Lemmy is so good right now because there's no commercialization here.
My ublock has been at a constant "0" on this site since I've started. A youtube tab will have over a hundred by the end of a 10 minute video.
And hopefully never will be. It seems like the people hosting instances aren't in it for the money. Particularly the *.world guys have other fediverse projects big enough that they could've done something like, say, add ads to it.
I’m a teenage FOSS enthusiast and I’m of the opinion that there are a lot more of us here than you seem to all think.
not speaking for OP but when I think about not wanting "kids" around, I mean immature people. I'm looking to be part of something like the reddit prior to them buying Alien Blue.
Not just fewer kids. But fewer conservatives too.
Gosh, I love it here.
Conservatives love having corporate masters, so they're all staying on reddit.
You know, it's so funny (though obviously not in an enjoyable way per se) how those folks are so selective and picky about freedom. Like freedom is OK when it's the freedom to enter a supermarket without a mask, but it's not OK when it's the freedom to express your gender. And as in this example, when it comes to corporate masters...
Don't you just love capitalism? And don't you just loooooove capitalists? It's honestly frightening how reminiscent it is to the way the fascists took power in 1930s Germany.
And by the way, I'm noticing a parallel with how much they not only embrace conservative evangelical Christendom, but also act like it's the epitome of freedom and liberty - the American Dream, if you will. If you attend one of the US's most notorious fundie schools, you're not allowed to stay up late, mingle with the opposite gender too much, attend dances, or be pretty much anything other than cishet (and implicitly, cishet white male). The irony of how said school is named "LIBERTY" University never seems to die on me.
Conservatives love giving lip service to freedom, but they hate anyone actually exercising their freedom.
Basically they only care about appearances and are devoid of any actual substance. That's why they scream "virtue signaling" so much. Since they have no real virtue, they can't conceive of anyone else having any either.
Agree. But it's not kids, it's stupid people of all ages. Same thing happened with Reddit and with the Internet as a whole. Used to be you had to be a little smart to know you wanted to be on the Internet and figure out how to get it working. Then same was true of forums and IRC. Then same was true of Reddit. But then Reddit changed formats trying to be a TikTok style quick content scroll app, so idiots who just want to scroll started using the site and quality of discussions went down. I hope Lemmy grows but I hope the sign up process stays as it is, to weed out the extra stupid.
I think you‘re onto something. I read a lot of comments of people thinking the fediverse is too complicated to deal with and while I disagree - but also think it has issues - there does seem to be a barrier of entry for a good portion of people in the form of „inconvenience.“ So whoever is here really wants to be here and not just be an anonymous arse. I don‘t think you gotta be particularly smart, you gotta step out of your comfort zone.
I think it's more just because we're early adopters and the first wave of refugees.
We're building something here - and right now, for some it's a new home, for some of us this is something big - a place that resists monetization. This isn't just the fresh new version of social media, built by cool people who have the best intentions and a vision (I think most of them did, at least initially)
Admins go bad, already some of the instances I'm on have people starting to look at not just paying for servers, but making a profit. And if they can live off the donations - fine, more power to them.
But when someone comes knocking with a bag of money, what are they going to do? They can sell us out, but they can't go far before we leave... What do we miss out on? The content will either follow or we're missing out on content elsewhere.
And we can mitigate it further - too many talented people care too much to let this idea die. We're going to face difficult times, but it's a new ephemeral Internet built on top of the one stolen from us - it doesn't start or end with a reddit clone.
And I think that's why we care - because this time is different. It can't go bad the way everything else does. It relies on no one, and it's built from all of us
This place is ours. No kings, no masters, no capitol, no capital
For me it is lack of commercial interests (ads hidden in post), lack of bots, and lack of "funny meme and jokes' posts.
lack of "funny meme and jokes' posts
This is it for me. The Pavlovian posting and upvoting of shitty jokes in every. single. thread. I haven't bothered with reddit's comment section in years because of it. Here, the comments so far seem chill and appropriate for the posts.
