I joined Lemmy a few weeks before the API change. I loved the conversations. I loved how the content was slower but more engaging, and less politically charged. There was nobody shitting on Elon Musk, or Twitter, or Reddit.

People were having meaningful, engaging conversations about random stupid memes. It felt like the early days of the internet… It felt like a small community of outcasts that all got together and posted shitty memes for the sake of giving someone else a feed of shitty memes to scroll through while they were taking a shit… Or not taking a shit, apparently…

But now that the Reddit API change happened… It’s like the super toxic part of Reddit was skimmed off the top and sent our way.

Every popular post is negatively charged. Every comment has an underpinning of hate. Everything is spun with some time of agenda that feeds half truths to make it look like whole lies.

What happened here? I thought this place was supposed to be better then Reddit? To not have some corporate overlord algorithm controlling us as part of some toxic hivemind?

Does anybody know of a Lemmy instance that has been spared from this proto-molecule outbreak?

  • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    Wow. Considering your down-votes and some of the comments: Seems most of the people don’t understand what you’re trying to say.

    But you’re right. Everything on lemmy has changed drastically. Including the tone, how people interact with each other, …

    I like to compare this to the time people went from twitter to mastodon. that caused all sorts of misunderstandings and culture clashes. But lemmy was kind of small, much smaller than mastodon was. so the culture that was here a few weeks ago is just gone. the thousands or millions of people that came here barely noticed the few people and posts that were already there.

    give it some time. let things settle. i get what you’re saying. they just arrived, scream at each other, are generally just loud and have strange manners from the perspective of someone who deliberately avoided reddit before. but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. we can have meaningful conversations, niche communities etc even if there are now many more loud people with a completely different style on this platform. it won’t ever be the same, though. precedent from the early days of the internet is: a large influx of ‘normal people’ will destroy your communities. but i’m hopeful for the future. this definitely is a chance to spread something nice to a lot of people. we have to establish a healthy culture now. but that’s doable.