I imagine there’s excitement for the increase of activity but worries about the potential toxic side of Reddit coming along too.
I’d especially be interested in the Lemmy devs’ opinions.
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I think the conventional way this is handled on Reddit is separating memes and fluff into one one community (subreddit) and more discussion based content into another community. It works on Reddit because even if the memes get more engagement in an absolute sense, each subreddit has it’s own yard stick for what is doing well, so a discussion that makes it to the front page of its own subreddit will make it through to the front page of users who are subscribed, alongside the memes. I don’t yet know enough about how Lemmy ranks posts to know if this will work, but hopefully it will.
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Can give you some examples? That is definitely not my experience, the few subreddits I visit often only have memes every once and while and they often get removed quickly by the mods redirecting them to dedicated meme subreddits.
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Sure, when it’s r/all by top. But a massive part of it is subreddits, which then constitute the front page. The majority of my Reddit front page isn’t memes, because my main subscriptions are things like acting, patientgamers, askhistorians, piano, etc. Which don’t have many, if any, memes posted.
Subs that regularly hit /r/all kind of lose their own identity
This is what I am hoping will happen. With the current reddit structure, for each topic, you have multiple communities -
- The noob-friendly one that is not actively moderated and has a lot of reposts and garbage content
- The offshoot that was created because the main sub went downhill. Has stricter moderation and content policies.
- The meme offshoot that was created because the main sub banned memes.
- The circlejerk version.
/r/gaming is garbage, /r/games is for discussion. /r/StardustCrusaders is a fan-art dump, /r/Shitpostcrusaders is a meme juggernaut The mods of the Game of Thrones subreddit wouldn’t allow people to shit on the show, so /r/freefolk was formed, and that also served as a template for stuff like /r/titanfolk.
Anything that gains critical mass will break down into multiple sub communities. It’s inevitable.
I like this model, although circlejerk can be the meme version too. Even a fairly quiet sub like /r/baduk/ begat /r/badukshitposting/ and it works well.
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I think the nature of the fediverse ends up serving as a barrier to entry to the “average” social media user. This is probably why Mastodon hasn’t replaced Twitter despite all the dumb things that they have done with the site. As much as people dislike the idea of gatekeeping, I think a moderate amount is necessary to prevent a lot of low effort content that gets promoted on other platforms.
As someone who has been on Reddit for the past 10 years or so, I noticed a dip in quality of r/all and a change in the community when new Reddit came out. Probably because the UI of new Reddit seemed to be geared toward a “feed” style of content consumption, similar to FB or Twitter, so people from those platforms started joining in large numbers and changing the culture. It seems like the recent migration/exodus from Reddit comes mainly from old.reddit users who value discussion and the “forum” style more (new.reddit users probably don’t care about 3rd party apps since they just use the official app anyway), so hopefully the quality of content and discussions doesn’t suffer too much.
I’m all about it! Great to see a platform take off when it’s centered around being ad free and open sourced.
I’m in Lemmy for, like, two years? Mostly lurking. I’ve been looking for alternatives for longer than that though.
I feel like the monsoon is mostly welcome. Content quality may decrease a bit, but the quantity will make up for it. And quantity is what has been missing IMO.
In special I’m hoping for specialised instances about some subjects that I enjoy. I like the Lemmy instance but stuff like anime and conlanging “feels” off-topic here.
Quantity has a quality all its own. I’m glad everyone here is so welcoming and looking forward to seeing how things develop.
Just to note, I just came from Reddit. I’m hoping for a critical mass of folks so we get those niche and specialty communities.
In special I’m hoping for specialised instances about some subjects that I enjoy. I like the Lemmy instance but stuff like anime and conlanging “feels” off-topic here.
Do you mean for subscribing to the communities of these new instances, or would you completely switch to that instance (create a new account there)?
I’ve noticed some lags/asyncronity with non-home instance content. I guess it would make sense to be home wherever is the most and best fitting communities. But that would also mean leaving behind the stuff of the current account.
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I’m a lemmygrad user, so it’s been a little annoying dealing with people who wander in to troll but it’s not too bad
I hope the reddit echo box ‘our way or the highway’, ‘everything is a pun’ mentality doesn’t transfer over as well
When someone shares a personal story about his wife’s struggle with cancer and the top reply is “I also choose this guy’s dead wife”
Aww, but Reddit pun threads are fun.
Agreed, I hope there is room for pun threads here too.
Once you’ve seen the Anne Frankly one more than a few times, you’ll have had enough
They’re fine when appropriate. It’s nauseating how they’re inserted everywhere.
Yeah, when a simple bots can post most of the replies. E.g.
if post.contains("r/theydidthemath") { post.reply("/r/theydidthemonstermath"); }then it’s gone too far. There are some good, creative ones, like The Old Reddit Switch-a-roo, but they’re too few and far between.
