I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but threads or comments about Lemmy or the Fediverse get downvoted a lot on Reddit and trolls who claim that it’s “dogshit” and “not going anywhere” get systematically upvoted.

Some of those trolls get then exposed when you ask them what Lemmy instance they tried and one of them with whom I had a surreal exchange answered with something like “yeah ofc I used Lemmy, this is the instance: join-lemmy.org” 🤦‍♂️

It’s frustrating that these trolls keep contributing to the big lie that “Lemmy is not ready yet” and that there’s “no viable alternative to Reddit”.

This and the overwhelming number of comments being “against the mod protests” just prompts me to question whether there isn’t some brigading being organized straight from the Reddit HQ.

  • Zebov@lemmy.world
    53·
    2 years ago

    Probably bots. Reddit has been using them for some time, but recently got caught using chat gpt or something similar to argue against the blackouts.

  • Wander@yiffit.net
    39·
    2 years ago

    Unfortunately there’s probably a large amount of users who simply don’t care.

    But that’s okay. What matters is content creators, not content consumers. Anyone with half a gram of decency and self integrity will have realized that they need to take steps to move away from Reddit.

    • YolkBrushWork402@kbin.social
      6·
      2 years ago

      When the content creators leave and go to Lemmy/Kbin, eventually those content consumers will leave and go with them too. Will be a bonus for the Fediverse

      • Wander@yiffit.net
        4·
        2 years ago

        We need to ask Louis Rossmann to join the fediverse. He’s been super critical with Reddit on YouTube.

        • impulse@lemmy.world
          4·
          2 years ago

          I’m sure he’s already aware and will make an account if he wants to.

          There’s no point in shoving the Fediverse in someone’s face.

        • Joph@programming.dev
          1·
          2 years ago

          Kbin, like Mastodon and Lemmy, is another way to interact with the fediverse through ActivityPub. Like Lemmy, it’s similar to reddit in style.

    • Houdini@kbin.social
      3·
      2 years ago

      Exactly. Let the milquetoast mouth-breathers stay behind. With sufficient brain-drain, Reddit will eventually look like Quora.

  • Extra_Cucumber_2979@lemmy.world
    321·
    2 years ago

    Once - unfortunately - Apollo app will be down, in less than 2 weeks, I’m pretty sure Lemmy will surge and they will come complaining here 😅

  • ono@lemmy.ca
    13·
    2 years ago

    Some subreddits are also using automod to remove comments linking to Lemmy.

    I hope some journalists put a spotlight on the deceptive tactics Reddit is using.

    • jpenczek@lemmy.world
      4·
      2 years ago

      My biggest issue with Lemmy is lack of userbase… which is fixable by signing up for Lemmy.

      Figured best case scenario other people make the switch, worst case I’ll forget this service even exists.

      Also does anyone know how to enable dark mode, or if there is a dark mode?

      • Aurix@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 years ago

        There is a lot of activity to spend many hours here. Discover more communities here. There is a dark mode, go to the settings page. You will find it in a drop down menu.

      • Mintyytea@kbin.social
        2·
        2 years ago

        yeah that’s what I’m struggling with too, like it’d be great if we could encourage people to try these, but at the same time I don’t want to give them a bad first impression to turn them off forever if they can not stand it’s still a baby project (understandable). I honestly don’t think it’s that hard to start using these fediverse products though, and I feel like the posts saying “lemmy will never take off”, “kbin is too hard to use” only gave me barriers to start using it. And then when I did start, I was like oh this is great, everyone’s talking, it’s a close community

        • moon_matter@kbin.social
          2·
          2 years ago

          The biggest issue is how easily people are taken “off-site” when linking to another instance, leaving them essentially logged out and unable to subscribe or otherwise participate. Users should be presented an option to be redirected to the relative view within their instance or go external. With the “external” link in much smaller font below the preferred option. Kind of like how Steam or Discord has a pop-up asking if you “trust this site” whenever you leave their spaces.

      • ImDonaldDunn@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        Once there are good mobile apps in the app stores, I think we’ll start seeing a surge in adoption. The other big piece is moderation tools. If Lemmy can manage to build better mod tools than Reddit, it would be a big draw for power mods

    • Dav@kbin.social
      2·
      2 years ago

      Amen, if Reddit ever died it would probably survive living rent free in Lemmy users’ heads.

      • HopeOfTheGunblade@kbin.social
        2·
        2 years ago

        Eh, Digg is nothing more than a historical note to most who left in the exodus, but there was a time when it made up a large % of the posts on Reddit. People will move on, but for now the wounds are still fresh.

