Mastodawn

Redditor shares their experience on Lemmy

Redditor shares their experience on Lemmy - RetroLemmy

>OK, let’s try this again. My post got auto-filtered. Maybe the image triggered something? Anyways, apologies if this isn’t the right sub for this. I wanted to get an outsider’s perspective on my experience on Lemmy. > >Every. Single. Thread. has the word “capitalism” or “Trump” in it somewhere. I’m sick to death of it. Even though I agree with a lot of the sentiment, the erosion of the middle class, the concentration of wealth, the consolidation of media, the “you will own nothing and be happy” mentality permeating the consumer space. In many ways that’s why I joined Lemmy, but dang it that doesn’t mean I want to talk about absolutely nothing else. Someone once defined a fanatic as “Someone who won’t change their mind and won’t change the subject” and that fits the average Lemming to a T. > >And the only communities devoid of politics are also devoid of content. I do a lot of worldbuilding stuff, and I’ve tried to make the worldbuilding community there more active, but sometimes I feel like I’m the only poster. Then I look at r/worldbuilding, and there’s a glut of really interesting posts showcasing people’s imagination and creativity, and nary a mention of Musk or Epstein in sight. > >I understand that people’s political opinions are bound to show up obliquely in even unrelated communities, but I can’t overstate how monomaniacal Lemmings are about it. The pic I originally tried to post was a screenshot of a completely non sequitur post in an unrelated community (sorry for the vagueness I think the specifics may have also tripped the auto filter). And Lemmings are always “on”. If you go to mildlyinteresting on lemmy.world right now, you’ll see maybe one or two posts about things like yellow stop signs or three-chambered peanuts, you know, stuff that’s actually mildly interesting, and every other post is stuff like “French president explains the political consequences of AI”. Is that important and worth discussing? Absolutely. What it isn’t is mildly interesting. > >When I bring this up on Lemmy, the response is always “Politics is everything and we should never shut up ever!” But even Anne Frank wrote about other stuff in her diary sometimes. > >And then there’s the tech side of things. Hope you like Linux, cuz that’s all you’re going to see. And if you dare suggest that Linux may not be the right choice for your blind grandmother, you get eviscerated in the comments. > >Granted, Reddit itself used to have a similar problem. It attracted a very specific type of user (neckbeards) and the experience wasn’t great if you weren’t one, but ironically the same popularization of Reddit that lead to its platform decay also solved this homogeneity problem. Similarly, Tankies and their ilk seem to flock to Lemmy, explaining the tone of the discourse. > >Others have pointed out that Reddit alternatives tend to attract people who were banned from Reddit (remember Voat?) and I think that explains a lot. > >In summary, Lemmy seems great if you’re a Marxist who uses Linux, but pretty much nobody else. Am I crazy? Should I try to stick with it in the hope it gets better?

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naevaTheRat Jun 16

This person is 100% about the relentless usaian political whinging. It’s so hard to find anything cool and fun on here.

Slrpnk had more but got blown up and unrelenting drama seeking “power users” (lmao) drove off most of the interesting people.

Same thing happened to masto

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ProdigalFrog Jun 16

Slrpnk had more but got blown up and unrelenting drama seeking “power users” (lmao) drove off most of the interesting people.

Could you elaborate what you mean? I’ve been a slrpnk admin for near 3 years, and I haven’t seen any power user drama addicts on the instance. I’m also not sure what you mean by blown up (too popular? We’re still a smallish instance with 380 monthly users).

Personally I think we still have quite a lot of interesting posts and discussions in our communities.

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naevaTheRat Jun 16

Bad phrasing, me ahh culp ah :p

-loads of downtime and unreliable access caused pop to drop (only unique problem)

slrpnk suffers from the same problem as the rest of lemmy with posts being drowned out by like 5 people posting 20 things a day to low effort communities.
The harrassing coms on lemmy (I don’t think there are any on slrpnk to your credit) like shitXssay and stuff drove off users that didn’t want to get recruited into useless conflict.

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ProdigalFrog Jun 16

Ah, I see.

Slrpnk went down only twice for an extended period in the 4 years its been up, each time only for about a week before it was fixed and back online. Both times were due to unforeseen hardware issues (since it’s self-hosted and running on solar power, in-line with our ideals). Without trying to offend, I think you may have an exaggerated view of how unreliable our server has been. Our uptime over 4 years is 98.91%.

We also didn’t see any lengthy drop of our active monthly users. Once they discovered we were back up, our numbers returned to normal, and we’ve continued to see steady growth, with a consistent active monthly userbase, per our fediverse observer stats:

To your second point, I believe it is relatively easy for a user to block those more active communities if they dislike them.