I think the influence on Reddit was deeper than a lot of people have considered. The hivemind was so strong it made it difficult to have decent and useful discussion, even the puns that muddied down nearly every post's comments achieved that end. The amount of posts I've seen of people feeling much more comfortable actually interacting on Lemmy, in my mind, lends weight to how Reddit wasn't a place for objective dialogue. That's why it felt so adolescent, like sitting at a high school lunch table.
For me, It's the lack of advertising. Especially the constant guerilla advertising and flash marketing done in the larger subs.
At this point I'm just so burnt out on the constant advertisements. It's literally shoved in your face at all times and not only does it make me actively avoid the products but its also exhausting.
Constant advertisements wearing you down? Now there's anti-advertisement spray! Just click here to read our website that totally isn't astroturfing. You too can be without advertising. JUST CLICK HERE!!!
/S
Yeah, sometimes on reddit I'd be talking to someone and realize oh... this person is probably 14 or something.
Its always weird to me when I realize not everyone online is ~30 years old.
all of you are wrong. lemmy looks like it does now because it's first of all and most importantly small.
the reason why it's small is that there are barriers for entry, be it effort needed to understand federation for the first time or choosing instance. "ooh just choose anything it's not that hard" shut the fuck up. it's a barrier because you can see that numbers are quite low, and just because you've come through it already doesn't mean it's not there
but there's bigger issue. depending on instance and how do you count, some 95%+ of new active users could have been rexxiters. this means that by coming there they have to leave reddit, and that means leaving communities that were there
average person isn't stupid or malicious or unenlightened plebeian. average person is just. average. because of small lemmy's size people there are subject to strong selection bias, namely on gaussian distribution of "how much do you care about moving there" that's far right tail that sits there. what are reasons for that, for every person that would be a bit different. some of these are FOSS enthusiasts or techlibertarians or softcore anticapitalists, this has some serious implications. some were banned from reddit but want replacement (some of these were shown door already, like exploding-heads).
now, crossection of "people who cared to come there" and "programmers" is reasonably big, as evidenced by programming.dev, but for any other unrelated topic there's much less. crossection of "people who care" and "people who are good at identifying mushrooms" or "aviation fans" or whatever is small, maybe too small to form new community. these people would need to leave reddit and their community and come there, doing nothing because they have no other fellow mushroom identificators to talk to. so, many don't. there's also probably negative selection of specific kind of people like some conspiracy theorists, at least for now
if you want to see lemmy grow, you would see dilution of that concentrated techbro sentiment with people who are otherwise average, but these people are also there to form new, specialized communities. you might want to gatekeep them out with some eternal september scenario, but it most likely won't work. personally i think that lemmy needs to grow a few times over for these diverse "unrelated communities" to form, and then things will get pretty sustainable
another thing is that there's no ads and no selection for hostile content or conspiracy theories, and that might be related to how lemmy's algorithm is not driven by engagement, at least that's how it looks like. and also bots, i've seen entire subreddits written by chatgpt or some dude who tried hard to do something similar by hand, and i hope to avoid this here at least for some time. the kids are alright
OP I think you spelled idiots wrong.
The Crow cawed that Lemmy is strong,
Since no kids have yet come along
But the teens disagree
All ages got stupidity
I think you spelled idiots wrong
I suspect that one of the reasons Lemmy's texts are longer, meatier, and more thoughtful is the age of the users. My gut tells me that we're an older audience that doesn't need to dump the usual social media BS - hasty comments filled with unsubstantiated arguments. Everyone has an opinion and should be heard and respected. As a Reddit refugee, I feel Lemmy provides such space, and that's what I enjoy most. Like many others whose profiles match mine, once you get past the initial confusion (where should I register, what app should I use, where can I comment) and get comfortable with the jargon, you feel more encouraged to participate in discussions. So far, I've been pleased with the civil environment of the discussions, as most users are able to express their thoughts in a relaxed and non-toxic manner. Honestly, I'd encourage anyone who has been just lurking to participate and share their thoughts.
I haven't been here much since I joined last week, but one thing I noticed is I've barely seen any typos on Lemmy. While I definitely don't mind seeing the occasional typo, the number of spelling mistakes was getting annoying, and it's gotten progressively worse over the last year or so.