To each his own I guess. To me it’s too much of the same regurgitated over and over again like a meme that stopped being funny years ago
I imagine a non-zero number of walled off instances forming cause “they banned me for _____”
I’m actually quite pleased at the new influx of users! There’s finally a good amount of activity and real discussion going on here, instead of just posts with links to articles with zero comments and no real OC.
Aside from that, I have enough faith in the moderators and the structure of the platform itself that there shouldn’t be too much of a toxicity problem. Honestly, my own biggest fear is just that a lot of the new users here lose interest and move on, returning the platform to its earlier days.
For now, I just hope that the servers don’t go down in flames when the 12th comes around. I can’t wait to see how this platform will look further down the road though!
I literally just signed up and this is the first comment I’ve read. I feared we might be seen as outsiders so thanks. I’ve been banned from Reddit for quite some time but lurked on RIF. Hopefully Lemmy can scale in time.
I have enough faith in the moderators and the structure of the platform itself that there shouldn’t be too much of a toxicity problem.
My concern: Are there enough moderators for the deluge coming?
Maybe not for the initial deluge, but with sustained growth the number of mods will grow too
Maybe, maybe not, but the instances have the option of closing registrations for a bit if they get overwhelmed and need to regroup. This is why it’s nice to see lots of other instances popping up across the fediverse
Maybe I’m missing something but how will that help the moderation, since users can visit/comment from any instance?
It’s fricking amazing. There is regular conversation and places that have been dead for years are reviving themselves.
Pretty happy.
The place and platform is capable of growth and diversity … on which, many should consider starting their own instances just to spread the load and allow people to find their moderation homes.
I’ve been wanting the fediverse to be more topic/group/community based than a twitter clone since I got here, so it makes sense to see some interest in these “Threadiverse” style platforms.
There’ll be growing pains, and the current admins and devs are probably going through some pain now. Sorry! I just hope enough community leaders, former sub-reddit mods and future admins will see the value in distributing social media and help pick up the slack.
More broadly, for those who don’t know, IMO, the fediverse has been suffering from an essentially oppressive dominance by Mastodon. Everyone thinks the fediverse is just Mastodon. Though that’s completely untrue, as there are a number of alternative platforms, some of which are rather novel and interesting, it is numerically very true with Mastodon comprising
80%of fediverse users.Generally, this amount of dominance is almost certainly bad for the future health of the fediverse and the values it seeks to promote (ie, interconnected platform and community diversity). Mastodon, at the moment, is creeping towards being just another centralised platform … essentially an OSS non-profit Twitter in its own right, which isn’t a bad thing at all, but not what the fediverse is about.
Enter the Threadiverse! Lemmy, /kbin (and even calckey a little with what will hopefully become its federated channels), and others. Not just platform diversity, but medium or format diversity.
At this moment, IMO, it is very valuable to the fediverse at large, that lemmy, /kbin etc grow and do well.
Love it, welcome everyone!
Hello /me waves
I fired up my own personal test instance so I can experiment with figuring out ways to reduce bottlenecks on the sysadmin/devops side - used to run the various PHP forums back in the day, so hoping to pass on some knowledge eventually.
I figure the toxic side(s) will gravitate towards instances that will tolerate their behaviour which is easier to deal with. Mods will be busy for a little bit though, and I wouldn’t be surprised if registrations closed for a bit on some of the bigger instances so they can catch up if they don’t just fall flat over on the heavy days. But, lots of smart folks trying to prep for this.
Any idea what hardware specs you need to run an instance? Like for 100 users, 1.000, 10k etc?
Or the hardware lemmy.ml runs on and the userbase?
It’s still a little unknown at this time what you need to handle X number of users, beyond a few hundred. Beehaw.org is pretty open about what they’re using though in their financial statements if you’re curious, but there’s of operational optimization being tried out to see what’ll help.
The stack is: postgres, pictrs, lemmy (Rust), lemmy-ui (nodejs), and nginx. RAM usage isn’t too bad, but so far I see CPU and disk I/O (pictrs) as the limitation. Websockets are being removed which was another hurdle - would cause nginx worker threads to max out and drop instances off.
I’m on a 6$/month droplet as a reference for my single user instance and I’m subbed to a boatload of communities. So far I’m not having problems, but I made a 2GB swapfile for safety if RAM somehow spiked. CPU usage for me tends to spike when a community is being loaded for the first time due to image processing, but otherwise things are pretty idle.
I have an i-5 6core dell sitting so why shouldn’t I spin up a node?
I’m mostly worried about maintenance and it breaking down one day, how do you deal with that in a good way?
