How have you personally found the Lemmy community compared to its competition and other social media?
How have you personally found the Lemmy community compared to its competition and other social media?
You're viewing a single thread.
I am reading a lot more toxic discussion and really angry people here on lemmy than i did on reddit, which makes me sometimes think i might be at the wrong place. I blocked some of the communities that pull american politics in my feed but still. On reddit, i was good reading just my niche interest subs, but there is very little traffic here for niche stuff, so i end up reading the crazy talk too.
My experience is exactly the same. I find people way more toxic here, and way more extreme discussions. I still reddit more on my PC, RES makes reddit worthwhile, and I'm unsubbed to most of the very popular subreddits, so my feed is mostly tailored to my hobbies and interests, which don't seem to be either very active here, or don't exist yet.
Since I don't reddit on my phone anymore cause I can't use RIF, I use kbin. But it's rather lackluster to me.
Odd, my experience is the opposite. Everyone here is chill and I rarely get flooded with downvotes. I’ve only had one asshole in my replies.
Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works defederated from some of the more problematic instances. You'll see it happen more on lemmy.ml.
That hints me that what people here is calling "toxic" is politics-related, since I'm a lemmy.ml user and I certainly would not say that my experience here is overall "toxic".
And, funnily enough, most of the issues that I had were with users from either lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works; sometimes lemm.ee.
A lot of it politics related in that someone posts something even slightly critical of communism and a ton of people dogpile on them.
There may be toxic 1v1 conversations, but I generally see dogpiling only from one side.
Got it - mostly politics, then. That explains a lot why you guys are seeing far more toxicity than I do, I don't generally join political discussions. (And when I do, since I'm myself communist, perhaps I don't even notice it.)
Yeah. If you don't participate in the discussions and you aren't likely to get targeted if you do, you probably won't see it.
I agree with you, for the most part this has been my experience as well.
Yeah I think it's because there's so much less engagement here than on Reddit. The same toxic people would have been buried or down voted to hell over there, but here with far far fewer comments those toxic trolls will remain visible and take up a disproportionate amount of any comments section.
There's also a selection bias thing going on, people who would get shadow banned or downvoted on Reddit find that they get engagement with their content here so stick around, the people who they put off will leave, which causes the toxicity ratio to go up and eventually the place will end up full of toxic commenters and posters. With a federated system this is an incredibly difficult problem to solve.
There's some interesting musings on how this can affect the development of online spaces here which has stuck with me since I read it. https://eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/
You also have a few things Reddit did or could do that you can't really do on Lemmy. You also have, with a few exceptions, a rather new moderation team on Lemmy without the years of experience that some Reddit moderators had.
Outside of the mass defederation of any Nazi instances, Lemmy has been a lot weaker on overall moderation.
On lemmy, I've literally been told that I should be tortured and nuked because I was born in the US, and then got banned for defending myself.
I find Reddit way more toxic, especially post the purge from the lack of apps. It's like their moderation ranked or something. It's probably different in smaller pages, but I've found the front page over there is way worse than Lemmy nowadays in terms of quality of conversation.
Given the purge was due to moderator access to API's, I'm not surprised.
The halcyon days lasted about month. After that each post sounded more and more like that 14 year old atheist reading the bible meme.
I've noticed an ebb and flow to that. It seems like anger goes down when activity goes up, which is the opposite of what I would usually expect from the internet but that's how it's been on here. I have an account where I filter/block things and one where I don't so I can see what's really going on, and when there's too much hate and rage content on the front page I take a break from lemmy for a while.
I think most of the people who say lemmy isn't toxic at all are probably people who found a bubble where people don't push back on their personal brand of toxicity very much.
It depends a lot on what you consider "toxic".
If it's just about intrusive off-topic political discussion, then I fully agree with you: it's far more common in Lemmy than in Reddit, and sometimes it reaches a point that even people who'd otherwise enjoy discussing politics roll their eyes and say "not this shit again".
However, if "toxic" includes other forms of undesirable behaviour, then Lemmy is probably less toxic than Reddit. For example: while sometimes you do see here disingenuous and deliberate stupidity, "waah TL;DR!!", the "I don't understand" conveying disagreement, or passive aggressiveness, in Reddit they pop up all the time.
So, what do you consider toxic? Depending on that, the other users' experiences might be really similar or really different from yours.
intrusive off-topic political discussion
Yeah that is pretty much what i meant.