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
Nice job buddy
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.
Mastodon has some weird etiquette I don’t quite understand. Maybe it’s because I’ve never really used “microblogging” or much social media outside old forums. Most people seem to use it for self-promotion. If you respectfully disagree on some part of someone’s post or just try to be helpful and add more context, sometimes the OP gets upset (I’ve heard the term “reply-guy” mentioned on there before, and also seen “experts” pulling the “do you know who you are talking to” card when others try to add context). There is little discussion and interaction from what I’ve seen; mostly just posts without meaningful replies.
Politically, Lemmy seems to lean left-ish. Mastodon leans liberal, but there’s more variety than Lemmy (I guess since interaction is low). I haven’t used Bsky, but I saw when Stephen King announced he voted for Platner he got dogpiled (dunno if that means Bsky leans establishment Dem that would prefer zionist and corporate Janet Mills or what).
I hear you about Mastodon. I want to use it and find “my people” there, but it’s unfortunately just eery quiet, and I don’t see a lot of conversation happening. Most posts just have zero replies, even.
I did get a shockingly nice set of welcomes from people when I used the “first post” hashtags or something. That was cool. It has the potential to be cozy!
It’s weird, because we’re naturally social creatures, so what part of the “culture” drives such a specific lack of engagement, I wonder?
But also the etiquette can be a bit confusing. I’m on a gamedev oriented instance, so they’re like “Hey keep it on topic please.”
…So I guess it’s not a place for my cat pictures or random life musings? And yeah thanks to the modern nature of the Internet, most people take “community” to mean “Networking opportunity to promote (or recruit for) My Thing.”
Even weirder, I notice engagement falling off here on Lemmy but…damnit I got thousands of comments racked up. It’s practically a writing exercise space for me at this point lol. But it feels less personal.
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.
Classic internet warriors, but if you don’t care about how much upvotes and downvotes you have, you are golden. Banned from a community? Probably not a place I would want to hang out then anyway, even if it is my topic, the community is simply toxic and it’s better not to be there. Just be yourself.
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.
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!
deleted by creator
Not at all, actually.
No it just feels like a young forum.
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.
Hostile, no not really. Less tolerance for bullshit isn’t necessarily hostile.
Insular? Yeah. It’s a small community.
less tolerance for other valid opinions is hostile though. You can’t call differing opinions bullshit
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…
All that’s missing is that one guy who spams emoji gifs they linked from another site because they just found out they could do that.
Be the change you want to see!
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.
The reddit way?
The only social media I have ever gotten into was Reddit. I was on that platform for over a decade. But eventually it became too toxic and caused me way too much stress. Every innocuous post or comment I made was subject to a barrage of unnecessary and unjustified criticism. I was constantly being banned anywhere from 72-hours to permanently for no logical reason. So after a decade I deleted my account.
I’ve noticed Lemmy seems to be going this way too compared to when I first joined a year and a half ago. The user base seems to be swelling with self-righteous Karens waiting to tear down any and all content. And, just like Reddit, the mods are falling dutifully into line behind them. Lemmy is far less enjoyable today than it was only six months ago. If trolls just ranted I’d ignore and block but the mods support them by deleting content. I’m a grown ass man pushing sixty years old. I can make my own mind up about content and comments. I don’t need somebody else doing it for me.
Absolutely. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve been burned at the stake for this three times over already.
