Like most other people here, I originally came here from reddit. Ive been having a blast so far, and I much prefer the forum-style of this. After about a week of using Lemmy I realized there was something intrinsic to reddit that Lemmy doesnt have. And I wont miss it. Too many people on reddit were way too horny. I was really annoying, but Lemmy seems way more chill. Plus its refreshing knowing that the people on here arent all bots.
You’re not wrong; I’ve noticed the same. Less ‘horny’ specifically, and more… reasonable and engaged; vs impulsive and reactive.
I think the accessibility of reddit vs Lemmy plays a feature there. Lemmy requires at least some level of tech literacy to understand well enough to use, and it also isn’t where most of the people are. So the people choosing to use Lemmy fully intend to use it; we’re not casual users.
Because it’s so easy to use, I think Reddit has a lot of young and/or immature people (demographics that overlap, but aren’t the same). So it’s full of impulsive, heavily-opinionated, casual users who aren’t really invested in their communities, that can easily make a new account on a whim, and that create echo chambers with their votes.
It’s not really Reddit’s fault, tbh. It’s an issue of user population, especially when 90% of the users do nothing more than upvote (so generically agreeable things rise) or downvote (anything that challenges them falls). The bigger a user platform gets, the more it homogenises.
Reddit was only unusual in that subreddits let it homogenise on a sub-by-sub basis and create echo chambers; a savvy redditor could still find smaller subs with better discussion (r/patientgamers rather than r/gaming for example). Or subs would get bigger and start becoming hostile or tribal, losing their original mission - and somebody from the old days would make a ‘true’ version (r/childfree vs r/truechildfree).
Lemmy is too small for groupthink to homogenise it (yet?). But particularly large instances could potentially go the same way given enough years. It’s just that Lemmy being federated means that we can make new instances, and defederate from any that we may find unpleasant. I’ve already learned of one portal that isn’t federated to my chosen one.
This is a big plus for Lemmy right now. IMO the reason Reddit used to be great was its inaccessibility. Old-style Reddit was ugly as hell and difficult to use and that kept away the “impulsive, heavily-opinionated, casual users”.
Old Reddit was certainly plain and stripped-down, but when was it ever hard to use?
Hey man, idk about you but im still impulsive and heavily opiniated lol
To add onto your point. One thing that we’ll have to watch out for is that toxic clout culture built up on other websites coming here.
It’s been something I’ve been thinking about in the context of all this. People aren’t coming from the void. They’ll have their own internet lingo and culture that they’ll bring with them to any site they go to. And while the design of a website can mitigate some of the worst parts of a culture, it can’t outright remove it.
Without near constant vigilance (like the ask a historian subreddit) most communities will end up dying off. And even then you’re at the whims of the platform.
I realise my point now is hardly even connected to yours, haha. Apologies.
That’s a great point, too.
I chose beehaw has my home instance because it’s community-focused, has an application process, and the communities are premade umbrellas (so people don’t fragment into echo chambers).
But lemmy.ml is already visibly showing the signs of Reddit migration. I think the users that are migrating are still the ‘better’ of Reddit (intend to contribute, care enough to go through the process of learning Lemmy). But lemmy.ml is rapidly filling up with the same fragmented, specialised echo chambers that Reddit’s culture developed, as they prepare to evacuate as many users from Reddit as possible - regardless of whether those users intend to contribute meaningfully to Lemmy.
That’s not automatically bad - a person who only plays older games values a space that isn’t dominated by news of recent releases, and a person that’s child-free will struggle to find recommended doctors for sterilisation in a ‘Family’ or ‘Parenting’ umbrella sub. And I came here from Reddit, too.
But it seems that people are coming to Lemmy with the expectation that they can turn it into Reddit, complete with the isolated communities/subreddits they’re used to. If not enough of them adapt to what makes Lemmy’s mixed-spaces different, users could play their own role in Lemmy’s ‘enshittification’ for older users, who lose the shared respectful discussion in favour of hundreds of echo chambers.
I absolutely agree on your point about people wanting to turn lemmy into Reddit. Everyone has some very clear problems with Reddit, so why do we just want to create it again??
And again, some communities are going to have to migrate. And they’ll likely hold the same culture they did on Reddit, and just… Writing this, I realise that I sound like an old man who hates people. But I just find huge forums or social media groups with thousands upon thousands of people to be EXHAUSTING. The culture, the social dance of it all.