Fediverse Observer checks all sites in the fediverse and gives you an easy way to find a home from a map or list or automatically.

Lemmy Sites Status. Find a Lemmy server to sign up for, find one close to you!

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naevaTheRat Jun 16

I’m not the person you have to convince lol. Also around half of every day I try I can’t hit slrpnk.

Reacting to criticism of lemmy by getting defensive is part of why lemmy continues to suck.

Just look at the instance’s front page atm. When a user logs in they see a lot of reposted news and posts by like 5 different people.

One discussion about foraging, nothing creative or original. These are hard problems to address but they’re why people bounce.

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ProdigalFrog Jun 16

Also around half of every day I try I can’t hit slrpnk.

I obviously visit Slrpnk very often each day, and I do not have that problem despite being halfway around the globe from where the server is located, and none of our users have reported issues accessing the site. If you cannot access slrpnk, I do not believe the issue is on our end. Do you get any sort of error when you can’t access it?

I am not trying to be defensive, but I am going to push back slightly on your framing of our instance if it contains misleading or incorrect information of our server that could unintentionally harm our reputation.

One discussion about foraging, nothing creative or original.

I also see a post from our zine, self-hosting, vegan, BIFL, Green energy, and Nolawns communities, as well as a fantastic post with imaginative original content in our Solarpunk Art community.

River Traffic - SLRPNK

Hi, it’s been awhile since I photobashed art for the solarpunk postcard series [https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/postcards-from-a-solarpunk-future/] (I’ve been busy on a couple other, larger-scope solarpunk projects [https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2025/01/06/buried-treasure/] I hope to share soon) but I have some time while we work through final edits and I wanted to get back into it. I’ve done a couple [https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2024/08/20/ship-in-a-storm/] other [https://slrpnk.net/post/14288397] nautical solarpunk pictures but they were both about modernized tall ships on the open ocean and I wanted to do one focused on the kind of activity you might see in a harbor, big river, or along a coastline. The biggest/closest vessel here is an electric cargo barge originally from the Netherlands [https://intermodalnews.eu/2021/09/15/electric-barges-new-trend-in-intermodal-transport/]. These close-to-the-shore cargo vessels are a good fit for electrification as they run shorter distances and can swap their shipping-container-sized batteries whenever they transfer cargo using the same cranes. This article [https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/24/beyond-the-harbor-electrifying-short-sea-routes-and-hybridizing-blue-water-shipping/] goes into more detail though it’s a little out of date as much of what it describes is now happening IRL. The house shifting barge was lifted from a photograph of a real project carried out by a company [https://www.nickelbros.com/residential/our-featured-moves/] in Vancouver, Canada though this appears to be common on coastlines. I’m a huge believer in salvage and reuse and have featured deconstruction [https://wiki.slrpnk.net/writing:deconstruction] in a previous postcard [https://slrpnk.net/post/9173975], but I haven’t showcased the work of picking up and moving entire houses [https://wiki.slrpnk.net/writing:deconstruction#house_shifting_-_building_salvage_without_deconstruction] yet. House shifting is also done overland [https://www.queenslandhouseremovers.com.au/understanding-the-house-removal-process-a-comprehensive-guide/], using large flatbed trucks, but the width of the roadways imposes more limitations on how big a piece of a building you can move [https://www.dalbyremovalhomes.com.au/relocated-houses/] so some additional disassembly and reassembly may be required. I think a solarpunk society would strive to limit outright demolition to very specific circumstances where the structure