I’ve noticed that there seems to be an emphasis on being extremely serious at all times, as if every single comment is a PhD dissertation being evaluated or something. There’s like this weird, subtle one upmanship about every little thing and a lot of people are very nitpicky and judgmental. It kind of takes the fun out of being on here, TBH. Or am I the only one experiencing this?
Pee pee poo poop
Its simply the old internet: A highly autistic place filled with highly intelligent (or at least, that is what they think of themselves) people with tons of StarTrek, inside jokes and oh so much petty grudges.
As someone who was around at the time of the Usenet and the end if the BBS era I love it, but it is a bit of an acquired taste…
Hostile, no not really. Less tolerance for bullshit isn’t necessarily hostile.
Insular? Yeah. It’s a small community.
Its raw internet. You gotta put effort into customizing it to your taste.
As someone who’s trying go find my place online… Having tried Mastodon, Lemmy, mBin, nostr, bsky, wafrn, etc. Lemmy is by far the most hostile and it’s not even close. Yes there may be more trolls on nostr. But it’s obvious trolling. Not serious hostility.
Honestly, Lemmy feels like an echo chamber. I only rarely see people disagreeing with the OP or being willing to accept different opinions without judging.
On other networks, I don’t sense as much anger or judging based on single statements. I once made an unfortunate and unclear statement on Bluesky and while the immediate reaction from some of the other people in there was definitely negative, it was more of a conversation and it actually ended up feeling like we all ended up moving on. Lemmy feels more like a place where you say something that’s borderline centrist and you’ll be slaughtered in bright daylight and hung out to dry.
But I may just have been browsing the wrong communities I guess.
I’m not saying I’m not an asshat at times. I am human, after all. It’s just that on other networks, I feel there’s more opportunity to have an actual debate instead of being lynched by a thousand anonymous community-beloved personalities.
Naa its mostly fun to me! And the people i interact with seem like good people for the most part.
Agreed. And to dispell the impression of posts having to be PhD dissertations: Pee pee poo poo
I am, however, a judgmental prick, but I (usually) keep those opinions to myself. I will silently judge youbased on your posts and comments, and leave it at that.
Pee pee on poo poo
I find myself generally well received in both serious posts and dumb jokes. I rarely actually run into anyone that hard headed.
My most upvoted comments are ways jokes.
Same as with Reddit, it probably depends what community you’re participating in. But i find most of Lemmy to be mostly reasonable like the communities I participated in Reddit. And mind you, I don’t have any particular Lemmy communities I frequent in.
Sounds like Lemmy’s already shaping up to compete with Reddit!
OK I’m kidding - I think you’re kind of right, Lemmy can get that sometimes, but much like Reddit, it’s only really on the bigger communities that you always see on the front page, smaller ones are pretty chill in my experience.
I guess it depends on what you’re seeing hostility towards, but I will also say that with Lemmy’s status as an open source social media trying to compete against the likes of Reddit and Facebook, I find that the people here are naturally more protective of it from the sort of thing you’ll see on other sites. Also because of Lemmy’s status, it also attracts a LOT of political discussion, which has always been the most likely thing to descend into hostile crap flinging.
Oh, I should also mention, please just block the whole entire .ml instance. I can guarantee that it will improve your Lemmy experience and your mental health. I did it in my first few days here, and I sometimes forget just how bad it was before I did block it!
I’m only a month in to my Lemmy journey (a few days or so of being actually active now I understand how it works) and I have so far found totally the opposite.
It’s sure a lot nicer than reddit, we can express ourselves better here without worrying about the banhammer or shit like that. Hell on Reddit I used to get permanently muted from communities just cause I said a ‘bad word’ - once was by a really good sub because I directly quoted an Australian animated skit with the word cunt in it. I’m Aussie so I’m not offended by it in the least, it’s an Aussie staple that can mean all kinds of things.
People here seem nicer, smaller community, more open for a chat, don’t have to autistically worry about someone getting offended as often. More likely to upvote comments too.
In short, fuck Reddit haha.
Lemmy is rather small, you might be bumping into the same 3 users everywhere.
In the app I use I can “tag” people’s usernames and keep track of them across posts. It’s interesting to bump into “angry cyclist” being aggressive again about a completely random topic. It kind of puts it into perspective that it might just be how this person sees the world, especially if they’re very active and keep showing up. It feels very much like older forums where the same people keep turning up, which is something I didn’t realise I missed.
Just an extension to this, when I used Reddit, /r/all was too big and had a bunch of crap I didn’t care about, and I browsed my home page of subscribed communities.
On here I only ever browse All, despite the drawbacks. I think it’s practically the only way to use Lemmy. OP might have subscribed to a dozen communities and felt claustrophobic especially if they’re coming from Reddit.
Different instances are more or less insular though. Hexbear can be good fun but once you realize 95% of the posts and comments are from like 200 people it feels more like a discord server than a federated link aggregator. db0 federates with most big instances so even our local communities don’t feel as insular. .world is .world, for better and for worse.
Sorry about that, I’ll try to get my friend on here who’s nicer than me.
Sounds about right. Outside of political threads, I’ve only noticed and tagged maybe three users that are truly toxic (as in they enter every conversation with an insult and devolve from there). The problem is that those users are active everywhere and make the Lemmyverse feel much less welcoming than it actually is.
Honestly, to me it feels more insular than Reddit. It feels like there’s no room for nuance in opinion. So for example, if I argue against something that isn’t a hard left economic idea I’ll get down voted pretty heavily even though it’s a pretty tame comment. It does feel like if you go against the grain here, it’s actually worse than that other site.
On Reddit if I posted something against the grain there would usually be one or two people who would chime in and say “yeah. I agree with this guy.” … But on Lemmy there’s no room for that.
I prefer it over the reddit way, tbh. Every comment section there is just filled with gifs and jokes, and you have to scroll miles to get a reasonable and sound answer to what OP was asking. It’s especially frustrating when I’ve searched for an issue online and reddit pops up in the search results, and all responses are just bad repetitive jokes.
Also bots. There to sway public opinion.
Yeah. I’m assuming a lot of the meaningless drivel on there is bots “driving engagement” too
Not even that, there’s talking point level reactivity now that doesn’t fit the prior reactivity we were all accustomed to on old reddit.
“This 👆 💯 🤯”
I tip my hat to you good gentlesir! Upvotes to the left!
The reddit way?
Nah, I’m one of the baddies. I want conversation, not just memes and canned comments.
Treating every comment you disagree with as through it were a dissertation is called Isolated Demand For Rigor and it’s a bad faith tactic used to burden the opponent with a workload no sane person would ever take on for an internet comment and win by default. You should probably block anybody you see who does that.
No, not really. Are you spreading misinformation or something?
