I don’t necessarily disagree, I just think that the solution is to cultivate the content here. Not connect with the same old corporate platforms that caused the problems in the first place.

Same. Ideally, Lemmy would be a Reddit replacement for me.

I got a tired of the cliched site culture and some people’s attitudes. I suppose it’s because it’s such a large slice of the public that you get more people being dicks and leaving drive-by jerky comments. The overdone in-jokes and pun threads got to be a bit much too. I needed something like Lemmy to demonstrate what I was missing on reddit.

I thought I didn’t until I came here and realized how nasty Reddit has become. You can go days on Lemmy without encountering an angry asshole.

Also, I don’t think that the way to deal with “there is content on a platform that I don’t like” is to run from it. It’s to make better filtering systems to choose what I want. Two reasons:

• First, some people like different things. They shouldn’t have to use different platforms just for that.

• Second, stuff like spam will show up anywhere that has decent size anyway eventually, once there are enough eyeballs for it.

I think that the goal should be to have plenty of content of all sorts on the Threadiverse, and then just have good filtering tools that are hard to subvert.

Reddit didn’t let people build the filtering tools they wanted in and in some cases – like when it came to their own ads – were actively opposed to that. The Threadiverse solves that problem for me.

I’m in the same boat. I want Lemmy to be a firehose of content, the overwhelming majority of which I won’t ever want to interact with. I want that because different people are interested in different things, and that’s what allows for even the niche communities to find their footing with more than a small contingent of people.

I think the tools at our disposal as users and administrators of Fediverse systems are already good enough to manage and control your own experience, and I’m confident that they’ll continue to improve at a rapid click. The experience of using Lemmy as a Reddit replacement has already improved dramatically since June 12th, and it does so every day. I appreciate that others may feel much more strongly about the “dumbing down” of the overall content and community than I do, and for those folks joining an instance that outright defederates is a great option.

Folks are quick to tell people how they should be using Lemmy. “Don’t sign up for one of the big instances, you should use a small one instead because federation” is a big one - but there’s a lot of appeal in this model with being signed up to the instances generating the majority of the content the broader community is consuming because it makes finding that content easier than it otherwise would be. My hope is that the larger instances like lemmy.world will at least test the waters with Threads federation to see what it actually does to the community before taking the step of defederation, because right now those large instances are what’s feeding the rest of the rest of Lemmy.

As it stands, having those large instances federated with Threads and having smaller communities defederated seems like a best of both worlds scenario, because a small instance defederating with Threads won’t lose out on the other content being generated by those larger instances, but those who want to trudge through the mire of mass appeal can do so in one place.

Mm… you do have a point, but I would argue that the content is generally better at the very least to the degree that it’s actual people sincerely posting things rather than bots, shills and karma farmers spamming and/or astroturfing.

And yes - niche communities are extremely underpopulated here.

I don’t think the solution to that though is to aim for more generic “content” with the hope that it’ll lead to broad growth and that a byproduct of that will be to bring more people who happen to share your interests. The solution IMO is to get on the communities you want to see grow and start contributing stuff, right now. Even if you’re just posting to one person, keep at it, and pretty soon it’ll be two, then three, then…

I hear you! You and me both, I’ve always been more of a lurker on almost every social media. However here I feel more comfortable posting than anywhere else because I know people aren’t here just to troll, gain followers through controversy or self-promote, so it feels way better.

You’ll get comfortable soon enough

I appreciate your comment and points you made. Hope you keep at it too!

It’s appropriate because that kind of shit happens irl, too. Small city with a cool local vibe becomes popular, people move to the city because it’s popular, all the popular stuff gets priced out and paved over to make room for more Starbucks. Then people whine about how cool the city used to be. Gee, I wonder what happened to it?!

aa

Well… yes and no.

I’m not talking about any effect I think it might have on me, because yes - I can just avoid the instances favored by morons.

To belabor the analogy a bit more, it’s not quite accurate to say that they want this neat little cafe to be McDonalds - they want the entire town to be McDonalds. They want to be able to open up their door snd see nothing but McDonalds, stretching to the horizon in all directions.

That that literally can’t happen - that the decentralized nature of the ActivityPub means that the most anyone can ever do is turn instances into empty wastelands of brain-dead “content” one at a time - doesn’t make their viewpoint any less perplexing to me.

More like a small town that used to have real restaurants that got driven out of business when McDonalds came to town selling shit on a plate so cheap it was impossible to be price competitive with food suitable for humans.

The mere existence of McDonalds dramatically hurt the options available.

It’s not about friends and morals though, it’s about data, open standards, and what you want the net to be.

If John’s fascist friends have very strong views about the way they want the friends of their friends to interact, and the vast resources to influence John into the trajectory that aligns with their desires, then perhaps a refusal to interact with John is the only option for someone with no resources. It’s the paradox of tolerance.

Take for example Google Chrome, at one time it was a plucky little open source competitor to the established browsers interacting with open standards. Now they’re killing ad-blocking. This wouldn’t have happened if no one had switched to Chrome. I personally can’t control what browser everyone else uses, but I can choose which browser I support.

What I’m wondering is go fat would that go. You could have an instance that defederates from an instance because it’s federated with another instance that is federated with Meta. And so on and so forth. To me that will just create a group of instances that aren’t federated with anything else…

More people, introduces different problems.

For example, not having enough people engaging in a more niche community is a HUGE problem, which can only really be fixed with more people.

A big part of the reason yes, but I think advertising has an insidious role also.

Lemmy instance admins have no financial interest in user’s time on site. There’s no outrage machine to drive engagement.

i mean if you want a social media network to grow…

I think what it means is that it doesn’t add up all the little arrows across all posts and comments, by default. Although, I suppose an instance, external tool, or browser plugin could still do that.

I don’t want to keep them from it. I just prefer they go to their other platforms for it. Because by inviting it to this platform, it degrades this platform in my eyes. I don’t have another place to go to get away from that content, they do have a place they can go to for that content. I’d appreciate it if we can respect that boundary. Keep this place free from the corporations that are destroying so much of our world. At least as much as possible. Nothing good can come from opening this door, and if it opens, history will repeat itself once more because there is always a new crop of people unwilling to listen to warnings. No good comes from aligning with growth at all costs corporations. It just isn’t possible.

I really don’t think anything justifies the massive data collection that currently happens. While “feeding the algorithm” may be their superficial excuse, data harvesting is really there for the resale value.

I really like that idea.

It would absolutely demolish the risk of a community turning into a meme sub, or one of subs where people just post pictures of their Raspberry Pi in some retail case over and over again.

And as long as pictures are disallowed on the main post, people could still be free to post links to guides or other important content that contains pictures.

I asked a similar question previously one of the makers of lemmy responded to me:

Open an issue on that or write a bot

… I thought sometime in the future I will make such a bot … but turns out I need to use typescript for that.

The instance I’m in limited pictures upload size to 265kb.

I’m also an ignorant slut

Just wanted to say that ya made me laugh with that phrase lol. I too enjoy using “slut” in a myriad of fashions

Your username is a hell of a reference, haha

It’s better if they did that, but they are not doing that.