I’ve noticed that there seems to be an emphasis on being extremely serious at all times, as if every single comment is a PhD dissertation being evaluated or something. There’s like this weird, subtle one upmanship about every little thing and a lot of people are very nitpicky and judgmental. It kind of takes the fun out of being on here, TBH. Or am I the only one experiencing this?
Pee pee poo poop
Its raw internet. You gotta put effort into customizing it to your taste.
Same as with Reddit, it probably depends what community you’re participating in. But i find most of Lemmy to be mostly reasonable like the communities I participated in Reddit. And mind you, I don’t have any particular Lemmy communities I frequent in.
Sounds like Lemmy’s already shaping up to compete with Reddit!
OK I’m kidding - I think you’re kind of right, Lemmy can get that sometimes, but much like Reddit, it’s only really on the bigger communities that you always see on the front page, smaller ones are pretty chill in my experience.
I guess it depends on what you’re seeing hostility towards, but I will also say that with Lemmy’s status as an open source social media trying to compete against the likes of Reddit and Facebook, I find that the people here are naturally more protective of it from the sort of thing you’ll see on other sites. Also because of Lemmy’s status, it also attracts a LOT of political discussion, which has always been the most likely thing to descend into hostile crap flinging.
Oh, I should also mention, please just block the whole entire .ml instance. I can guarantee that it will improve your Lemmy experience and your mental health. I did it in my first few days here, and I sometimes forget just how bad it was before I did block it!
Not at all, actually.
No it just feels like a young forum.
The only social media I have ever gotten into was Reddit. I was on that platform for over a decade. But eventually it became too toxic and caused me way too much stress. Every innocuous post or comment I made was subject to a barrage of unnecessary and unjustified criticism. I was constantly being banned anywhere from 72-hours to permanently for no logical reason. So after a decade I deleted my account.
I’ve noticed Lemmy seems to be going this way too compared to when I first joined a year and a half ago. The user base seems to be swelling with self-righteous Karens waiting to tear down any and all content. And, just like Reddit, the mods are falling dutifully into line behind them. Lemmy is far less enjoyable today than it was only six months ago. If trolls just ranted I’d ignore and block but the mods support them by deleting content. I’m a grown ass man pushing sixty years old. I can make my own mind up about content and comments. I don’t need somebody else doing it for me.
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Default behavior is to allow emotions to drive thoughts, which immediately inform behavior. Times are very hard for people around the world, so it stands to reason most people online are going to be in a negative frame of mind to start with. Anger going sideways and getting projected or transferred where it shouldn’t, and solves nothing.
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Bots have definitely made their way to the Fediverse and like anywhere else their whole point is to foment disagreement and fights, as well as pressure people with a flood of information implying the majority opinion is far right, pro-AI and that sort of thing. See above, but it behooves them to create a stressful atmosphere since stressed people are angry people and angry people don’t think clearly.
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Every platform tends towards certain patterns of behavior and I am inclined to agree on the specific pattern here. It’s almost always about something personal, including political beliefs. I have seen some incredible comments and comment threads based upon someone reading whatever OP posted as if it were a personal attack or a political press conference. People also seem here, like on tumblr a decade or two ago, to think that fighting with random people online is equal to real political action. It’s not. It never will be. Worse, it seems a lot of people feel insecure about their intelligence because man do these arguments stink of someone trying to prove how smart they are against, again, some random person they don’t even know.
tl;dr, people are angry but don’t know how to handle it in a more mature manner, or they’re deliberately fomenting discord with bots because they were paid to do so, which honestly circles right back to the beginning because why do that?
I do think it’s still better here than on Reddit though. I hope that this remains the case for years to come. I had some bad shocks on Reddit which caused me to cease engaging there. Same to BlueSky, honestly. I follow some people who know what they’re talking about, but… the keyboard warriors are just too much.
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No. Get a feel for communities and instances. Different horses for different courses.
Having said that there are people here who take shitposts seriously, that have disdain for socialism and go to .ml, that run their mouth in Blahaj about things they don’t understand etc. Then there are the people who don’t understand that instances are governed by the laws of their physical location, like the entire UK being “banned” from .zip (?) and .world having an overly protective (imo) attitude towards Zionist atrocities etc.
