this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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You're not wrong; I've noticed the same. Less 'horny' specifically, and more.... reasonable and engaged; vs impulsive and reactive.
I think the accessibility of reddit vs Lemmy plays a feature there. Lemmy requires at least some level of tech literacy to understand well enough to use, and it also isn't where most of the people are. So the people choosing to use Lemmy fully intend to use it; we're not casual users.
Because it's so easy to use, I think Reddit has a lot of young and/or immature people (demographics that overlap, but aren't the same). So it's full of impulsive, heavily-opinionated, casual users who aren't really invested in their communities, that can easily make a new account on a whim, and that create echo chambers with their votes.
It's not really Reddit's fault, tbh. It's an issue of user population, especially when 90% of the users do nothing more than upvote (so generically agreeable things rise) or downvote (anything that challenges them falls). The bigger a user platform gets, the more it homogenises.
Reddit was only unusual in that subreddits let it homogenise on a sub-by-sub basis and create echo chambers; a savvy redditor could still find smaller subs with better discussion (r/patientgamers rather than r/gaming for example). Or subs would get bigger and start becoming hostile or tribal, losing their original mission - and somebody from the old days would make a 'true' version (r/childfree vs r/truechildfree).
Lemmy is too small for groupthink to homogenise it (yet?). But particularly large instances could potentially go the same way given enough years. It's just that Lemmy being federated means that we can make new instances, and defederate from any that we may find unpleasant. I've already learned of one portal that isn't federated to my chosen one.
To add onto your point. One thing that we'll have to watch out for is that toxic clout culture built up on other websites coming here.
It's been something I've been thinking about in the context of all this. People aren't coming from the void. They'll have their own internet lingo and culture that they'll bring with them to any site they go to. And while the design of a website can mitigate some of the worst parts of a culture, it can't outright remove it.
Without near constant vigilance (like the ask a historian subreddit) most communities will end up dying off. And even then you're at the whims of the platform.
I realise my point now is hardly even connected to yours, haha. Apologies.
That's a great point, too.
I chose beehaw has my home instance because it's community-focused, has an application process, and the communities are premade umbrellas (so people don't fragment into echo chambers).
But lemmy.ml is already visibly showing the signs of Reddit migration. I think the users that are migrating are still the 'better' of Reddit (intend to contribute, care enough to go through the process of learning Lemmy). But lemmy.ml is rapidly filling up with the same fragmented, specialised echo chambers that Reddit's culture developed, as they prepare to evacuate as many users from Reddit as possible - regardless of whether those users intend to contribute meaningfully to Lemmy.
That's not automatically bad - a person who only plays older games values a space that isn't dominated by news of recent releases, and a person that's child-free will struggle to find recommended doctors for sterilisation in a 'Family' or 'Parenting' umbrella sub. And I came here from Reddit, too.
But it seems that people are coming to Lemmy with the expectation that they can turn it into Reddit, complete with the isolated communities/subreddits they're used to. If not enough of them adapt to what makes Lemmy's mixed-spaces different, users could play their own role in Lemmy's 'enshittification' for older users, who lose the shared respectful discussion in favour of hundreds of echo chambers.
I kinda wish I joined beehaw for this exact reason. I signed up a little before the overload and I think there was a couple hundred members at most but now I'm seeing some of the old reddit mindset trickle in and.... ugh.
Maybe I just don't like redditors? Talk about irony. Lol
I hope there ends up being a migration feature introduced sometime.
You could always just go to beehaw.org or lemmy.world directly and register a new acc there, and still subscribe to all the same communities. You don't actually lose anything that matters by signing up elsewhere. Even your own post history on your lemmy.ml account can be viewed by just going to lemmy.ml to log in again, if it matters to you.
In fact, signing up to a moderately-sized instance like lemmy.world may also be good for your usage; lemmy.ml is being slammed by incoming users, so anybody using it (even if they're viewing other instances' communities) feel the chug. If it goes down, all of Lemmy is inaccessible to you.
But if you're on a different, smaller instance, then you can continue ticking over while the behemoths are struggling by staying in shallow waters until they recover from the server load. A moderately-sized instance is more likely to get ongoing support than a small, newer one is; and less likely to time out or be hugged to death than a larger one is.