Maturity really isn't the same as age: plenty of legally adult people (many already so for decades) around who are anything but mature individuals.
That said, as others here I think the absence of the subtle pressures derived from commercialization and profit-seeking make most of the difference.
Also, I've been thinking about the possibiility that both those already in Lemmy before and the Reddit refugees who came in recently, are at the most principled end of the spectrum compared with those still in Reddit (whose principles on the subject of ultra-authoritarian top-down imposition as done in Reddit clearly aren't strong enough to make them try something else), possibly also more confortable with change. This might make the crowd here at the moment a self-selected bunch leaning significantly more towards a certain psychological profile than the average which in turn (or so is my theory) affects the dominant tone of discussions here.
We are all early adopters here. They are typically more engaged with the product.
The internet as a whole got sadder / meaner / more unruly when COVID happened. I was on reddit a lot at the time and noticed it immediately.
It’s still like that, but I hope we find a way forward.
Meh, lets not.
In my experience, older people have to make conscious effort to maintain critical thinking and reasoning and not start lazily regurgitating settled, memorized opinions they've come rely on as absolutes, intead of allowing those beliefs to be subject to fresh challenges from novel perspectives that may change those opinions. Many do make that effort, and many do not. To paraphrase my favorite fictional character, if you refuse to change your mind, then you will die stupid.
Individuals are individuals of course though. I'm of the opinion that, on an individual basis, beyond the age of around 12, age is an extremely poor metric to estimate someone's intellect, wisdom, and insight. I'm in my mid 30s and have a master's degree in psychology with a 3.9 GPA. I recognize that there are 18 year olds that dwarf me intellectually, and more commonly 80 year olds who've lived lives devoid of reflection, who will die defending their long dead pappy's narrative about how the world works with anger rather than reason, solely because that's what they were told to believe. I have pity for that type, but very little patience.
This is like when people in 7th grade say that the 6th graders are sooo immature omg
And no repost bots. Reddit top posts are so filled with trash reposts I have seen the 69420 times like I am looking back my primary school homework
please don't randomly start some ageism crap suddenly now please. the vibes are good because we collectively experience self-efficacy against the corporate super power that is reddit. All people should feel welcome on lemmy
Lots of kids, but the mental age of the user base is all adults (for now)
When I was a kid I thought grown ups were annoying, when I was in my 20s I thought teenagers were annoying, in my 30s I think people in their 20s are annoying. People will always have something to complain about others. “Kids” is just a different group for different people.
I had a lovely conversation with a 19 yr old. He kind of reminded me of myself, only growing up in this crazy time. He was really thoughtful about his experiences. Any one here now is probably a touch more mindful, but we can all slip and be dumb or even bad people, and when there's more people, it's easier to do, especially when there are people who are sad or mad or whatever.
It's not an age thing, It's the same reason the internet generally got toxic after a time people who aren't passionate about things take over and drown out the high effort contributers
No kids? I am a kid
It's past your bed time. Stay off my lawn. Get a jawb! Cut yer hair! Stop smokin' the devil's grass!
I dont know, it feels like reddit still and it isnt much about age. Pseudointelligents are present, braggers present, ad-hominem enthusiasts present, fingerprinting my machine to death most likely present, i still fear getting banned for speaking my mind as in all english-language spaces so it will probably be my first and last post on this website if not for the omnipresent abusive and constantly angry mods on every community oriented site i had posted on that bullied me for me being me and high functioning but still autism Mixed feelings, but gatekeeping quality destroyers works, thats my experience and objective knowledge that it works, and some spaces have lower demographics by age than this place but are the cozy village with admin that doesnt exploit it. Its not about age its about maturity Lets sit and watch what is going to hatch of this site, my feelings are mixed
This is the time before the Eternal September. Enjoy it while you can.
I would imagine a high proportion of people so easy to leave Reddit found it easy because they remember leaving digg.
Anyone younger than that are just bloody sensible
As long as there are no well-known apps on any app store, there are going to be less kids, since they probably don't want to go through GitHub. I find most of them are somewhat afraid of downloading apks from websites they might not use often.
Showerthoughts
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Posts must be original/unique
- Be good to others - no bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct