PhilHow do pre-reddit influx lemmy members feel?
simpleDefinitely better. I tried getting into Lemmy about a year ago and it was kind of a miserable place. Most communities were abandoned and the website was less usable than now, the only active group were tankies (specifically CCP lovers). There just wasn't any demand for a Reddit alternative. I abandoned Lemmy and went back to Reddit not long after.
Now the website feels sooooo much livelier and is a much nicer place. The community isn't huge but it feels like the content I need to find is here, and as people settle in specific communities activity is going up! Once Lemmy fixes their bugs and Kbin fixes their federation I'm confident I won't want to go back to other websites.
That is promising , I was hoping we are not polluting the pool , so to speak
MonkeyhogIf anything, we're cleaning the pool
Imagine moving to a place that's home to a lot of people you don't like, and calling them dirty.
You mean, imagine all of human history since the earliest hominid first stood upright and saw another group across the savanna?
TheOneCurlyI had a very similar experience, my lemmy.ml account is about a year old and I bounced off it several times because of a lack of content and engagement. But now I think it'll stick, thanks spez.
Thanks for sharing your experience. It's good to hear there wasn't a lot going on because, honestly, coming here from Reddit feels a bit like participating in some sort of digital gentrification.
PorkrollPosadistGenerally positive, with caveats. Lemmy's early adopters were driven by an understanding that Reddit was not a viable platform for self organization, free discussion and association. We knew this day would eventually come.
The current wave of bans and hostile takeovers occurring on Reddit is nothing new for the radicals. We watched them suppress the Blue Leaks, we watched them shut down r/CTH in the middle of the George Floyd uprising, we watched them coup r/PresidentialRaceMemes, we watched them purge r/GenZhou, a community focused specifically on revolutionary theory.
Reddit has demonstrated time and time again that it is happy to serve as an instrument of counterinsurgency. This comes as no surprise, with an Atlantic Council alumnus heading their content moderation policy.
As one of the most astroturfed social media platforms on the Internet, Redditors bring a lot of those problems here. They tend to behave like they are the smartest people in the room, just because there are a lot of them. They like calling other websites echo chambers, when they hail from the biggest echo chamber on the English speaking net. The conspiracies I've seen them spread about the Lemmy devs and contributors have been absolutely wild.
I think time will heal most of them.
I have seen the conspiracies posts as well but assumed they were just reddit shill accounts spreading disinformation, no one I know has taken them seriously.
It is interesting to see this point of view, especially the "this day would come" bit, for me I sort of knew something was wrong , but it is like your local pub slowly being taken over, you do not want it to be true so you ignore stuff you should not.
Read for yourself what he writes on his website. It's pretty grim shit. https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#did-mao-kill-millions-of-people
Those do not appear to be written by him, but will do some more digging. However open exchange of views is wise in my opinion even if they are those I personally do not agree with.
Edit
Rightly ho, although I clearly have not read all the material on display (openly public btw) it is obviously the repository of someone who is willing to explore the far left politically , but the essays that might be by him(some are not accredited) are not on the subjects you mentioned, those are accredited to others. Now this dev might or might not agree with this stuff, they might be a politics student I can not say but I doubt anyone has asked. I am not sure it is particularly relevant in this thread anyway.
See my response to the other person.
I have read the responces , and I applaud the general tone of both sides of the discussion.
I have to just say that without view exchange , and expressly with view suppression , those who feel suppressed become even more intrenched. I for one learned from the debate.
Conspiracy? One of the devs has a website where he literally openly denies the Uyghur genocide, Tiananmen square massacre, "Mao did nothing wrong", "Ukrainians are Nazis", denies every single critique of USSR and China, and a whole lot of other vile shit. Read for yourself: https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#did-mao-kill-millions-of-people
This is the real test of the fediverse. Can software written by a piece of shit like that exist without being influenced by their garbage political views?
I think it's possible and I like Lemmy to thrive but it's important to keep an eye out for tankies and to not close your eyes to the reality of who started this.
I wish someone could explain to me how this wumao BS has gained any traction at all.
wumao
My point exactly. Nobody can possibly disagree with US State Department line unless they are getting paid.
tikitakiCan software written by a piece of shit like that
someone isn't a piece of shit because they hold different opinions than your own. it's OK to post articles even if you don't believe everything in them. I glanced through one of the articles about the death tolls under Mao - https://mronline.org/2006/09/21/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward/
The guy goes through analysis, cites sources, and makes an argument that the death toll is inflated due to Western propaganda.
Is that really such a piece of shit opinion? Wrong or right, I don't think the author did anything wrong nor the dev by putting it in some sort of compilation. People are allowed to disagree on controversial topics.
Remember Noam Chomsky? He got so much hate back in the day when he defended someone's right to be a holocaust denier. It's as if you are not allowed to critically think about certain topics.
For example the Ukraine nazis thing. Ukrainians are not Nazis - but the Ukrainian military did official incorporate a neo-nazi paramilitary group. Just saying that is grounds for someone to claim you're a Russian shill. I really wish people were more open minded and rational in discussion.
If you believe someone is wrong, explain why you think so instead of just attacking them like you are doing here.
Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward? | MR Online
Over the last 25 years the reputation of Mao Zedong has been seriously undermined by ever more extreme estimates of the numbers of deaths he was supposedly responsible for. In his lifetime, Mao Zedong was hugely respected for the way that his socialist policies improved the welfare of the Chinese people, slashing the level of poverty and hunger in China and providing free health care and education. Mao’s theories also gave great inspiration to those fighting imperialism around the world. It is probably this factor that explains a great deal of the hostility towards him from the Right. This is a tendency that is likely to grow more acute with the apparent growth in strength of Maoist movements in India and Nepal in recent years, as well as the continuing influence of Maoist movements in other parts of the world
Noam Chomsky is generally pretty smart, but he has some blinders. I am actually shocked to hear he would entertain this, as a Jew who was in his teenage years during the Holocaust. Was he doing the bone-headed ACLU “Even Nazis deserve the right to free speech” thing? If this is his position, I actually disagree with him.
The thing about the Holocaust is that there is a rigorous consensus that it took place, and that it was the worst atrocity in modern history. This is supported by anthropological evidence (the physical sites and artifacts where the exterminations took place), meticulous records recorded both by the perpetrators and the victims, the oral history of its survivors and their offspring. There are many well known people alive today who can name relatives who perished in the Shoah (Bernie Sanders and Norman Finkelstein, off the top of my head). My father met Eli Wiesel personally when he was in the hospital receiving medical treatment.
This is a very different case from the kind of academically discredited lies we see originating from the “Black Book of Communism,” which starts out by counting all the Axis KIA as victims of Communist brutality, and which ignores the now-available information revealed by the opening of the Soviet archives 30 years ago. If you apply the logic these people use for the Chinese Revolution to the US Civil War, you would come away with the conclusion that Abraham Lincoln murdered one million Americans and that the abolition of slavery was one of the greatest mistakes in history.
Marxism is supposed to be the eminent critique of all which exists, but the typical dork from Reddit who knows nothing at all about Chinese history except for Tank Man and thinks 1.4 billion people are just brainwashed subservient lemmings who need a white savior to come fix their country isn’t the person I care to talk to about it.
“Even Nazis deserve the right to free speech” thing
I'm sure he would say this. But in this specific case it's more of a question of not having any topic be off limits. I know there's a lot of emotions towards the holocaust and anyone who questions it is immediately labeled some sort of neo-nazi (and 90% of the time, that's what they are). Chomsky firmly believes in the Holocaust, because like you said, he experienced it. He's a Jew in his 90s.
But consider a world where you canno make an academic or scientific inquiry into a topic because "the issue has been resolved". What kind of world is that? He was defending a researcher who did an analysis into the Holocaust and came up with significantly different figures. Basically claiming the death toll was inflated. Which is, to the best of the research I've read, entirely incorrect. Something like 6 million people died in the Holocaust and there is plenty of evidence to show that.
But again, the point isn't whether the researcher was wrong or right. It's just that we can't set the precedent that certain topics are "finished" and can't be modified anymore. Because at that point we're not doing science or research - we're falling victim to ideology. Keep in mind the guy he was defending was getting charged with a crime since this was Europe and they have certain laws about Holocaust denial.
So we bring it back to the Lemmy devs. The article I read (I didn't read them all) was an analysis of the death toll of the Mao period and claims the figures were inflated. Does someone posting a link to this or otherwise sharing it make them a "genocide denier" and a "CCP tankie"?
This immediate lashing out when experiencing "wrongthink" is something I think is so toxic and dangerous to having serious discussions about sensitive topics. The more you study these things, the more you realize things are never black and white. There aren't good guys and there aren't bad guys. Or rather, maybe everyone's a bad guy. But I think you get my point.
Regardless, I appreciate your comment.
about the Lemmy devs
I mean, the devs haven't made it a secret about how they fully believe Chinese nationalist propaganda.
Not that it really matters though, since if any issues did come up, Lemmy itself would be forked with new devs "in charge" even if the original devs still continued most of the work. The lemmy.ml instance itself would be a different issue, though.
I, personally, would prefer slower linear and more organic growth. I want people to be here because the want to come, not because they want to run away from somewhere else.
But I do acknowledge that there was not much discussion going on and was not enough content for my procrastinating habits, nor I could keep myself informed in current events.
Thou I have had lemmy.ml account for three years now I never heard of beehaw before this reddit wave started, so that might be on me.
While I am positive overall, I do not like that some bad habits from reddit are resurfacing here, mostly not being able to have different opinion without someone insulting you.
I hope there will be enough instances where discussion and difference in opinion will be nurtured and welcome.
I guess that is well worth keeping in mind , coming from the cesspool that is reddit everything seems so polite here by comparison.
No it doesn't.
lowdownfoolHow dare you. Are you some sort of magat/commie/centrist/orcanist?
Lmaoo is an orcanist someone who supports the boat destroying orcas?
