I find the quality and variety of discussions on the fediverse to be lower than what I had on reddit. Lemmings have strong preconceived notions and little interest in changing viewpoints from new information. I think I'll be switching back.
Edit: you'll find that most of the comments deny any shortcomings of the culture and go directly to invalidating my opinions via character assassination. If lemmy was a community that actually stood for the ideals which it espouses it would take constructive criticism in the spirit in which it was intended. QED.
Not possible. The reddit that you're longing for died a very long time ago. Subreddits are entrenched into their positions and will only berate you and bash you if you go against that grain.
What you're describing here isn't lemmy. It's the internet in general.
Edit: Ohhhhhhhhhhh. This explains why you don't want to be here. It's not that this place is an echo chamber. It's that you're petrified of logic and fact.
I switched back after some drama with a petty mod. I've found that so far, the quality of content on Reddit just isn't there anymore. In fact, I'd go as far as to say it's hot garbage. Unfortunately, the niche content I enjoyed and sometimes relied on just isn't here, so now I flip back and forth between them.
I'm still beyond pissed about 3rd party apps, though. The official Reddit app is a steaming pile that wants to be TikTok SO BAD.
I disagree. I feel that on Reddit, the type of users and discussions were mostly toxic and based on popularity. Lemmy is far from perfect, and there are aspects about it that I feel certainly are lacking, but to suggest that it's a bigger echo chamber than reddit, I find hard to believe. But, if you can provide me with some examples that highlight your point of view, I would be interested.
Yeah I'm sorry. I just don't give a shit about conservative, racist, pro-genocide point of views. I'm going to stick with the human rights, preferred pronouns, and star trek memed Lemmy. This place still has the fraction of users reddit currently has. You have to be patient for the user base to grow if you want more variety.
I’m enjoying Lemmy more than I had enjoyed Reddit in a long time. Like everyone says, however, the niche discussion is the bald patch, that will get better with time.
I agree for the most part. Most of the top posts on here are left-wing political posts, where often times center-left views get downvoted to oblivion. Don't even get me started on Hexbear, etc.
I wish we had more people making posts about hobbies and such. c/Linux and a few others are rich in content, but so many others (motorcycles, Factorio, etc.) have very little activity. The hobby subs were my favorite Reddit subs.
Very much agreed, though I'm not looking to switch back. Reddit had gradually turned into a homogenous slurry of astroturf and toxic groupthink. Lemmy lacks the critical mass for both of these to become a problem.
I still find Lemmy a better alternative, because at least I can see opinions that differ from mine. I'll gladly throwdown and get my opinions challenged rather than feel that I don't need to contribute to a discussion.
Not everyone is here for debate and proselytizing. You want to have debates then go scream at people in the streets with your face visible and within arms length of whomever you're offending. I'm here for fine art, painted miniatures, and owl pictures. Those are procured with civility not dumpster fire opinions.
You’re on the internet arguing politics. You’re only going to be happy in an echo chamber in your favor. Arguing about shit that you’re never going to physically do anything about makes zero sense.
Lemmy just has an unusually large number of passionate young people on it. Not surprising when you consider the Fediverse as more of a rebellious option looking to upend the dominance of the giants.
Also makes it feisty though. It's kinda on you to make it good for yourself by controlling what communities you sub to though.
Ehhh, it kinda depends on where you are on lemmy. The more you're haunting the politically charged communities and instances, the worse it gets.
Outside of those, it varies more. There's usually a fairly echoey vibe to Linux forward thinking, and you'll run into some with fediverse focused discussions/communities regarding social media.
But, if you're hanging around in either niche subject communities, or in the general communities on instances where politics are not a focus, it's way better because you don't have the peanut gallery of randos as often. But even in some of the bigger instances, you can have great discussions with friendly folks easier than on bigger subs.
That's lemmy though, it's smaller, and composed largely of people that think in a general way because lemmy is by nature an "off brand" thing. There's a huge chunk of the user base that left reddit because they got sick of something about reddit. It skews the vibe a good bit. Whether or not any given person likes that is a different issue.
I don’t agree with that at all. Just because you don’t agree with the majority opinion doesn’t make it an echo chamber. People downvoting your comment doesn’t make it less valid.
Unlike in Reddit where being downvoted will hide you comment, potentially rate limit you, and users are ranked based on their karma.
