Agree. But it’s not kids, it’s stupid people of all ages. Same thing happened with Reddit and with the Internet as a whole. Used to be you had to be a little smart to know you wanted to be on the Internet and figure out how to get it working. Then same was true of forums and IRC. Then same was true of Reddit. But then Reddit changed formats trying to be a TikTok style quick content scroll app, so idiots who just want to scroll started using the site and quality of discussions went down. I hope Lemmy grows but I hope the sign up process stays as it is, to weed out the extra stupid.
I think you‘re onto something. I read a lot of comments of people thinking the fediverse is too complicated to deal with and while I disagree - but also think it has issues - there does seem to be a barrier of entry for a good portion of people in the form of „inconvenience.“ So whoever is here really wants to be here and not just be an anonymous arse. I don‘t think you gotta be particularly smart, you gotta step out of your comfort zone.
Hmm this is also a good point. I’ve been explaining to redditors that Lemmy is not that complicated and only takes a couple minutes to get started. But reading this, now I’m hoping Lemmy can find the balance between number of active users and quality of content. I’m wondering if my spreading the word on reddit was a bad idea.
Maybe the “work” required to make the jump to Lemmy will be enough to keep lower quality content (for whatever reason) at bay for a bit longer, though. Of course, it won’t last forever. All we can do is make our communities good spaces from the get-go and try to maintain them carefully as we grow.
Which part of it is supposed to be complicated? I’ve seen this argument many times, and while I’m still trying to figure out the user interface(s), the whole idea is pretty basic
I can‘t tell you since I also disagree. I did basically the same thing I did on Reddit, I only got thrown off seeing multiple „subs“ with the same name.
Some people complained how complicated „explanations“ are. I saw these types of comments on the Reddit Alternatives sub.
Yes, this exactly. I’m starting to suspect that either someone very misinformed or someone with an agenda started spreading this rumor.
It just takes one person to reaffirm that it really is “too much work to switch” and “you aren’t lazy for not trying” to keep a lot of folks in place.
This kept me off Lemmy until the blackout. I was interested prior to that, but so many people said it was complicated, I figured I’d look into it at some vague point in the future when I had time to untangle the fediverse. Then the baclout happened, and what do you know I had time, and lo and behold it was easy. I’m now a bit annoyed I was dissuaded for so long based on BS about it being complicated.
I just had to find an instance (or “site”) that allowed sign-ups and register. My first account was on Kbin since it seemed less buggy on mobile. I feel like they think something’s complicated just because it’s on a website, or because there are multiple options.
Getting one’s head around the concept of instances is hard for some people who aren’t used to dealing with tech beyond the basic social platforms.
Is it one social media platform, or is it a bunch of individual ones? The fact that the answer is “it depends” is confusing. Especially when you get into defederation and cross-platform interaction.
Very true. I often make the mistake of thinking that if something makes sense to me pretty quickly, it will be just as quick for others.
We should remember that those of us here now are more likely to be uniquely interested in this tech and thus more able to wrap our heads around these concepts without being deterred. We could always do a better job making it accessible for beginners who don’t benefit from the same background.
It was the worst thing to witness on reddit. A post with tens of thousands of likes and only a handfull of comments
I boosted from 1k karma to 20k by searching ‘pun’ on every top joke each day for a week.
It’s enough that good/bad posts get boosted up/down by votes without them generating Karma.
Intelligent answers aren’t always the most popular…
Reddit karma wasn’t about popularity or intelligence. It was about who got there first. If you shotgun enough comments into brand new threads your karma will skyrocket.
I’m a teenage FOSS enthusiast and I’m of the opinion that there are a lot more of us here than you seem to all think.
not speaking for OP but when I think about not wanting “kids” around, I mean immature people. I’m looking to be part of something like the reddit prior to them buying Alien Blue.
Agree. I suspect that the UX challenge of the Fediverse as well as the fact that you’d largely only migrate here if you’re ideologically displeased with the admins means that people on this site skew more mature.
The people on here at the moment are the same kind of people that exclusively used old.reddit.com on desktop.
As a fellow teenager and a FOSS enthusiast, Linux user and Linux tinkerer and hobbyist, I’m glad to see there are more people my age getting into the FOSS space.
Booyah high five! Glad you’re here
Same same, it is mostly the matter of your FOSS knowledge, if you were a FOSS nerd you would most likely to switch from reddit in some way or another… (16 btw)
Same, also 16, and the ‘mentally kids’ excuse is more insulting than they may have realised.
please don’t randomly start some ageism crap suddenly now please. the vibes are good because we collectively experience self-efficacy against the corporate super power that is reddit. All people should feel welcome on lemmy
I disagree. Terrible take. It’s never wise to discount, alienate, or exclude our youth. Growth is the name of the game and they’re the ones who are going to be ushering in hopefully a better future. Who will they learn from if not us? You want them stewing with each other?
No. We maintain whatever nebulous internet “culture” we like and establish rules. Anyone, young or old, who doesn’t adhere can suck eggs. That way young people learn how to act and we can hear them tell us about all the ways we need to better society.
Truly I believe that the children who develop during this time of overstimulation and rapid technological advancement will emerge maybe a bit… maladapted but better than us. Humans can be so resilient especially under supportive circumstances. Our intelligence is adaptive. So if you want to make a great internet community, maintain your respect for our kids.
Not just fewer kids. But fewer conservatives too.
Gosh, I love it here.
Conservatives love having corporate masters, so they’re all staying on reddit.