TIL I'm an orcanist.
slicedcheesegremlinI have noticed this as well. I've made a few excursions back to reddit since it keeps loading old comments I haven't yet mass-deleted to my profile page, and on the two trips where I didn't immediately close the browser afterwards, both times I clicked on a thread and immediately saw some inflammatory bait, got a little annoyed, and then remembered "wait, I don't browse this shithole anymore" and came on back.
I'm not perfect, not even close, but I'm definitely trying to check how I say things while I'm here because I want it to stay this was for as long as possible.
I have a pet peeve around people saying "this." When they agree with someone. Idk why... I was hoping I wouldn't see that here but unfortunately it's cropping up.
My concern is that and a bunch of other reddit-isms flood the site. I don't mind redditors coming here but I hope the site can still have its own identity.
There are a few others:
- "at least the is ok" on videos where someone gets hurt
- "no shoes therefore dead"
- "some ninja is cutting onions"
- "sir this is a Wendy's"
- Etc.
I mean this reddit post complaining about annoying phrases came out 9 years ago. 9 YEARS. And since then I continue to see so many of those and others.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1i5cd2/_/
I don't want to gatekeep either. But certain phrases repeated over and over is just so irritating.
snorkbubsI've seen the low-effort meme comments as well; I hated them on Reddit, and I hate them here. This topic had come up on Reddit many times over the years, and there's not really a way to combat it, from what I could tell. People with nothing to say still want to participate (e.g. earn fake internet points), and that seems to be a favored way do it.
Entomology subs like /r/whatsthisbug had a hard rule against comments like "kill it with fire", "nope", and "nuke it from orbit". It was explained in the sidebar, mods would actively remove the comments, and people would downvote them, but it barely made a dent. Scroll to the bottom of a post and you'd see the same stupid "joke" repeated over and over, verbatim.
These people don't even look at the other comments, they just drop their canned catchphrase and leave. This is why I like that we have to scroll to the bottom to comment here; at least the numpties have to put in slightly more effort, and hopefully they notice the comment has already been made 30 times. Ah, who am I kidding? Seeing the same comment probably reinforces their desire to post it.
The entire issue is lame as frig, wish there was a way to stop it. I know I'd be a bad moderator, because I'd just ban them.
That kind of stuff irks me a bit as well, but I think it's human nature. It's a form of call-and-response where people can show that they're apart of the community. Friendships are built on shared experiences, and those kinds of memes are instant shared experiences that are being used to build camaraderie. I think the reason it is annoying to users like us is because it feels watered down, like a free ticket in, instead of becoming a part of the community organically. I get both sides, so I don't actively try to stop people from doing it, I just ignore it.
I really hated when "maybe it's Maybelline" was popular on Reddit a few years ago. Never made sense to me that anyone would find any value in somebody repeating a dumb corporate tagline.
OrangeSliceOne reason those.comments do so well is that they appeal so broadly (to Americans, in your example).
Some Lemmy instances will develop their own variety of memes, especially if they are more insular. I think it will make stuff like that a bit more interesting (or maybe it just means that there will be more stuff to be annoyed by).
Just couldn't help yourself, eh? Lol
oshitwaddupI'm happy there's enough content on here to make it worth checking lemmy now
No Lemmy ettique missing as there wasn't enough of a community to form anything. I had no issue with the smaller size and all the usual posters I'd see and chat with have dispersed with the larger array of content.
But now you don't get people signing up, talking about the lack of content and disappearing. Or servers set up in hope and shut down - eope.xyz caw.ai Jeremmy.ml or ones that ragequit fapsi.be. And of course wolfballs.
Even if most go back to reddit it will still be an improved space with the servers and communities that remain I think.
server ragequit, that's a tale that should be told
It sounds like there was, but the action seems to have happened on mastodon servers. The quit message can be found here.
https://lemmy.perthchat.org/post/219342
"stupid lemmings" and "narcissistic sociopaths" sounds like a popcorn drama
Please tell me the legend of wolfballs
Wolfballs was what could be called a free speech instance run by Master of Balls.. There was friction, but personally I liked that the was a variety of instances if not the content.
Exploding-heads run by Kapow is the closest in vibe and a spot where some jumped to.
Master of balls left an exit note here which pretty much sums up the vibe, stored on the fedirama community https://lemmy.ca/post/390398
MasterofballsBetter they hear it from my mouth than someone who altered it.
Why did wolfballs shutdown?
Why did wolfballs shut down? I think it’s worth a blog post to describe why wolfballs shutdown and what plans are for the future. There is a link floating around of my words changed/altered so I want to put a official wolfballs statement that can stay up. Wolfballs was set up during the death of ruqqus. I needed a place to vent my frustration with covid lockdowns. I loved how much engagement I got at ruqqus.
But now you don’t get people signing up, talking about the lack of content and disappearing. Or servers set up in hope and shut down - eope.xyz caw.ai Jeremmy.ml or ones that ragequit fapsi.be. And of course wolfballs.
Someone give me a history lesson. A lot has happened already apparently.
i'm here for the lesson too.
Fledditors are all over the map in terms of interests, temperaments, and manners. I think the majority of us are trying to fit it and contribute, but even that can be disruptive when there are this many newcomers. I deeply appreciate how patient and friendly the folks who were already here have been toward this sudden invasion.