this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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I don't know if you've noticed this, but threads or comments about Lemmy or the Fediverse get downvoted a lot on Reddit and trolls who claim that it's "dogshit" and "not going anywhere" get systematically upvoted.

Some of those trolls get then exposed when you ask them what Lemmy instance they tried and one of them with whom I had a surreal exchange answered with something like "yeah ofc I used Lemmy, this is the instance: join-lemmy.org" πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈ

It's frustrating that these trolls keep contributing to the big lie that "Lemmy is not ready yet" and that there's "no viable alternative to Reddit".

This and the overwhelming number of comments being "against the mod protests" just prompts me to question whether there isn't some brigading being organized straight from the Reddit HQ.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Probably bots. Reddit has been using them for some time, but recently got caught using chat gpt or something similar to argue against the blackouts.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

The majority arenβ€˜t bots. Most of them are legit no lifers to whom Reddit going down the drain would be a huge blow. I mean you work full time as a cashier for taco bell and you are not really happy with that situation. Some people go to school again, learn a skill… others spend all their time one Reddit stockpiling karma. Those are the people who really hate lemmy and anything that could remotely make Reddit worse, because they are heavily invested in the platform for the wrong reasons.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you have a source for this claim? I'm very interested in reading about it

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Unfortunately there's probably a large amount of users who simply don't care.

But that's okay. What matters is content creators, not content consumers. Anyone with half a gram of decency and self integrity will have realized that they need to take steps to move away from Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

When the content creators leave and go to Lemmy/Kbin, eventually those content consumers will leave and go with them too. Will be a bonus for the Fediverse

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We need to ask Louis Rossmann to join the fediverse. He's been super critical with Reddit on YouTube.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'm sure he's already aware and will make an account if he wants to.

There's no point in shoving the Fediverse in someone's face.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I care and I’m here. I count as do all of us! Fuck β€˜em!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Exactly. Let the milquetoast mouth-breathers stay behind. With sufficient brain-drain, Reddit will eventually look like Quora.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Once - unfortunately - Apollo app will be down, in less than 2 weeks, I’m pretty sure Lemmy will surge and they will come complaining here πŸ˜…

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

Maybe. It's not like there's a Lemmy app that's as good as Apollo.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some subreddits are also using automod to remove comments linking to Lemmy.

I hope some journalists put a spotlight on the deceptive tactics Reddit is using.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lmao, who cares what they think?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (6 children)

My biggest issue with Lemmy is lack of userbase... which is fixable by signing up for Lemmy.

Figured best case scenario other people make the switch, worst case I'll forget this service even exists.

Also does anyone know how to enable dark mode, or if there is a dark mode?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I use jerboa for Android and it has TWO dark modes 😱

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

There is a lot of activity to spend many hours here. Discover more communities here. There is a dark mode, go to the settings page. You will find it in a drop down menu.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (9 children)

The people who like it are here. The people that don't are still there. Not that complicated.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I haven't noticed that because I no longer look at reddit. I suggest you do the same.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, OP is getting hate-baited hard.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Neoliberals and saying "there is no alternative", name a more iconic duo

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

The wheel of history will succumb redditors who refuse to accept that their system will pass just as all other before it have.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Reddit is known for it's use of bots. Bots helped Reddit grow in its early days. I'm not surprised that bots are being used now. As more people leave, I'm sure more bots will get used to give the impression of an active community. Just lie they did in those early days.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Of course there’s no viable alternatives to Reddit. Why would someone create another dumpster fire?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

First, they ignore me...
Then they laugh at me...
Then they try to fight me...
And then I win.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So what are the odds those are spez-trained bots?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Spez-naz lol

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

redditors always find another way to disappoint. whether it's going back to use the site after 2 days of "protest", or the moderators giving in to reddit admin pressure instead of resigning.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I think there's truth to some of the "not ready" claims... and this is coming from someone who really tried to get into Lemmy, ended up creating their own instance (as demonstrated by my user handle).

A few issues I think Lemmy dev team really need to address ASAP, from least technical (thus affecting most users) to more technical (this affecting less users) are:

1. UX/Discoverability -- Finding communities are a huge pain in the backend right now, and with multiple communities on different instances serving same purpose (i.e.: [email protected] and [email protected]). Sure, Reddit had same issues (the example I've heard is /r/meirl and /r/me_irl), but Reddit offered solution (multi on old reddit, community+community on new reddit). There must be a way to streamline it with meta-communities or lists on Lemmy such that the contents can be viewed in a unified fashion. I recommended !community@ (note the lack of domain) to streamline all of user's subscriptions with same name on different instances as an example; and perhaps we can use #[email protected] for users's maintained lists to unify [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]), [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]), [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]), etc.).