It’s a defederated global platform - there should be no (or very little) homogeny.
I hope you find what you’re looking for and enjoy your time here.
Naa its mostly fun to me! And the people i interact with seem like good people for the most part.
My most upvoted comments are ways jokes.
Agreed. And to dispell the impression of posts having to be PhD dissertations: Pee pee poo poo
I am, however, a judgmental prick, but I (usually) keep those opinions to myself. I will silently judge youbased on your posts and comments, and leave it at that.
Pee pee on poo poo
I find myself generally well received in both serious posts and dumb jokes. I rarely actually run into anyone that hard headed.
Lemmy is rather small, you might be bumping into the same 3 users everywhere.
In the app I use I can “tag” people’s usernames and keep track of them across posts. It’s interesting to bump into “angry cyclist” being aggressive again about a completely random topic. It kind of puts it into perspective that it might just be how this person sees the world, especially if they’re very active and keep showing up. It feels very much like older forums where the same people keep turning up, which is something I didn’t realise I missed.
Just an extension to this, when I used Reddit, /r/all was too big and had a bunch of crap I didn’t care about, and I browsed my home page of subscribed communities.
On here I only ever browse All, despite the drawbacks. I think it’s practically the only way to use Lemmy. OP might have subscribed to a dozen communities and felt claustrophobic especially if they’re coming from Reddit.
Different instances are more or less insular though. Hexbear can be good fun but once you realize 95% of the posts and comments are from like 200 people it feels more like a discord server than a federated link aggregator. db0 federates with most big instances so even our local communities don’t feel as insular. .world is .world, for better and for worse.
Sorry about that, I’ll try to get my friend on here who’s nicer than me.
Sounds about right. Outside of political threads, I’ve only noticed and tagged maybe three users that are truly toxic (as in they enter every conversation with an insult and devolve from there). The problem is that those users are active everywhere and make the Lemmyverse feel much less welcoming than it actually is.
I prefer it over the reddit way, tbh. Every comment section there is just filled with gifs and jokes, and you have to scroll miles to get a reasonable and sound answer to what OP was asking. It’s especially frustrating when I’ve searched for an issue online and reddit pops up in the search results, and all responses are just bad repetitive jokes.
The reddit way?
Also bots. There to sway public opinion.
Yeah. I’m assuming a lot of the meaningless drivel on there is bots “driving engagement” too
Not even that, there’s talking point level reactivity now that doesn’t fit the prior reactivity we were all accustomed to on old reddit.
“This 👆 💯 🤯”
I tip my hat to you good gentlesir! Upvotes to the left!
Initially yes, the most active communities are filled with incredibly pedantic and holier-than-thou users that are more than happy to call you a drooling idiot for not agreeing with their logical opinions.
Once you start subscribing to communities you actually enjoy and block comms that allow users to muse about how 14 year olds have a “consenting nature” (looking at you !shitposting@lemmy.world), Lemmy becomes a lot more useful and inclusive. There’s a lot of communities that are more active than it seems. I suggest going to the communities page and subscribing to just those comms that interest you.
Also be the change you want to see! Start posting and commenting without worrying about what the average Lemming thinks of you. We can build the type of communities we want instead of allowing this place to become another 4Chan.
Gotta agree with you here Velma. The beauty of Lemmy isn’t that it attracts or allows different people, but that we aren’t advertised to, and we are able to block instances or communities that don’t work for us, and we are able to fully curate our home pages without being shown posts from completely unrelated pages just because they paid money to be boosted. Once that is done and we have found and settled into our spaces, that is where the good interactions come out.
Misogyny is just as rampant here as any online space, it’s a systemic issue, it was not a reddit/4chan-exclusive issue. It existed before and will outlast reddit/4chan until we solve the actual fucking problem: men are both socialized and continually encouraged to fundamentally disrespect women. They need to do just as much brain-rewiring as we do when we combat our internalized misogyny.
