end of the world? Why do we see post after post of people freaking out about this? Instance owners can’t even sign an NDA without getting death threats.
You gave your opinion and he did as well. I agree with becool, Meta has proven themselves to be an extremely unethical and untrustworthy company throughout the years. I believe it’s in the best interest of the fediverse for instances to distance themselves from Meta. That said, there’s nothing stopping you from using multiple platforms, or working to foster the type of community and culture you want here.
This is still the very early days of the fediverse and it will no doubt change a lot in the coming months and years. If there were things you liked about reddit then try to bring that culture here and you might attract more like minded people.
The content you’re replying to reminds me of the earlier years of reddit where they think they are superior of mind and basically look down on you.
csm10495: Hey, guys. Can we not be assholes about why we are here?
becool: Not to say “fuck you and get out” but fuck you and get out.
Personally, I see both sides of this matter. As a long time redditor, I am seething at the thought spez is effectively claiming "We are entitled to all the free data users gave us over the years and to jack up our API prices which will make for a worse user experience. I also think there is a right way and a wrong way to discuss the overreach of some people, like spez, who have a pathological lack of awareness in a way which makes constructive resolution easier and more imminent.
For example, instead of what you wrote, I might have said something like “Fortunately, reddit is still a thing and we can work on showing the people over there just how shitty spez’s actions have been and how they will lead to a worsening experience for them while simultaneously encouraging them to join kbin”.
I’m not saying your position and its premises are necessarily wrong; I am saying time, place, and manner of communication often – if not always – matter.
not to be a dick
go back to reddit
trailblazers are always ‘weird’. Open source and privacy people BUILD all this software for everyone. As soon as millions of people rush in, you won’t even notice the weirdos anymore
The weirdos… being us?
Excuse me I go by freak
call me a deviant
You’re a deviant!
that sounded weird.
Asshole about open source anti big tech here. Point taken. You can choose your communities you see on your home feed. Seriously, use the block user feature too. Block me if you want. It is not personal. I have a half dozen people blocked just because they have been negative and I don’t want to see it any more. With around 150k people here rn the total communities are still developing. There are several I miss but don’t want to mod or churn content by myself to get started. This is still mostly unsettled early adopters. Everyone here is going through the same series of breakup withdraw emotions, and everyone is a weird asshole user to someone. Most of us mean well. You are able to steer the conversation too. Post, and help making the conversation you want to participate in.
Obviously also new here. What you are seeing, honestly, is that the communities that have the most activity. This is what the majority of the users here want. Can you really blame them? You came to a preexisting community that had one thing in common. The federated social networks are explicitly anti-faang, that’s their reason for being. We’re just here because Reddit took away our stuff. It’s on us to make the content and the community we want. They welcomed us.
Yep. The reason the fediverse exists is to solve the ownership problem of big social network companies (ranging from privacy issues, to greed, to political influence), so naturally the group that uses the fediverse first are the ones that feel most strongly about that issue.
It really isn’t hostile here 95% of the time, but on the topic of Meta it’s like poking a hornets nest.
I know my family and most people don’t really care about the privacy settings of Meta and I don’t bother trying to convince them to change, but I will always enjoy shit talking them to like minded folk online.
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I won’t miss the Redditisms, award speeches and lame unoriginal jokes (variations of “how can he walk with such huge balls hyuck hyuck”).
I really don’t mean to be offensive but if you miss it why don’t you go back? No one is forcing you to be here. If you don’t care about the concerns we have on this side then just go back, reddit is still there for you.
While I hear where you’re coming from, I would not chase away anyone just because they have a different world view or perspective, or wants to see something different than what’s here today (as long as it’s not toxic, of course). Having diverse opinions and experiences is what makes many conversations compelling, otherwise you end up in the same echo chambers that corporate owned social media have fostered.
OP, don’t go back, you came here for a reason. Have patience and understanding, and contribute to the areas you personally want to see grow, and it will come around.
Much thanks. I think my concerns just happen to be different from others. Hopefully we’re more accepting of that in the long run.
I didn’t mean to say he MUST go back. All I’m saying is that if he likes something he doesn’t need to feel pressured by everyone else who thinks different. He likes reddit so why not use it? It is as if I stopped eating pineapple on pizza (yes I am one of those) just because a lot of people hate it.
I’m sorry, but to me, it’s not normal to be transparent to the bones for big tech. It’s not normal to be pushed around by big tech just like Spez, Elon and Zuck do it with their userbase. It’s not normal to be the product and to be followed around, often even without consent.
It’s the opposite of normal to think that this is normal. To me, people who think this is normal nave been successfully brainwashed by big tech. Think I’m wearing a tinfoil hat? Okay, go ahead.
But if we don’t finally step up against shit like that, it’ll only get worse.
Lemmy right now feels like reddit from the early 2010s. The community is still quite small, it’s mostly still early adopters and folks looking for an alternative to big social medias, which attracts a different crowd than the mainstream.
It’s actually a hit of nostalgia for me, I’m kind of into the weirdness and intimacy of a smaller community, but I certainly understand where you’re coming from.
One of my favorite niche subreddits has over 600k members, the biggest equivalent community has about 350ish users here, there’s a certain quality that comes with that quantity of users.
But if we stick with it more folks will join and we can make this place into what we want it to be, and that’s pretty cool imo. Lemmy is still in it’s infancy compared to reddit, and it’s not perfect, but I think we can build it into something even better, and missing the good parts of reddit can inspire us to make sure that we incorporate them into lemmy in the future.
I’ve been embracing the weirdness of multiple platforms with distinct cultures and equally enjoying going to different parts of the internet again after quite some time! I do miss the sense that in browsing Reddit you could sample the cultural pulse of a particular demographic cluster.
I’m with you, I miss it too. Lemmy and it’s instances confuse me, but I’m doing my part by doing my best at avoiding Reddit since I’m strictly a 3rd party app mobile user.
We will wait it out together and hope it gets better (I’m so tired of seeing crap about Meta and Threads).
Instances aren’t too complicated, they’re just subreddits that live on different servers.
The Lemmy interface is confusing though (and kbin too).
I’m sorry, but what was even the point of this post? What have you accomplished by coming here and then complaining about the content here?
It seems like the root of the problem is that you’re not really clear on why you’re here in the first place. A lot of us are here because we’re sick of corporate social media. For those of us that this applies to, we have seen what Reddit has done, we have seen what Meta has done, and we have decided we have had enough. Seems like you kinda just came here because of Reddit’s API changes, and have not done any thinking about the broader trends this is indicative of with regards to the way tech companies operate and destroy friendly communities on the Internet like these. To me, they have shown that they see this group of users as a business opportunity and money they are missing out on, and they will do everything in their power to take advantage of it.
If you have so much faith in these companies that you are even ambivalent about them following you to the Fediverse, what are you doing here, in an environment that was created to escape them? You’ve literally heard from former artists whose dreams and livelihoods were destroyed by Meta changing its algorithms, and you want to see what Meta brings to the Fediverse? Can you not see why we, who moved here to escape Meta, Reddit, and tech companies, would be annoyed and frustrated by that? I see you apologizing for that user’s loss, but are you really sorry if you’re chill with bringing those things back into the one refuge we have left?
Please just figure your shit out. If you don’t like memes, you can block meme communities. If it’s too much, you can go back to Reddit or Meta. Lick their boots and pretend they have a motive of anything but profit, and will do anything but attempt to poach users from harmless, open source projects like these and destroy them. I don’t care. But complaining about a platform to users on that platform accomplishes nothing. And for the love of Lemmy, don’t be surprised that people are angry when you maintain the facade of keeping an open mind to something that has destroyed so much for so many. In my opinion, you may as well be a part of them, because the attitude of indifference you display toward these companies is what enables them to destroy good things for the rest of us.
The whole purpose of Lemmy and the feddiverse is to be anticorpate.
I have been a foss fanboy most of my life so it’s a welcoming community and concept. But I get how weird it would be to suddenly join a community that basically says the mainstream way of thinking is wrong when it comes to the Internet.
That said I think Twitter Reddit and Facebook have all proven that it is. Centralized homogeneous platforms are just bad. Once you’re passed the fomo effect it becomes clear that they are not necessary. They are just tools and should be thrown away when they are no longer useful. Reddit could of maintained its status quo and we would all be there. Instead they felt they were “essential” to our lives so they could do what they wanted. It’s just not and this instance of Lemmy is just as disposable.
Lemmy will become more mainstream and more like old reddit with the addition of ppl like you. Variety is the spice of life so I think that’s a good thing. As someone who has lurked on Lemmy for years I can tell you it’s changed dramatically in just a couple weeks. Mostly for the better.
It’s kinda tricky because a lot of people who just left reddit, left for the reasons you’re ranting about. I think that’s why there’s such a prevalence in posts that are anti-Meta/anti-Threads/anti-corpo. It’s so fresh in everyone’s mind how greediness has ruined a lot of communities they’ve built.
I will say, there’s a learning curve to using the fediverse (I’m still getting the hang of it). But there’s a way to get more “normal” content, you just have to deal with the reality that a lot of those communities are starting out and need your contribution to become a real community.
Besides, you don’t have to completely give up reddit. I still use mine and I don’t have any intention of deleting it any time soon.
I only use it logged out via web. Right now there’s no alternative for a lot of things, but I’m not participating anymore, and I am trying to participate in the fediverse and build up some new communities.
Thanks for your post. I totally agree.
I’ve been at Reddit for over a decade. Reddit is comfortable, I don’t have to think very much after work to browse and post.
Now, on Lemmy/kbin, everything is new and I’m learning but I like it for the most part.
It’s like going to school after coming home from work!
I still go to Reddit, but only briefly and I don’t contribute.
I will reply as someone who in 2015 had 340,000 followers overall in the big social media of the time (tumblr, insta, fb, flickr etc). I was the world’s most popular collage artist at the time (not an exaggeration). I even got selected by NYTimes for having among the “best book covers of the year” in 2016, among other works for many magazines etc.
Long story short, for an artist to make it without a gallery (I despise the whole idea of galleries because they force you to make the same kind of art all the time), they must base their business via social media. There’s no other way. And so I did, and did well. Well, come 2017, the enshitification of these platforms started happening. Nothing was chronological anymore. And since I’m not a person who shows what they ate today, or making it all about myself (I was only posting art, not personal stuff), their new recommendation algorithms destroyed my business. I used to make thousands per year to sustain my life, because each time I’d have a sale, people would SEE my post about it and if they liked my art, they’d buy. Now, my posts are served to about 1/10th of my followers, and no new users find me, because hashtags aren’t embraced for finding new users anymore, everything’s just recommendations. Within 5 short years since the big algorithmic, I was now making only about $100/month via my art. And that was not just for me, but 95% of other artists and photographers out there too. The recommendation system of all social media (including youtube now) only promotes a few superstars in any given field, not everyone is getting their share fair of exposure based on chronology. Many online small businesses don’t work anymore because everything is not a fair field anymore. Even buying ads doesn’t make a difference.
So, I have no interest in using things like Threads, where you are literally bombarded with celebrity and brands content, but almost none of the people you follow.
Reddit has followed the same line, it’s just that we see it less, because it’s more discussion-driven. But similar changes have happened to it – in spirit. I still use reddit only for 3 sub-reddits that are too specific and don’t have enough people for here yet. I don’t use the rest of reddit.
On top of that, I’m not interested in trackers, ads, and everything that eventually lead to enshitification of these platforms. So now, I only use federated services. I have accounts with lemmy, mastodon, pixelfed, peertube, nostr, matrix, etc.
No, none of my friends are there (my husband has a mastodon account, and that’s it). And I don’t care if they aren’t. When I’m with my mom next time I’ll install a matrix client for her too, so she can call me for free (so we don’t have to use fb messenger, the only big app I still use, so I can talk to her in Greece for free). Then, I won’t need of these big social media apps.
As for my business, it will never come back (especially now with AI art). But at least, I have MORE eyes here on the fediverse than I have on the big social media. I posted a new painting on my pixelfed yesterday, and it got 17 likes, out of just 27 followers. On instagram I usually get 70 likes out of 3600 followers (that’s on my illustration account, my other, collage account, had nearly 170,000 followers in its hey day). And consider that Pixelfed only has 160,000 users (plus federated via mastodon by some instances). Given that amount of likes on the fediverse, if Instagram was still chronological and hashtags were still bearing importance as they did in the past, my posts there could have about 5,000 likes – given their 2+ bn users. Instead, with their recommendation engine, I get only 70 likes, and no new followers. So proportionally, I get more eyes on the fediverse, than I do on the big social media. So why would I want to go back to big social media? Just to be served Kim Kardashian content that I never asked for it? I won’t.
“I personally would like to see what Meta does in the fediverse… maybe it will make it more normalized.idk.” Meta won’t normalize the fediverse, people educating themselves and understanding why we need the fediverse will normalize it. Meta/Threads will kill the fediverse, this is a known playbook companies use to kill things they can’t buy.