    • FaceDeer@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      Also, people have a natural tendency to form “teams.” Even if they don’t particularly like what Reddit’s admins have been doing they may identify as part of “team Reddit” and so see other teams as the enemy.

      • GunnarRunnar@kbin.social
        3·
        2 years ago

        Besides, the way to convert isn’t by arguing. You do it by providing a good platform (not there yet), good content (not there yet) and good community (kinda there?).

        • Kichae@kbin.social
          3·
          2 years ago

          Yup.

          Don’t get dragged down into the mud. They’re kicking up shit because they feel like they’re losing something. Like the thing they like is under attack and in danger. Getting into fights with them not only validates their feelings, it makes everyone else see it as a “both sides” thing.

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
          2·
          2 years ago

          I’d say we’re at “okay platform” level, and “okay content if you’re into the specific things we’ve got okay content for at this point.”

          It’s a gradual process. The Fediverse is slowly getting better, and Reddit is slowly getting worse, and eventually someday they’ll pass each other in the wilderness.

      • HopeOfTheGunblade@kbin.social
        2·
        2 years ago

        There was a legendary episode in social psychology called the Robbers Cave experiment. It had been set up in the bewildered aftermath of World War II, with the intent of investigating the causes and remedies of conflicts between groups. The scientists had set up a summer camp for 22 boys from 22 different schools, selecting them to all be from stable middle-class families. The first phase of the experiment had been intended to investigate what it took to start a conflict between groups. The 22 boys had been divided into two groups of 11 -

        • and this had been quite sufficient.
        • C_Spinoff@kbin.social
          1·
          2 years ago

          I’ve just read up on that experiment on Wikipedia and the conclusion you present seems to be shortcoming to tell nicely. Reassuring to me was that the two groups occasionally ganged up on the experimenters, being aware they’re being manipulated. Thanks for mentioning this, yet for me it seems to be way more to it than '2 groups will fight inevitably ’

          • HopeOfTheGunblade@kbin.social
            1·
            2 years ago

            Sorry, it was a pithy quote. It’s not meant to fully encapsulate the results of the study, it just seemed relevant and likely to bring some pleasure to people.

            Obviously, people are more complicated than can be fully captured in a single statement, but there is some truth there; look at how hostile people can get over sports teams, which are never going to affect people’s access to food, shelter, medical care, etc, and which are still treated with life of death seriousness by their adherents, who largely differ in which location they happen to originate.

  • NRVulture@kbin.social
    8·
    2 years ago

    Of course there’s no viable alternatives to Reddit. Why would someone create another dumpster fire?

  • Warped@kbin.social
    8·
    2 years ago

    Reddit is known for it’s use of bots. Bots helped Reddit grow in its early days. I’m not surprised that bots are being used now. As more people leave, I’m sure more bots will get used to give the impression of an active community. Just lie they did in those early days.

  • Raveena@sh.itjust.works
    7·
    2 years ago

    redditors always find another way to disappoint. whether it’s going back to use the site after 2 days of “protest”, or the moderators giving in to reddit admin pressure instead of resigning.

  • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net
    6·
    2 years ago

    I think there’s truth to some of the “not ready” claims… and this is coming from someone who really tried to get into Lemmy, ended up creating their own instance (as demonstrated by my user handle).

    A few issues I think Lemmy dev team really need to address ASAP, from least technical (thus affecting most users) to more technical (this affecting less users) are:

    1. UX/Discoverability – Finding communities are a huge pain in the backend right now, and with multiple communities on different instances serving same purpose (i.e.: [email protected] and [email protected]). Sure, Reddit had same issues (the example I’ve heard is /r/meirl and /r/me_irl), but Reddit offered solution (multi on old reddit, community+community on new reddit). There must be a way to streamline it with meta-communities or lists on Lemmy such that the contents can be viewed in a unified fashion. I recommended !community@ (note the lack of domain) to streamline all of user’s subscriptions with same name on different instances as an example; and perhaps we can use #list$user@lemmy.domain for users’s maintained lists to unify !homelab@lemmy.ml, !datahoarder@lemmy.ml, !homelab@lemmy.world, etc.).