and materials are truly unrecoverable, and to relocate buildings wherever possible so this kind of move might be a common sight. I replaced the original lead tugboat with an electric one [https://magazines.marinelink.com/Magazines/MarineNews/202404/content/board-electric-tugboat-612677]. Closer to the opposite shore on the left, we have a cargo sailboat, or more officially, a steel-hulled, container-capable gaff ketch [https://www.gosailcargo.com/secret-50.html]. I don’t know how practical it is but I really liked this design as soon as I saw it - the mixture of a fairly traditional design with capacity for a modern shipping container (or 1 TEU sized ‘bus’ module to serve as a passenger ferry) just calls to me because I like a good anacronism. One of the big advantages of ships and containers is scale but single containers will still have to be moved from whatever big port they’re unloaded at to their final destination, so I suppose this would be similar to a riverborn 18-wheeler truck. It’s primarily wind driven but also has some configuration of electric motors. If these are viable we might see a good many of them in the bays, coasts, and big rivers of a solarpunk society, if only because they can reduce externalities like pollution or unnecessary draw on the grid. In the middle there’s a docked sailboat. Not much to say about that. And on the right is a river cleanup craft. Hopefully a solarpunk society will produce far less trash overall, especially far less disposable plastic waste, and would recycle or dispose of it better. But there’s always something that gets away and water has a way of catching anything blown around by the wind. Waterborne trash might also include debris swept downstream in previous floods. It’s more effective to catch this waste while it’s concentrated in waterways near human settlements [https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-03-17/ocean-cleanup-plastic-pollution-great-pacific-garbage-patch/102075810] than it is to try to find and collect it on the open ocean, so I wanted to show one of these boats at work. There are many designs, but I picked Mr Trash Wheel from Baltimore, MD because the design is whimsical and probably easiest to recognize. As for the shoreline, I was inspired by a photograph of Troy, New York, where a neighborhood of brick buildings look out at the Hudson river over a set of parking lots. I wanted to do a quick background with a dense community with a lot of four to five story brick buildings (as they’re pretty sustainable/practical long term) with hints of forested streets and a big park/riparian forest buffer [https://research.fs.usda.gov/centers/nac/riparianforestbuffers] along the waterfront. I’ve done one postcard [https://slrpnk.net/post/13696744] about flood compatible cities and generally favor sponge city designs where applicable, but I’m not sure what the best answer is for old downtowns built right up against rivers, with reinforced shorelines already in place. Replacing waterfront parking lots with parks full of swales and other flood mitigation designs is probably a good start and those changes could also improve water quality in the river by trapping waste and filtering surface runoff, especially if any fertilizer/compost use is carefully minimized or eliminated. Perhaps the community has also bought up waterfront land nearby, removed levees and restored flood planes to give the river room to spread and slow. Levee removal can both mitigate flooding and restore important wetland habitats [https://www.npr.org/2026/05/03/nx-s1-5806062/washington-tribe-restore-wetlands-fish]. The amphitheatre-shaped recess in the embankment is intended to provide safe public access to the river. This is also kind of aspirational for me - canals, harbors, and rivers IRL often catch drainage from city streets contaminated with animal waste and vehicle fluids, overflows from sewers, outflows (legal or illegal) from various manufacturers and industry and even just fertilizers and pesticides from lawns. I’ve seen people swimming in all sorts of waterways I’d personally stay out of IRL, but I’d love to live in a society which was so conciencious about its impacts that the water downstream even from major cities remained safe and clean.