You know, it’s so funny (though obviously not in an enjoyable way per se) how those folks are so selective and picky about freedom. Like freedom is OK when it’s the freedom to enter a supermarket without a mask, but it’s not OK when it’s the freedom to express your gender. And as in this example, when it comes to corporate masters…
Don’t you just love capitalism? And don’t you just loooooove capitalists? It’s honestly frightening how reminiscent it is to the way the fascists took power in 1930s Germany.
And by the way, I’m noticing a parallel with how much they not only embrace conservative evangelical Christendom, but also act like it’s the epitome of freedom and liberty - the American Dream, if you will. If you attend one of the US’s most notorious fundie schools, you’re not allowed to stay up late, mingle with the opposite gender too much, attend dances, or be pretty much anything other than cishet (and implicitly, cishet white male). The irony of how said school is named “LIBERTY” University never seems to die on me.
Sounds like a win-win for everyone.
A lot of the political discussion I’ve read on here has also been pretty well thought out. I feel like people are taking time to explain their perspective more and even if in general it’s been more left leaning there is definitely more nuance. I was surprised by the quality of some of the discussion around the end of affirmative action.
Fewer conservatives, yes. If it wasn’t for the harcore tankies and trolls it would really be perfect. But it’s very close, much better than Reddit.
how do you do, fellow adults?
my back hurts
I have a headache
Just had my yearly colonoscopy
We do a bit of adultery
I think it’s more just because we’re early adopters and the first wave of refugees.
We’re building something here - and right now, for some it’s a new home, for some of us this is something big - a place that resists monetization. This isn’t just the fresh new version of social media, built by cool people who have the best intentions and a vision (I think most of them did, at least initially)
Admins go bad, already some of the instances I’m on have people starting to look at not just paying for servers, but making a profit. And if they can live off the donations - fine, more power to them.
But when someone comes knocking with a bag of money, what are they going to do? They can sell us out, but they can’t go far before we leave… What do we miss out on? The content will either follow or we’re missing out on content elsewhere.
And we can mitigate it further - too many talented people care too much to let this idea die. We’re going to face difficult times, but it’s a new ephemeral Internet built on top of the one stolen from us - it doesn’t start or end with a reddit clone.
And I think that’s why we care - because this time is different. It can’t go bad the way everything else does. It relies on no one, and it’s built from all of us
This place is ours. No kings, no masters, no capitol, no capital
all of you are wrong. lemmy looks like it does now because it’s first of all and most importantly small.
the reason why it’s small is that there are barriers for entry, be it effort needed to understand federation for the first time or choosing instance. “ooh just choose anything it’s not that hard” shut the fuck up. it’s a barrier because you can see that numbers are quite low, and just because you’ve come through it already doesn’t mean it’s not there
but there’s bigger issue. depending on instance and how do you count, some 95%+ of new active users could have been rexxiters. this means that by coming there they have to leave reddit, and that means leaving communities that were there
average person isn’t stupid or malicious or unenlightened plebeian. average person is just. average. because of small lemmy’s size people there are subject to strong selection bias, namely on gaussian distribution of “how much do you care about moving there” that’s far right tail that sits there. what are reasons for that, for every person that would be a bit different. some of these are FOSS enthusiasts or techlibertarians or softcore anticapitalists, this has some serious implications. some were banned from reddit but want replacement (some of these were shown door already, like exploding-heads).
now, crossection of “people who cared to come there” and “programmers” is reasonably big, as evidenced by programming.dev, but for any other unrelated topic there’s much less. crossection of “people who care” and “people who are good at identifying mushrooms” or “aviation fans” or whatever is small, maybe too small to form new community. these people would need to leave reddit and their community and come there, doing nothing because they have no other fellow mushroom identificators to talk to. so, many don’t. there’s also probably negative selection of specific kind of people like some conspiracy theorists, at least for now
if you want to see lemmy grow, you would see dilution of that concentrated techbro sentiment with people who are otherwise average, but these people are also there to form new, specialized communities. you might want to gatekeep them out with some eternal september scenario, but it most likely won’t work. personally i think that lemmy needs to grow a few times over for these diverse “unrelated communities” to form, and then things will get pretty sustainable
another thing is that there’s no ads and no selection for hostile content or conspiracy theories, and that might be related to how lemmy’s algorithm is not driven by engagement, at least that’s how it looks like. and also bots, i’ve seen entire subreddits written by chatgpt or some dude who tried hard to do something similar by hand, and i hope to avoid this here at least for some time. the kids are alright
I don’t support age shaming. Let’s not be those people.
Yeah the kids these days have some weird memes and I’m here for it. So much better than the rage comics from when I was their age
Lemmy is so good right now because there’s no commercialization here.
When I was a kid I thought grown ups were annoying, when I was in my 20s I thought teenagers were annoying, in my 30s I think people in their 20s are annoying. People will always have something to complain about others. “Kids” is just a different group for different people.
I’m 32 and indefinitely can relate. Every generation has been worse than the last since time immemorial, apparently.
It’s so good because a lot of people have been waiting for a viable alternative to Reddit for half a decade or longer. It’s non-corporate internet, the way it should be.
Non corporate internet, just like the days of old 🥲
What do you mean? I’m 16/f/cali
It’s not an age thing, It’s the same reason the internet generally got toxic after a time people who aren’t passionate about things take over and drown out the high effort contributers
Sounds like someone needs a good teabagging followed up with a dab… or are kids not doing that stuff anymore? I don’t even know what’s hip now.