Regular backups should do the job. It’s all run in docker instances with mapped volumes, so you can just backup those contents regularly and roll-back worst case if things completely pooped out. Otherwise maintenance isn’t really much worse than a normal webserver - great for learning Linux CLI if you’re not already familiar.
No reason you shouldn’t spin up a node though! The more the better - lets load spread out.
I’m looking forward to the increase in traffic tbh. I have setup a pretty beefy instance with a ton of monitoring on it so that hopefully after the wave I can create a nice write up on what it would take to scale lemmy in the future. I’ll keep everyone updated with the results!
Yeah, this is a golden moment for those of us who like to learn from sudden heavy load on server software! There are not very many teachable moments like this out there, so I’m trying to soak everything up for work experience
It’s good. This place was pretty much a ghost town a few months ago with only a few users posting.
Honestly, while most people here have been alright, toxic newcomers have been a problem and I consider this place ill-prepared to handle them in a bigger wave than this one.
There has already been an observable culture shift, and some nasty screaming when some newcomers used to being a majority are challenged in their views and shocked to find a nontrivial pushback. And I feel that lemmy.ml will undergo a similar event to /r/antiwork if there isn’t staff action taken , where the place loses all its values and just becomes a sanewashed recuperated place that feels cheated when its founders keep saying what they said from the start. People largely just don’t read rules or sidebars, it seems, and realize lemmy.ml explicitly says it isn’t a general unthemed instance for everyone. It’s broad, but not ‘reddit’ broad, nor (pretending to be) politically neutral. Relevant source
Edit: I realize this may come off as “why aren’t other people doing more things!”. I realize the staff/devs are overloaded, I’m not blaming them to telling them to drop things. But I regret how few moderating/admin staff were recruited, and we’re seeing how many communities were made 4 years ago and have no active moderation, nor culture to avoid this becoming ‘reddit but here’.
I don’t know how to interpret “everyone should feel welcome here” other than it is for everyone. As far as culture shift, it really is impossible to maintain the more “fringe” leftist culture with an increase in users, marxist-leninist simply do not exist in large enough numbers. I don’t really see why lemmy.ml shifting its majority political leaning would be something negative to you, since the only thing that would happen would be more discussion in the comments, and if discussion isn’t something desirable, places like lemmygrad do exist
I’m not even talking about the M-Ls, I mean even as broad as anti-capitalism and tech/FOSS. There was a meta discussion a while back I started seeking clarification on what “leftist” in the lemmy.ml blurb means, suggesting something less vague. Because to the devs, it evidently doesn’t mean ‘progressive capitalists’.
This isn’t just some preference, because these factors are precisely why Lemmy won’t become another reddit disaster. And no, they’re not niche groups. Even on reddit, these communities are substantial!
I’m new here from Reddit. I was a former Digg user. Over the past few years, Reddit has gotten swamped with spam and low quality content. I was most at home there on the niche subreddits that were still earnest and not spammy. I hope things stay that way over here.
I’ve made a small donation to help Lemmy grow. It’s not much, but scaling up to handle the escapees is a big deal. Having the money to grow and build robust processes to keep content thoughtful and helpful is important. While I love the funny posts and memes sometimes on reddit, it’s really infested the popular subreddits to the point of being excessive. Ergo, I tend to hang out in smaller spaces where the dialog is more “straight up”.
What’s the link to donate?
Check near the bottom of https://join-lemmy.org/
There you can see the different options to support Lemmy.
I went here because I could do a one time donation. I plan to see how things go and eventually set up a recurring one though.
https://opencollective.com/lemmy
I found it on the main lemmy page where you sign up for a server. It probably needs to be posted in more places, like on the communities pages. (there’s a patreon site too where you can donate)
I joined the Beehaw instance a bit ago with a small exodus from Tildes, another Reddit alternative. It’s been nice to see the community grow and grow steadily as time progressed, and seeing the Reddit refugees makes me hopeful for the platform’s strength going into the future regardless of what Reddit does with its API (or other features).
As for the toxic side of Reddit, I’m more concerned for the devs in having to deal with the reports, but as a Reddit mod myself, I don’t think it’ll be too bad. At least on Beehaw we have a supportive community and I’m reminded of a video talking about the userbase of the early UseNet and how they dealt with the first spammer (not necessarily their methods, but the fact that they rose up as a community to enforce a community rule). Hopefully we can see that here (i.e. “the report button exists”).
Edit: a detail
a small exodus from Tildes
I’ve seen Tildes being proposed as a Reddit alternative along Lemmy, what was the exodus about?
I’m also wondering about this. I remember seeing Tildes promoted a few months ago but haven’t seen any mentions of it recently.
From what I remember, it had to do with the moderating decisions of the person behind Tildes.