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naevaTheRat Jun 16

To maybe be more constructive something you might want to consider is fostering people sharing stuff communally. Lemmy will never beat reddit at being reddit and a lot of reddit is awful anyway.

Something vegantheoryclub used to do was a chat thread each week with a topic to discuss and to just share what’s going on or talk in an unstructured way. You could consider something weekly to support community formation, something that makes someone go “oh! this is why you start using lemmy. This is what you can’t get on reddit!”

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ProdigalFrog

We create a pinned community discussion thread each month, and invite our users to participate in the comments with any ideas, happenings in their lives, introductions, etc. We consider it, and call it, the instance’s town square.

The moderator of our writing community also creates a monthly discussion inviting people to discuss the projects they’ve been working on.

I wouldn’t be opposed to more of our moderators creating monthly or weekly threads in their communities, it’s a good suggestion.

SLRPNK Community Discussion - June 2026 - SLRPNK

Each month, we create a post to keep you abreast of news and happenings regarding the server, discuss recent events, and to act as town square for the community. -------------------- #### 🌟 Community Highlights 🌟 * [email protected] [/c/[email protected]] - Recording nature and other sounds outdoors. * [email protected] [/c/[email protected]] - Discussion & News for XMPP (Jabber), a secure and decentralized chat protocol * [email protected] [/c/[email protected]] - A place to post Solarpunk related documentaries (we got some good ones in there) #### 📣 Experiments with Taglines 📣 Lemmy has a ‘tagline’ feature which allows an admin to add some custom text or links at the top of the main page. Inspired by how the admins of Pawb.social [https://pawb.social/] are using theirs, we’ve decided to experiment with implementing something similar; adding useful links to what Solarpunk is, highlighting our XMPP and the alternative frontends we host, as well as a link to our liberapay for those who’d like to support the instance. I believe highlighting our XMPP in this way may be particularly impactful, as a surprising number of our members have told me they weren’t aware that it exists, or that they can access it without having to create a new separate account (it uses the same database that your slrpnk.net [http://slrpnk.net] login uses, allowing you to use your existing SLRPNK username and password to access it). If you feel it takes up too much space, we have the option to spit up the different sections and rotate through them individually when the page reloads. We’d love to your thoughts on it. :) UPDATE: We noticed the main page was a little too busy from a mobile browser, so we opted to switch it up and rotate between the XMPP and Alternative frontend taglines to save space. #### 🚧 Piefed Migration Update 🚧 For those unaware, we’ve been looking into a potential future migration to Piefed, which has been discussed in previous Monthly Meta threads [https://slrpnk.net/post/32248555/20027087]. We’ve mainly been eyeing the prospect of migrating due to a persistent database bug with Lemmy which has been particularly troublesome. However, it’s quite a big task to migrate our instance with all of its comments and communities intact, and poVoq would be pioneering that endeavor, as it hasn’t been done before. It is also likely that all pictures previously uploaded to SLRPNK would not make the jump to Piefed, which is an unfortunate downside. In the time since we considered migration, Lemmy development has begun to approach a stable 1.0 release, and with it are some changes to how it handles the database which could potentially fix the issues we’ve been experiencing. It also would bring with it some long requested quality of life features [https://join-lemmy.org/news/2026-05-19_-_Open_beta_testing_for_Lemmy_1.0.0]. Due to that new development, we’ve decided to give Lemmy 1.0 a trial run to see if it resolves our issues, and reassess from there if a Piefed migration is still warranted. #### 📸 Meta Post Image 🎞️ The wonderful art for this month’s community discussion is Community Gardens by Daniele Turturicil [https://storyseedlibrary.org/art/daniele-turturici/community-gardens/] (CC BY-ND 4.0). It also lets us also highlight the Story Seed Library [https://storyseedlibrary.org/] from which it was sourced, which is a superb library of Solarpunk artwork and story ideas from which to gather inspiration for your own Solarpunk works. (We also have a Story Seed Library community here at [email protected] [/c/[email protected]]) ------------- #### 🔋 How to Support SLRPNK.net [http://SLRPNK.net] 🌱 If you’d like to donate to SLRPNK to help cover Internet, electricity, and domain name costs, you can now send a one-time or reoccurring donation via Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/F-hub.org/ [https://liberapay.com/F-hub.org/] Currently, SLRPNK is receiving 46€/month in donations, which is covering a good portion of our recurring expenses. Thanks! #### 💬 Open Discussion 💬 Now it’s your turn to share whatever you’d like down below; your thoughts, ideas, concerns, hopes, or anything related to the server. If you have a new community you’d like to shine a spotlight, shine away! If you’re a new user wanting to say hi, feel free to post an introduction :) SLRPNK Community Resources: - Community Wiki [https://wiki.slrpnk.net/] - Moderators, you can create your own Wiki here for your communities! - Movim Chat [https://movim.slrpnk.net/] - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials) - Etherpad [https://pads.slrpnk.net/] - Collaborative document editor ::: spoiler 🗃️ Meta Archive 📰 Our Monthly Meta posts are sometimes home to more in-depth sections written by our admins. Many of our newer members may not be familiar with some of the past guides, so for those interested, we’ve compiled a list below. * December 2024 [https://slrpnk.net/post/15741246] - How to Prepare for a Fascist Regime * February 2025 [https://slrpnk.net/post/17910446?scrollToComments=true] - How to avoid Big Tech and maximize your digital security & privacy * June 2025 [https://slrpnk.net/post/23012609] - A brief guide on Security Culture & Adopting FOSS as prefiguration * July 2025 [https://slrpnk.net/post/24141955] - How to build community with fun projects! ::: ::: spoiler ⬛ Union Resources 🟥 These are unions from around the world who can train you to become an effective organizer to form a grassroots union with your co-workers! * 🌍 Global: IWW [https://www.iww.org/] (Français [https://www.iww.org/fr/]) - (Español [https://www.iww.org/es/]) * 🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA [https://fora.com.ar/] * 🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA [https://asf-iwa.org.au/] * 🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB [https://lutafob.org/] * 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS [https://avtonomna.com/%D0%B7%D0%B0-%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%81/%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%8F/], CITUB [https://knsb-bg.org/] * 🇩🇪 Germany: FAU [https://www.fau.org/] * 🇬🇷 Greece: ESE [https://ese.espiv.net/] * 🇮🇹 Italy: USI [https://usi-cit.org/] * 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond [https://www.vrijebond.org/] * 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT [https://www.cnt.es/] * 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC [https://www.sac.se/] * 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW [https://www.uvwunion.org.uk/en/] :::