Ask Lemmy

Less lurkers and more people making comments over time. This thread is a great example.

Doesn't actually seem much different to me. Would be nice to have a few more people for the niche communities - but I do kinda worry that Lemmy becoming popular will lead to an influx of bots.

1. It has gotten bigger. More active. More posts, more new content. When i first came over i would check the All page, sorted by eitber Active or Hot, and only find a couple of new posts per day. It is still nowhere near as active as Reddit was back then (probably a goos thing), but it has enough content to help me procrastinate at work now.

2. LemmyNSFW died and has been replaced by FediNSFW recently. I am sure that it will be better in the long-term, but it still doesn't seem to be back to where it was yet. I think a lot of the old posters were bots, largely re-posting from Reddit, and not all of those have been rebuilt yet. I have mixed feelings about that.

3. The Connect app has gotten better and better. Love it.

4. For the past year or so, Lemmy has been of a size big enougj for patterns to ripple and promulgate through it bht small enough to notice them. For example, almost immediately after New Years several different communities on different instances started to see a drastix influx of webcomic posts. Usually 4-panel ones. Usually low-fidelity ones (XKCD-style, not Girl Genius for example). And usually oned with some sort of error or controversy. Rage bait to get the comments going, but nothing controversial enough to get banned or removed.

There would be new accounts made that just posted a handful of these comics quickly, and sometimes argue with people in the comments. Once people like me started pointing out the pattern they started deleting the posts and accounts after a couple days. I'm not sure when it stopped, but i have not noticed one for probably a month.

Same for the most part. There was a period of time where it seemed like every post and comment was angry. Silly fights over semantics. That still happens but it seems like less. I see more and more English speaking European influence. Still lots of angry Linux guys but Linux seems to be in a winning season so it’s chill.

What is reddit? It's just a fast paced forum with lots of people.

Lemmy is in essence the exact same thing. It just operates far more decentralised than reddit.

The difference over the last months/years is that lemmy as a whole is growing. More people, more engagement. That's it.

I don't know what you mean by "lost it's uniqueness" the only unique part of lemmy is it's decentralised system. And that's still the same.

Honestly? Not much.

The biggest change for me was losing Lemm.ee. That was a blow. I had probably the most thriving (not by much) synthesizer community. I haven't had the heart to try and start it back up elsewhere.

I arrived during the API debacle.

Some things are better, content and activity.

Some things are worse, spammers, AI proponents who harrass you despite the clear community-wide dislike of the plagarism machine, fascist chuds trying to mainstream rascism, misogyny, and ableism.

Basically each new wave is another usenet September equivalent, and it feels like we're approaching the eternal september epoch as lemmy becomes more widely used. Soon we'll have to deal with state actor bot-nets if we aren't already.

Amounts of political propaganda are wild in some comunities and instances. But, I guess that this thing will eventually occur in any social media.

Significantly, and for the better. The is significant engagement, a large increase in new communities, and we have even had our very own memorable, memeable instances!

It has gotten much better. More content and general activity and nutjobs at .ml and similar got mostly isolated from the rest of the network.

I think fediverse is really shaping up as a strong reddit alternative. Most pop subjects are mirrored here and the vibe is very similar to early reddit so there no real reason to go to reddit other than super niche communities like of a tv show or something.

Most props go to the lemmy.world team as it kept a consistent big sane network running that keeps the project stable! If .world never happened I think Lemmy would have remained cess pool of social rejects like most reddit alternatives like Voat or lemmy.ml

A bunch more assholes who take any and every opportunity to be an asshole, and tripping mods who can't be bothered and apply blanket bans because you said a thing they didn't agree with. What's new.

there are increasingly a greater number of nutjobs, spammers, and hostile/miserable/angry people. my block list is like 300+ now. 6-9 month ago it was like 12 people.

2 years ago it was mostly super nerds just nerding about.

Its gotten significantly less optimistic and more cynical. Its in my opinion more of a reflection of the state of the world than a Lemmy specific issue but it affects Lemmy users more because this isnt a space that allows people to live in ignorant bliss.

A lot less beans nowadays

It feels more like reddit now, but still is populated by a certain type of person that would seek out Lemmy. Mostly techy, left of center+, over age 30+, etc. I enjoy it.