Listen, I am a Lemmy supporter at the highest level. I believe that the Fediverse model for social media is the next step in evolution for the industry. But Lemmy itself, in terms of the front end, is a near exact copy of Reddit. And was created, at least in part, with the idea that from the beginning, it couldn’t be heavily monetized and become a profit-driven and publicly traded company. That it wouldn’t sacrifice the quality of the product and lead to the enshittification of the service like so many other digital offerings.
But currently, if you were to compare Reddit and Lemmy. Reddit’s digital content offerings are significantly better than Lemmy’s. Which makes sense. Reddit has been around for much longer than Lemmy and is much more known by the general public. It has a much larger user base as a result. Which for a user generated content platform is everything when it comes to the pool of individuals that can generate and submit interesting content.
The thing that I am still struggling to wrap my smooth brain around, is that I have an account on a widely federated lemmy instance. Allegedly, I should also see content from mastadon and other federated services. How do I do that? How would I even phrase the question so that a search engine could provide useful results?
actually, imma ask chat gpt. if it spits out anything usefull, i’ll report back.
I grew up in the age of Internet forums, in the ancient days of the late '90s-early-00’s before the (Eternal September) Smartphone dumped every human being onto the landscape.
Having small communities is so much better. I often hear people complain that Lemmy isn’t big because there are not communities with 3 million people like there are some subreddits. Much of the reason that Reddit is shit is because of how big it is.
On the old Internet, you could know the people who were part of the community. I have old friends, that I’ve known for 20+ years, that I met playing MUDs on BBSs. Now, I couldn’t tell you the name of a single person that I’ve ever interacted with on social media in the past year.
Digg and Reddit came on the scene and pulled a huge crowd because we didn’t have The Algorithm to recommend content and these link aggregation sites were the first time people got a taste of that kind of ‘See all of the newest things from every corner of the Internet in a single place, curated by a process that produces good quality results’ that we now just expect from recommendation algorithms.
The old communities were essentially starved of population. Nobody wants to take the social effort required to become part of a community when they can just scroll Reddit mindlessly.
There’s very few people that even had a chance to experience the magic of spontaneous communities full of people working together.
If you still want a taste, check out the Something Awful forums.
The barrier to entry is higher: you have to learn the rules (read the rules), the social norms and there is a $10 one-time fee (so getting banned has some sting to it, read the rules).
In exchange you get an actual community of people. Many of the people posting there (or, in the various Discords now because that’s a thing) have been on SA since they were edgy teenagers and are now professionals with careers. That isn’t to say that there are not trolls and assholes, those exist in any community, but there’s a much higher ratio of good to bad posters.
One of the interesting decisions that they do is that rulebreaking posts are rarely ever deleted. If a person is probated (temp ban) or banned, their comment stays up with a “(User was Probated/Banned for this post)” edited into the post so you can see, and hopefully learn, from the bad behavior. In addition, there’s a ‘Wall of Shame’ section where you can see everyone who’s been actioned against, who the moderator was and the moderation reason.
I’ve always hated the fact that comments on Reddit just disappear. You can never see what a mod removed and there is no reason why it is removed. This allows all kinds of bad and manipulative behaviors to be done by people with moderation access.
I avoided forums growing up because from what I’ve witnessed there was a lot of verbal abuse and so on, but I was into “communities” (basically closed social network long before I heard of myspace or facebook).
For example, I listened to a lot of hip-hop as a teenager. there was no meta algorithm feeding me garbage, but there was a hip hop community website :) It felt more intimate or homegrown if you will.
I’m also from that era of the Internet and you’re so right about smaller communities being better. One great example was Wil Wheaton’s phpBB forum. Probably a hundred active users including Wil and we all got along and more or less policed ourselves.
(Plus I helped him out with some car trouble. Let me repeat that: I helped Wesley Crusher with an engineering problem. One of my proudest moments.)
One of the interesting decisions that they do is that rulebreaking posts are rarely ever deleted. If a person is probated (temp ban) or banned, their comment stays up with a “(User was Probated/Banned for this post)” edited into the post so you can see, and hopefully learn, from the bad behavior. In addition, there’s a ‘Wall of Shame’ section where you can see everyone who’s been actioned against, who the moderator was and the moderation reason.
That’s a really great feature.
