Reddit doesn’t care; they sold out.

Yeah, I never feel like I’m commenting/posting into the void. By my surprise, it has actually encouraged me to post more, which isn’t something I expected when I joined Lemmy, and definitely not something I ever did on reddit.

I’ve always been such an admirer and peruser of such a classic and timeless dialectical format. Its like constantly examining knowledge and each other and being likewise cross-examined in all the best ways

I honestly believe it has made me a much better writer and thinker although I have no pretensions about how systematic any of it is.

Edit: it can compel me to be hilariously nitpicky sometimes

I made one of my favorite niche communities (on my Lemmy.world account), for the XCOM games. And I try to drop memes in a few other super niche communities that I’m interested in every so often.

Growth is slow, but a handful of very active users can contribute more than you’d think.

I post and comment a lot, and it frequently leads to me having like 40-50 messages in my inbox if I don’t check for a few hours. I’ve even noticed a significant uptick lately, which is encouraging.

We can even have communities on similar topics with different vibes, moderating styles, etc. It’s great.

I’ve found that communities that are both mainstream and related to technical subjects to always get filled by people who know just barely enough about the subject to spread self-assured disinformation.

You won’t really have this problem with super-niche stuff, or stuff that isn’t mainstream enough like a pilot community. Gaming in social media is definitely cursed.

Yeah, it feels like gaming communities everywhere on the internet can be so toxic.

I’ve had better luck with comms focused on individual games, but their content is slow right now.

Your post prompted me to have a look at Tildes. It looks alright, but a bit… dry.

How active is tildes? I never saw how many users it got.

You have an invite for Tildes?

Indeed, it’s not really a good idea to run your own instance if you’re not prepared to deal with such content. Many small instance admins have shutdown their instances for this very reason.

There was a patch merged recently which disabled caching of federated images, but I believe it still needs some work. Some discussion around that over here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/3962112 including an interesting comment suggesting rerouting /pictrs/ path to 404, so nginx won’t serve any images.

Don’t, software is shit and you’re not prepared for what you’ll see and how much time you need to sink into that project.

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Sorry, but I disagree. Note that I don’t disagree with the idea or the technology itself (and the concept of Fediverse), the problem is the current state of development. Saying that it’s the moderators job doesn’t absolve the responsibility of the software, when the software, in it’s current state, doesn’t really provide any decent tools for moderation and user access controls.

CSAM was never a problem on well-configured traditional forums, which were based on forum software such as Invision, vBulletin etc. To elaborate, in traditional forums, you’d get a LOT of controls for filtering out the kind of users who post such content. For instance, most forums won’t even let you post until you complete an interactive tutorial first (reading the rules and replying to a bot indicating you’ve understood them etc). On top of that, you can have various levels of restrictions, eg, someone with less than 100 posts, or an account less than a month old may not be able to post any links or images etc. Also, you can have a trust system on some forums, where a mod can mark your account as trusted or verified, granting you further rights. You can even make it so that a manual moderator approval is required before image posting rights are granted. In this instance, a mod would review your posting history and ensure that your posts genuinely contributed to the community and you’re unlikely to be a troll/karma farmer account etc.

So, short of accounts getting compromised/hacked, it’s very difficult to have this sort of stuff happen on a well-configured traditional forum.

I used to be a mod on a couple of popular forums back in the day, and I even ran my own server for a few years (using Invision Power Board), and never once have I had to deal with such content.

The fact is Lemmy, in it’s present state, is woefully inadequate to deal with such content. Dealing with CSAM should never be a volunteer mod’s job - that stuff can scar you for life, or even trigger PTSD/bad memories for those who might’ve suffered abuse in their forgotten past. If people are involved, it should be a job for professionals who’re trained to deal with this stuff.

Once again, I don’t disagree with the general idea or the concept of Lemmy, it’s just unfortunate timing the Reddit exodus happened when the software was essentially an alpha.

Yeah I agree. Lemmy obviously isn’t at the level reddit is, but reddit has had nearly 2 decades of development with a larger userbase.