Misogyny is just as rampant here as any online space, it’s a systemic issue, it was not a reddit/4chan-exclusive issue. It existed before and will outlast reddit/4chan until we solve the actual fucking problem: men are both socialized and encouraged to fundamentally disrespect women. They need to do just as much brain-rewiring as we do when we combat our internalized misogyny.
Well said. You’re right - the root of the problem is that the users here are predominately male and that then influences the tone of the space. Without conscious effort it is easy to allow misogyny to flourish.
Especially since they are hard-wired to just not notice it - hence why we constantly get told we are overreacting - to them it comes out of left field because they do not see what we see.
The real piss off with that is that while I realize it isn’t their fault they are socialized that way, if they really want to believe that they, individually, are one of the “good ones” (as in, the non-problematic men, the ones not contributing to the problem) they can’t justify that belief unless they are actively listening when we tell them what we experience, or how something comes across from our perspective. So many of them want to push the problem down by saying “nuh uh” or arguing with us about our own damn experiences
Its fucking asinine.
My favorite is when they acknowledge we live in a patriarchal society, that women are treated worse than men, but we are overreacting or simply imagining men are treating us this way.
Fucking asinine indeed!
Sorry you girls/women have to fight so hard just to have a space. Probably makes it hard to want to try some days and it shouldn’t be that way.
As dkppunk said, it would help if the good men here would push back against their fellow men and some of these attitudes here. Seeing others push to create space for everyone to feel welcome helps a lot!
I haven’t come across much, but I mostly visit stuff where discussions don’t bring in anything mysoginistic. I may not notice everything as immediately since I’m not the one directly affected, but I do try to speak up when I notice because it affects some of my favorite people. I’m glad though, that you and others are speaking up and pushing so more of us take the effort to heart and pay proper attention.
Absolutely! I wish more male users of these comms would call out their fellow men’s misogyny and not rely on others to do it for them. It would make the spaces more welcoming to a lot more people and create a more positive atmosphere.
I also love seeing 2 of my fave lemmings in other spaces 🥰
Been missing seeing you as often after Blahaj went down last week! Good to see you again today :)
Definitely one of the users that make Lemmy a pleasure to be on!!
I’ve found Lemmy the most gender diverse friendly place yet. A lot less 4chany/reddit/spezpedo than anywhere else.
You’re ignoring how many women, femmes, trans, enbies, and POC are on Reddit.
Reddit’s population size is going to naturally make it way more diverse than Lemmy for a long time still.
Not ignoring. They have a larger audience, but I felt the general community was more welcomed, and openly themselves here edit: in non-specialized subs.
Ah, there were quite a few great subreddits I was involved in that were incredibly diverse and friendly. I miss those spaces, though I’ve found a couple of communities on Lemmy with similar feel.
I’ve found Lemmy quite harsh and exclusionary for women, so maybe my experience has just been different than yours.
Sorry to hear. I hope that changes fast. My experience on Reddit was vastly different.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I just don’t understand misogyny. I absolutely love everything about women.
Damn, I have the perfect gif for this but Lemmy doesn’t support gifs in comments yet?
Maaaaybe? If the following gif works, we will know something
Edit: Damn, links the IMG but doesn’t play the gif for me.
It played the gif for me.
Voyager app checking in with all systems green: your wish is granted.
I had to open it, then hold tap on the image and click “play animation”, so it’s definitely app dependant
It plays if I open it! Hm maybe it’s a difference in instances or apps.
That’s my guess as well.
It doesn’t? Could have sworn I’ve seen them in tenforward
users to muse about how 14 year olds have a “consenting nature” (looking at you !shitposting@lemmy.world)
What the actual fuck? Are you finding people like that? Oh wtf man. I haven’t seen that in there yet. I’ve seen some category 5 dumbasses but nothing heinous like that. That’s fuckin gross
Yeah I reported several comments, but the post had been up for days at that point and no mods stepped in at all.
Full conversation justifying rock stars raping 14 year olds because it’s more cool than when politicians do it and 14 year olds have a consenting nature.
It was absolutely disgusting. Even the OP of the post called it out.
Nothing. Comments are still up. I blocked the pedo comm at this point.
I’ve noticed that lately shit posting communities have really gone down the drain because there seems to be some sort of cultural notion that you can just post anything and it’s fine because… “It’s a shitpost, it’s not that serious, you just don’t get it”. I remember back in my day shitposting used to mean something 😤
It’s a fine line.
Yeah satire still has taste to it. If you are familiar with super troopers, shitposting is like the officers fucking with people, but what these creeps are doing is like Farva calling people “ChickenFucker” with no humor or nuance etc or anything.
If you aren’t familiar with Super troopers, you need to go watch it meow.
Yeah there’s definitely some cp-adjacent porn comms on here too, it’s fucking disgusting.
Yeah that’s completely fucked. Glad I’ve not seen it but definitely reporting any I find. Pedos and their enablers need to fuck off and die in a hole.
Almost every comment I’ve seen from you is hostile lol
Take a look at my post history, you would be surprised at the positivity I usually comment with - I have no patience for sexist men though.
Yeah you love spewing insults lol
I’m also self aware enough to know i can be a shithead and i’m not out here whining and pretending i’m not part of the problem either
Your name is recognizable and i have seen countless comments from you that rub me the wrong way
If you know you’re part of the problem, why not… stop? You don’t have to be a shithead. It’s actually really easy to treat people with respect.
Because I don’t agree with the OP that it’s an issue. I think that on anon boards you can act however you want. There are better places if you are this sensitive.
You can act however you want, but if you act like a shithead all the time you’re probably gonna get a lot of shit back. That’s fine if that’s what you want, but in that case you gotta have a thick enough skin for it.
If I was bothered I would just block accounts.
Oh I’m not allowed to act however I want but you are?
Why is that?
You can. I would have blocked you if I wasn’t ok with it.
I’m merely pointing out that you have no room to complain about hostility here. Youre a hypocrite
Yeah, which insults do I throw out most? I don’t name call hardly ever unless it’s to point out misogyny and even then it’s to call them a misogynist. I’m serious, feel free to go through my post history. You won’t find what you’re looking for there.
I’m self aware enough to know that I am rude to men who do not respect women. I don’t deny that.
I’ve seen a lot of comments that rub me the wrong way as well.
We get it, you hate men
No, I hate sexist men who can’t respect a women’s only community.
I hate men who rape.
I hate men who insist on their viewpoint being the only correct one and waiving away women’s perspectives and views.
That’s very different from hating all men.
Yes we get it, man bad bear good
Insular has such a negative connotation. I’d call it “neighborly”: I like seeing the same usernames over again and getting to know their idiosyncrasies.
Hostile, I have to disagree with outright. I only have reddit and oldschool fora to compare it against, but lemmy is much friendlier than both.
Are we given to long comments? Sure. Are those comments worth reading? Usually! And that’s what makes the difference.
Don’t disagree at all, I think a lot of what’s going on is the uptick in the “eternal September phenomenon”. A lot of us have been here for a while even if like myself we’ve switched instances, and those that have stuck around know the way things work and also like it, the new folks come here and think it’s Reddit, and when they get pushback because we’re all clearly here because we on one level or another had problems with Reddit or some other platform, they seem to think we’re the inclusive ones. When really they’re all up in the koolaid and don’t even know the flavor.
Some will stick around and some will bail, and then the cycle repeats, it’s just been happening with greater frequency
Edit: I’ll also freely admit that sometimes it is a bit serious here for my personality which leans flippant, but that’s fine, I still am here for a reason
or it’s just that as things get popular the lowest common denominator content becomes the most prevalent.
because that is how the majority of folks operate.
I find it much more cynical than other places, probably just the nature of how everyone ended up here, jaded by the design of centralized social media.
I have to remind myself that everything isnt as ‘sky is falling’ as I see around these parts. Maybe I’m just blessed with a nice life, and I try not to take that for granted, but it does give me that feeling unfortunately.
I try my best to insert some humour into the headlines as some sort of way to make some light of it all, but that might just be playing into the fear and anger that I see around.