    2. Trigger happy defederation hubs – a certain instance has unceremoniously de-federated a couple of other larger instances. This is not the way, but here we are, with users on those instances not able to access the broader Fediverse, and vice versa. Until discoverability gets taken care of, it will be challenging for users to find a good home – this leads to next point:

    3. Authentication – The Fediverse at large needs to separate authentication out from instances. Instances may provide their own authentication, fine, but there needs to be better way to authenticate against something else other than an entire new instance of Lemmy. The ActivityPub protocol has clear definitions on what is an actor, and users shouldn’t need to deploy a Lemmy instance to identify themselves, separately from a Mastadon instance to identify themselves, separately from a… etc. This is because frankly…

    4. Deployment of Lemmy is utter garbage. The official documentation’s getting started guide gets users setup with an instance where the UI container cannot talk to public, but the lemmy backend can? Why bother shipping an nginx container if the backend will just expose itself to the whole wide net? Also, let’s just pretend postgres container isn’t open to the whole world with a basic password… Trying to get it up and running with Traefik was a pain, just do a quick Google and see how many people have asked and gave up, as well as how many different ways people have tried to go at it (something something xkcd 927; I’ve contributed to a new one of my own per linked post on top!), and the dev basically just straight up going ‘we don’t support traefik’… also, each approach is not without problems…

    5. Federation is a bitch. I am pretty proud of the way I’ve used override to not edit original docker compose, and locked my setup down a little. But, I’m not ready to have the instance open to the whole wide web without CloudFlare in front… but allegedly, Federation doesn’t work with CloudFlare… why? Good luck trying to get to even a popular sub’s scale without getting hit with DDOS when someone disagrees with something someone else posted.

    There’s many more problems, and I genuinely want Lemmy to work. But, Lemmy is, lack of better words, “not yet ready” for prime time. It is thrown into the spotlight with Mastadon (which feels a bit more mature, at least from reading the docs) because of bad leadership at mega techs… It will take a lot of work for Lemmy to evolve and mature, before it can be “ready” to really absorb the mass of Redditors leaving Reddit.

    • pingveno@lemmy.mlEnglish
      11·
      2 years ago

      Regarding #2, I think not defederating might be an easier sell if users had the ability to block instances. Right not it’s just users and communities. Hate lemmygrad? You can block its communities one by one, but it’s kind of a pain. So instances only have the option of a full block.

        • pingveno@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          Lemmygrad is thoroughly obnoxious. Full stop. Also, you clearly have no idea what western chauvinism is if you’re calling me one.

            • pingveno@lemmy.mlEnglish
              11·
              2 years ago

              You hate Lemmygrad because you hate communism

              I dislike it because it is a personality cult and worships governments that have not earned that praise. Communism doesn’t enter into it. While I’m not communist, I don’t hate it. It has some interesting insights, but it’s hard to ignore that in practice it usually just makes a new ruling class that has no intention of ever releasing power. I’m interested to see where China goes over the next few decades as it shifts from playing catch up (easy productivity gains) to reaching parity (harder productivity gains).

              western chauvinist

              neoliberalism

              At this point, you’re just picking pejoratives out of a hat marked “disagrees with me”. I don’t believe in Western superiority, even if I believe in certain values that are widely espoused in the West (free speech, democracy, etc.). But I’m not shy about being critical of my country when it goes astray from my values. And I’m free to do so because I live in a country where that is a right. Would you do the same for China? Would you feel safe doing so if you lived in China?

              And for the record, my family has a long history of appreciating cultures around the world. I just don’t like authoritarianism, populism, and kleptocracy, regardless of what political brand is associated with it.

    • bankimu@lemm.ee
      01·
      2 years ago
      1. That certain community is beehaw.org by any chance? They also ask you to write pretty much an essay to join, and didn’t accept mine.
      • aster@lemmy.ml
        31·
        2 years ago

        I have an account on beehaw and I wrote like three sentences and was accepted, I wrote the same thing here on lemmy.ml not being accepted is probably more of an attribute of you

      • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net
        1·
        2 years ago

        Not a lot of value in singling any community out… I think if it keeps up, eventually, they will just flip to private instances and de-federate themselves away from the larger fediverse…

  • angrytoadnoises@lemmygrad.ml
    5·
    2 years ago

    Lemmy is pretty dense to a newcomer, especially one who is used to the centralized web. But that’s okay - we don’t need Lemmy to replace Reddit. Just like Mastodon, this ‘temporary exodus’ is only beneficial for this platform.

    Even when the drama ‘blows over’ and Reddit is back to its usual status, we will have gained a huge amount of new users interested in a decentralized web. As long as there are enough users for Lemmy, I think that’s okay.

    • Khold@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 years ago

      Initially I was kinda lost, but now that Im getting the hang of the instances etc, its pretty cool

      • Sage the Lawyer@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        And people forget that before we used reddit for years, we had to get used to how subreddits worked and how to curate them to make our feeds more personalized. That wasn’t any harder than figuring out instances here. The more you use a system, the easier navigating it becomes.