I certainly would like to see Lemmy development happen a bit more quickly, and in particular better 3rd party/mod tools (I REALLY want a RES for Lemmy), but I don’t think we’re in a bad place on the Lemmy timeline.

Be the change you want to see!

It’s quick and easy to spin up a community/sub!

I answered that here: https://lemmy.ml/comment/3916556

Besides contributing actual code… not really. You can donate money which will help with the upkeep of servers, but that’s not really an issue with most instances. No amount of money can compensate someone (normal) for dealing with the trauma associated with such content. So yeah, the only thing that can really help right now is tools for moderation and user access controls.

This is a transition period.

Reddit lost a lot of important contributors during its little krystalspez crackdown. The formula for a successful, self-propagating online community is: good moderation + posted content + interesting comments + lurkers = healthy community.

Reddit still maintains a lot of its heavy posters, but a lot of the interesting comment makers have drifted off… a lot of them moved here. The federated communities don’t have the continuous churning content creators en masse yet, but they do have interesting comments coming from the people that are here.

Reddit is somewhat the opposite. The content creators are churning away, but the interesting comments are dying off. There is more content being created on Reddit, but the comment that you will quote, or think about all day, is now slightly more likely to be made in a federated thread.

So Reddit feels hollow, and out here feels growing but still light on content. I predict that prolific posters prefer pointed ripostes to their posting, and will work their way here. That will be great, but it will also drag along a lot of the problem children of reddit as well. That will put a huge burden on the moderation here, as well as start piling on those server fees. I predict in a year or two, we will face the choice of doing zany pledge drives to protect our larger servers, or face some forms of blatant monetization. Also we’ll have to figure out how to avoid giving the hug of death to new federated servers with interesting content.

…and there will be hidden corporate shill servers trying to latch in. Another problem with federation we need to consider down the road.

But it’s worth it. Capitalism will always try to exploit community, but community is an important human experience. If we can keep the leeches down to a minimum, we can build great things together, and help each other in a world that increasingly only offers what profits most. That type of community is what Reddit pretended to be, and it’s what the Federated Communities can be.

Just a heads up, this is how early reddit was. People will argue that the larger the platform the more likely the community will deteriorate. I will argue that is partly true and does contribute to enshittification of social media, but I think the main factor is the corporate greedos trying to continuously increase profit. Reddit kept making new rules and policies that kept degrading the platform. They made a toxic environment where flaming and antagonistic content would be shown on people’s feed.

Am I saying Lemmy isn’t awesome? Not really. You guys can make that conclusion. But I have seen similar posts like this in the early days of reddit. Make do of this as you want. Ponder and ask what made reddit bad and if this is the path of lemmy or it is “naturally” immune to it.

I disagree. Too many people take one side or the other, take for granted that their side is 100% correct, and refuse to believe anyone could possibly be center.

People behave in normal distributions. By definition vast majority of people are in the centre. The extremists (outliers) scream the loudest and warp an observer’s perception but the actual population is still a normal distribution.

When has it ever, really?

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Thare was exploding-heads.com instance, but they exploded.

Well… that escalated pretty quickly

Heh

I think this is the biggest reason. A huge amount of content on reddit is astroturfing / brand manipulation; both in posts and in the comments. And in addition to that, a there’s a huge amount of ‘karma farming’, where heaps of popular but low-effort content is recycled over and over again to gain points and create a sense of credibility for accounts that will later be used for marketing / manipulation.

And at that point we can defederate from corporate instances. Its so user first.

It’s the “slightly confusing” step that 80% of people don’t take.

No, you tried something new, the unknown did not dither you. Weirdly, that was the “complicated” barrier.

Well, dummies is too strong a word tbh. its the people who didn’t take the 30 seconds to understand how they have been using e-mail, a federated service, their entire fucking lives and things worked well.

It takes three to Tango

I don’t try at all, I’ve just been drafting you

It seems is a lot harder to transfer a niche community that’s not directly predisposed to using tech alternatives. The general purpose communities are already great here.

As a critical thinker, church is unlikely to be high on your list of socializing options - unless you’re conducting some kind of experiment.