2. Trigger happy defederation hubs -- a certain instance has unceremoniously de-federated a couple of other larger instances. This is not the way, but here we are, with users on those instances not able to access the broader Fediverse, and vice versa. Until discoverability gets taken care of, it will be challenging for users to find a good home -- this leads to next point:

3. Authentication -- The Fediverse at large needs to separate authentication out from instances. Instances may provide their own authentication, fine, but there needs to be better way to authenticate against something else other than an entire new instance of Lemmy. The ActivityPub protocol has clear definitions on what is an actor, and users shouldn't need to deploy a Lemmy instance to identify themselves, separately from a Mastadon instance to identify themselves, separately from a... etc. This is because frankly...

4. Deployment of Lemmy is utter garbage. The official documentation's getting started guide gets users setup with an instance where the UI container cannot talk to public, but the lemmy backend can? Why bother shipping an nginx container if the backend will just expose itself to the whole wide net? Also, let's just pretend postgres container isn't open to the whole world with a basic password... Trying to get it up and running with Traefik was a pain, just do a quick Google and see how many people have asked and gave up, as well as how many different ways people have tried to go at it (something something xkcd 927; I've contributed to a new one of my own per linked post on top!), and the dev basically just straight up going 'we don't support traefik'... also, each approach is not without problems...

5. Federation is a bitch. I am pretty proud of the way I've used override to not edit original docker compose, and locked my setup down a little. But, I'm not ready to have the instance open to the whole wide web without CloudFlare in front... but allegedly, Federation doesn't work with CloudFlare... why? Good luck trying to get to even a popular sub's scale without getting hit with DDOS when someone disagrees with something someone else posted.

There's many more problems, and I genuinely want Lemmy to work. But, Lemmy is, lack of better words, "not yet ready" for prime time. It is thrown into the spotlight with Mastadon (which feels a bit more mature, at least from reading the docs) because of bad leadership at mega techs... It will take a lot of work for Lemmy to evolve and mature, before it can be "ready" to really absorb the mass of Redditors leaving Reddit.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's sort of an asshole problem. All the cool people are walking away from Reddit, or at the very least trying to support the blackout/boycott. So all that's left are the chronically online people, apathetic lurkers, and assholes who purposefully don't care. The assholes are now seeming more vocal because all the logical voices are burned out or gone. Provided the good contributors/commenters stay away. Eventually lurkers won't enjoy a ton of pissy comments on everything and look for more interesting discussion to peruse. Then the assholes will just be being assholes to each other, then be like man this place is full of assholes, and go look for a healthier community to be an asshole too because they don't want people who fight back like they do lol.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Dude, you are recommending Pepsi in a Coca-Cola forum.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Lemmy is pretty dense to a newcomer, especially one who is used to the centralized web. But that's okay - we don't need Lemmy to replace Reddit. Just like Mastodon, this 'temporary exodus' is only beneficial for this platform.

Even when the drama 'blows over' and Reddit is back to its usual status, we will have gained a huge amount of new users interested in a decentralized web. As long as there are enough users for Lemmy, I think that's okay.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Being a niche place without a million American teenagers is better anyway.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

No, I wouldn't notice because I don't use reddit anymore.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I wouldn't be surprised if reddit admin are inflating upvotes on pro reddit comments or have an army of bots defending reddit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The comments/replies to my comments that really chapped my ass were when someone was defending ads and trying to claim they didn't even know there were third party apps and we were just being babies. I don't want to have to watch two unskippable ads like YouTube just to see a meme or comment in an AskReddit or be bombarded with gas pill ads between every front page post because I typed "why am I farting more than normal?" In a toolbar five years ago, and I'm not being a baby because I don't want to give up my working product for a shit alternative that turns me into a product. I feel like Reddit is Pied Piper from 'Silicon Valley' where they hired a shit load of trolls in an office in New Delhi to gaslight us and drive up support for a highly disliked business path.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I don't think it's necessary for them to be trolls, I think some people want to believe that there is no alternative, since that means they don't have to change anything. The guilty conscience for supporting something they know is bad can be rationalized away by external factors.

I suspect people are that aggressive because they have to explain themselves, towards each other and towards themselves why they're staying.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well as long as people are talking about Lemmy, that's good for us. Any publicity is good publicity.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

"Don't attribute malice when you can attribute stupidity."

I would not be surprised at all if that user was not aware of which instance they opened or tried after opening join-lemmy.org. Many people are not very mindful or thorough or intentional in how they use technology or software or services. They probably do not even know what an instance is - and so linked the lemmy website.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (12 children)

As a tech savy person, I can confidently say lemmy is not a viable reddit alternative at this stage for an arbitrary reddit user. The UI and clients are just terrible and full of small bugs, annoyances and inconsistencies. Sure, it will eventually get there, but negative opinions about lemmy are not completely unmerrited. Just as I'm typing this, I get screen tears and flickering elements. It's just very, very bleeding edge and I can absolutely see how someone trying it for 5 minutes would be turned off. If you want to capture the masses, the user experience has to impeccable.

PS: my first try at submitting this response timed out. This is my second try.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It’s frustrating that these trolls keep contributing to the big lie that β€œLemmy is not ready yet” and that there’s β€œno viable alternative to Reddit”.

That's not frustrating at all! That's GOOD! It's proof they see Lemmy as a threat, and right now, it is!

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