And I want to escape that from Reddit. The main stream of Reddit felt like a secondary rat race to my actual life. No substance, just astroturfing and attention traps. I don’t want another Reddit, I don’t want another time sink for the toilet. I want genuine discussions and the good hearted fun of old forums…
Haha, sorry, going to continue to yap off until my jaw simply falls off my face.
Honestly, I think this is the point where we have to do our best in making a good community. The application process for beehaw is fantastic. And maybe I’m just mean but I hope to see many more application based communities. Say what you will about gatekeeping. But sometimes asking people to do more than the bare minimum is necessary to making a good community. And sometimes a good community doesn’t have to involve everyone that so much as glanced over.
I think that gave me an epiphany that hadn’t occurred to me earlier somehow: I don’t think I ever really got to experience Old Forum culture? And I kinda feel like I missed the boat?
Reddit was probably the closest I got to experiencing that kind of place. I think I knew of a couple established forums related to my interests growing up, but I learned pretty early on that I wasn’t quite ready to be in that kind of place yet. Bless my heart, I found myself being annoying in all the wrong ways 🥴. I found Reddit right around the time I started to straighten that out. I think that was around a year or a few before the Ellen Pao round of intrigue? I suppose I just never found enough of an incentive to branch out from there.
I always found myself at least intrigued by the likes of Tumblr, Hacker News, or just general blogs and that kind of thing. I think the uniting thread behind them that interested me is an experience that has the potential to be a bit more longform compared to Twitter or Facebook. I’m used to people around me seeing Reddit as old school, different, and Off compared to whatever else, so I figured I was still getting a pretty respectable analog to the forum vibe I had a loose understanding of earlier.
But was I really? I recall sensing changes in the vibe pretty early on, and I wouldn’t even say I was an early entry on Reddit. Things typically felt too fast for me to get my word in, and the hivemind attitude toward opinion and form was a real turnoff (not that I care to throw them around like confetti, but I’d be psyched to leave behind the rampant emoji hatred 🗿.) That’s not to say I imagine forums as invulnerable to similar kinds of pitfalls, but I suspect Reddit was in a special position to make those kinds of issues more visible.
I think either way I end up with the Reddit migration, it’s going to be at a slower pace and a different form than Reddit was, at least for a while. That worried me at first, but the more I think about it, maybe that’s for the better. I’m starting to think I was missing out on something I didn’t know I’d prefer. Maybe if I grew up just a few years earlier I would’ve found myself more among a smattering of forums than I ended up.
I was only on forums as a little kid myself. Trust me, I’m Very Young, I was just good with computers young. But the notifications, small scale, it gave me a little tickle that I hadn’t felt since those silly days of logging onto Pokemon forums as a kid.
I’ve never been super active on Reddit myself. Hell, I’ve probably written more comments on here in the past day or two than I did over a few years on Reddit. So I can’t accurately describe the culture change to you. I’m sure there’s plenty of older folk who would be able to tell you though.
But it’s something I haven’t felt for a while, and something I had forgotten myself. Where social media is… An active choice? On Reddit, it was easy to be entirely passive. Just scroll and scroll. And really, it wasn’t even making me happy. It was just engagement for the sake of being engaged. But if I’m on a smaller forum I love talking with people! Sharing these experiences. Also, yay for having forum tools again!! I missed being able to post pictures in comments.
I kinda wish I joined beehaw for this exact reason. I signed up a little before the overload and I think there was a couple hundred members at most but now I’m seeing some of the old reddit mindset trickle in and… ugh.
Maybe I just don’t like redditors? Talk about irony. Lol
I hope there ends up being a migration feature introduced sometime.
You could always just go to beehaw.org or lemmy.world directly and register a new acc there, and still subscribe to all the same communities. You don’t actually lose anything that matters by signing up elsewhere. Even your own post history on your lemmy.ml account can be viewed by just going to lemmy.ml to log in again, if it matters to you.
In fact, signing up to a moderately-sized instance like lemmy.world may also be good for your usage; lemmy.ml is being slammed by incoming users, so anybody using it (even if they’re viewing other instances’ communities) feel the chug. If it goes down, all of Lemmy is inaccessible to you.
But if you’re on a different, smaller instance, then you can continue ticking over while the behemoths are struggling by staying in shallow waters until they recover from the server load. A moderately-sized instance is more likely to get ongoing support than a small, newer one is; and less likely to time out or be hugged to death than a larger one is.