There are no algorithmic manipulations on the fediverse. People may not agree with you but they aren’t going to silence you.
The one thing I would agree with you is that there is a segment of neurotic posters that think that instances should defed with any instance that don’t ban users for being conservative because they consider all conservatives to be members of a right-wing hate cult. Those people should not be taken seriously and thankfully the big instances don’t take that approach so you can still have a positive experience on the fediverse without being a communist
Saying that "Lemmy" is an echo chamber is a bit ignorant. Lemmy is a platform; it can he used to spin up an instance with whatever values you like. The fediverse is the same. So saying Lemmy is an echo chamber is a bit like boycotting wood because a politician you dislike stood on a stage to speak.
Having said that, there are instances with heavy political biases. You can block those from your instance and you can block them from you feed.
So lemmy is somewhat an echo chamber sure, but I feel if you word it nicely and approach with an open mind you can have really good conversations if you don’t agree with a topic and want to understand more. Whereas on Reddit I find it extremely difficult to have actual conversations
I see where you're coming from but I also get reddit-ass pandentic arguments here. People downvoting you for posting an unpopular opinion on unpopularopinion is peak reddit as well.
Since I can get the wider reddit experience without spez, I will just stay. I use an alt front to see the smaller communities on reddit once in a blue moon. That's what works for me.
The niche topics are expanding on the fediverse but it’s not quite there yet.
The general topics on Reddit are full of uninteresting posts and comments. Quality community members have definitely left.
I can’t tell if you think it’s an echo chamber because there are too many like-minded people here, or if your opinions generally fall apart under scrutiny. You may want to evaluate this.
On lemmy, using something like thunder or some other client that integrates with a wide swath of the lemmyverse and other things its connected to, you can easily join or leave not just subreddits, but different lemmy instances, which at this stage are often defined by userbases that sometimes have a broad consensus of opinion on certain things, but sometimes dont.
Point 2: Maybe I missed this in reddit, but again using something like thunder, its not too hard to just block people who you witness demonstrate commitment to hive mindedness either in absurd, barely relevant scenarios, or in cases where its obvious the commitment to the hivemind opinion flies in the face of the actual facts of a discussion, or they demonstrate irrationally charged responses to only certain topics which are at best tangentially related to their hivemind triggers, or in cases where their hivemind triggers cause them to misread what was actually typed, assume malice, become irrational, and then refuse to back down after clarification.
Yes this is far from an ideal solution to the hive mind / echo chamber problem, but at least as I am aware, it is /something/ you can do to mitigate the problem, at least for yourself personally, that you cannot do on reddit.
Again though, as reddit has been a sad parody of human discussion for a while now, i have not used it much and may have missed it if you can basically twitter style completely block people entirely from you being able to see them at all, at a client, instead of subreddit moderator level.
EDIT:
To think that you can have a large, popular, diverse interaction with other humans, basically fancy, large forum on the internet without this also including large numbers of people with opinions or rhetoric you personally find objectionable, or who are very confident and very uninformed, is delusionally absurd, any actual objective analysis of the history of basically any large social media app or site or large internet community of basically any kind would evidence this.
This is why i like the blocking ability. Puts power in the hands of the user themself to define their experience.
Is it perfect? Obviously not. Is it better than not being able to do this? Obviously yes.
Can biased people who themselves are very hive mindy use this to put themselves into echo chambers? Yes. It certainly does not solve that problem.
But it does at least allow for more level headed users to choose who they engage with and personally make the call of, ok, this person is wrong, but not in an insane way, maybe theyre worth talking to or seeing further comments/posts from them, vs, nah, this person is obviously toxic and if i dont ban people like that, i am going to suffer mental health problems from seeing deragned nonsense all the time.
Again, anyone whose been in any other large internet community for a while knows that mods are very often lazy, biased, and fall into personal popularity cults / dream worlds, and cannot generally be trusted to be objective, nor reasonably expected to be in a large community where they are basically volunteers, presumably with actual lives and responsibilities when afk.
haha never, here you can breath a fresh air of people and freedom, in reddit-twitter you have the freedom that a company "gives" to you. I am in both, but I am more proud to be here than to be on bruhddit.
If you join a server that blocks many other instances or have personally block other communities, users or instances, then you are part of the problem.