there's a lot more reasonable, adult discussion here. i like it a lot.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Personally I've termed the phenomenon Lemmy-Decompression.
I'm using bigger words now, where before I would dumb my conversation down to be accessible to even children. I'm cussing more, and using more slang in general. I'm being blatantly sarcastic without tagging and without fearing I'll whoosh the whole userbase.
Yeah, it's pretty nice. Though I also hit the new Fediverse thing so hard I did give myself some social media burnout and have had to cut my usage down since. But it's fine, I knew I couldn't maintain something like 30 decent comments/day and 3 posts/day for very long. It was the peak of the reddit influx, so I wanted to be around and helping a lot.
Let's be real though, the same thing happens all the time when a site is young. People like Us who are willing to move over to a new platform and give it a solid effort aren't the ones who ruined the last few sites like digg and reddit.
Once the masses get here things are going to change, and I'm not looking Forward to it. Things here are nice, if a little quiet. Good conversation, but not enough yet.
It's true that the demographic tendencies of early adopters are definitely a factor. The Fediverse has a baked-in solution though: Go to a smaller Instance and block the big ones.
Everyone who says the Fediverse will eventually get just as bad as anywhere else is forgetting this one key technical difference. This is not the same as a major tech company holding, fundamentally.
I'll admit, I'm new to the concept of federation. Ive read a bit, but it's hard to imagine how that all works once the scale goes crazy. It'll be interesting, and I hope it grows to the point where I see exactly what you mean.
I wrote a breakdown in regular language for it, helps grasp the scope and degree of freedom:
I'm already starting to see that begin to change though, compared to a few weeks ago. It might have been a very temporary phenomenon.
I too started to decompress, but I think now I am going to go back to merely lurking, it is just not worth the headache of arguing with people who are not engaging in good faith.
It is a fundamental law of the universe that I can only control myself, not others, so if they want to make NOISE rather than articulate actual logic in the form of speech, I can do nothing against that onslaught. There are just so MANY of them, and only one of myself to have to work against the trend, e.g. blocking people.
It is definitely important to remember not to feed the trolls. It's not like this is some ideal space that will automatically be exactly what we want it to be. Nor should it be, because that's different for different people, at the end of the day.
Yes and I was trying to think more about what I said, in-between then and now, to perhaps understand it better. I think part of what I was circling around is the difference between ONE person arguing against whatever I may be saying at any given time, even in a bad-faith manner, vs. the background purpose of an entire community. If >90% of all comments are like "^THIS" and other echo-chamber related noise, does that not foundationally change the experience? So, as you alluded to, at the end of the day it simply is what it is, but I do seek to question what that is. I think we will find out as time goes on.
And where I was coming from is that the difference between a "discussion forum" vs. a "social media platform" is... YUGE (it seems to me).
... yeah, I think you've nailed it. Discussion forum vs social media platform. They serve very different purposes for different people.
One big problem is shitposts. Or simply, low-effort content. This response right here is taking me about 5-10 minutes to compose. I read what you wrote, I contemplated it, and now I am somewhat carefully composing a response to give back. I'm discussing with you, not because I think you or I are important, but because the conversation itself interests me. This is an effortful comment I am writing.
A shitpost is the opposite. Low-effort content, less about the discussion, more about the individual. More social media-ey. More trashy.
Then trolls do need to be remembered. It's important to remember trolling is an activity, not a type of person. In the same way someone becomes a driver the moment they sit behind the wheel of a car, someone becomes a troll the moment they start laying bait for others. So they can be found anywhere, at any time. It's valuable to be able to discern them, as they specifically want to just waste your time and aggravate you.
I wrote out a long (>800 word) response, but I think I should dramatically shorten it so apologies if it now seems terse, having gone too far in the other direction:-).
We like shitposting, if we are honest. At least, it has its place.
Some of us may even like trolling, or would if we were on the offering end - like playing peek-a-boo with a baby, it is a game that people play, which ostensively even serves a societal function to act as an incentive for people to toughen up their emotions and not allow themselves to be so easily triggered.
Then they can often be combined, so the line can get quite blurry - like if a cult religion puts forth millions of dollars to make a professionally-produced film, and let us say for the sake of argument that only the top few people in the cult are aware that it is all based on a lie, while the vast majority of people working on it are not, is that "trolling"? That further delves into the actual truth of a matter vs. the perception of a matter, and from what POV, and then still further there is the reception end of things... but that is getting off on too much of a tangent:-).
My problem is that when shitposting + trolling becomes 99.99% of what content exists, then (1) how can people so much as even find anything else, which further leads to (2) a mismatch between what is expected to have been delivered vs. what is actually delivered. Thoughtful responses do not "match" a meme, so someone acting to explain the joke works to ruin the entire experience of it, often even if not always (exceptions exist ofc, like "in my language those words mean something a little bit different"). So in some ways, it is up to us all to "read the room".
But are thoughtful responses welcomed on the Fediverse? I would say mostly yes... - maybe not in a political magazine, unless it happens to match the preconceived notions of each individual recipient who could be anybody and it is not likely that they will know or if so respect the explicitly asked-for instructions on how to converse in that space - but for how much longer will that remain true? After all, that was once the main selling point of Reddit too, once upon a time. This place still has karma, even if it does not work the same. This place still allows alt accounts, and from what I hear the moderation tools on kbin are virtually nonexistent. Now that the fediverse is becoming more popular, and all the more so as Meta is edging closer, I am starting to think that it will go the way of Reddit too, unless actions are taken to work against that. I do not know what those actions might be.
The key difference the Fediverse has, is the easy ability to associate only with those you wish to. I expect big parts of Lemmy will turn into exactly what you describe, but this is natural and desirable if it is what people actually want. And many people do, I loved it as a teen. I am sure I was not that unique.
However, it can much more easily have smaller, healthier communities as well, that themselves will benefit from their own interconnectedness.
The Fediverse never will be, nor should it be, just one thing. It should be all the things. This could eventually remove those people from the harmful effects the tech giants currently have.
I'm not disagreeing about the result, Lemmy definitely feels less spammy/trolly, but either you or I have misunderstood something about registration. As far as I'm aware, any rate-limiting, proof of personhood, email verification, etc. is completely a per-instance thing. So all you'd need is an instance that's permissive to get heaps of accounts. Or even if there aren't any permissive ones (that haven't been defederated), you could host a private instance, or sign up on multiple instances. However permissive Reddit is, I don't think Lemmy fundamentally has the capability to be particularly restrictive.
I think the difference is that there's no incentive to rack up karma on Lemmy, so a lot of the trolls and reposters around.
That might stave off some people, but plenty of trolls and harassers in general are happy to play without karma.
Lemmy has a very 2000s forum feeling. Hopefully, smaller communities will continue to exists but we'll still get some well moderated, huge communities like in Reddit.
I know this definitely isn’t the right community to ask this, but I have been struggling to find the “how the fuck does lemmy work” community. So far I’m loving lemmy and everything I’ve experienced. My only concern is that with it’s decentralized fediverse nature, is it impossible for a user to delete a post or comment they make?