Asklemmy

48166 readers

830 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

123

Are anti-Lemmy sentiments being botted? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago by tehmics@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

91 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In other places on around the web, (chiefly /r/RedditAlternatives) whenever Lemmy is brought up, invariably I see the exact same complaints from brand new accounts.

Lemmy is too complicated, it wont gain traction, can't figure out how to use it, can't log in, etc.

Now, I'm definitely more tech savvy than the average redditor, but I just don't see the complaints. You can go to any Lemmy site, instantly start doomscrolling with a familiar UI, and sign up on all the instances I've tried has been frankly more simple than making a new reddit account. The only real complaint I have is the generally smaller volume of users and posts.

My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.

Ideally, the first link someone sees when googling Lemmy would be a global feed on a fairly generic instance, with a basic tagline akin to 'front page of the internet.' End users don't need to care about the technical details, at least not until they're interested in the platform.

So is this "Lemmy is too confusing" sentiment even real? And if not, what motive would there be to astroturf this?

If it is a real issue affecting would-be users, how can we address it?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] conicalscientist@lemmy.world 24 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Yes. Of course the big platforms actively seek to undermine competitors. There's billions of dollars at stake. Something that really convinced me was reading about how Facebook ran VPN services to spy on traffic so they could spot budding competitor platforms.

We know reddit used bots at the beginning to generate activity to make the site look popular. Something I'm not convinced they ever stopped doing. I believe reddit corporate still bots their own site for whatever purpose they require in the moment. I absolutely believe they troll their own site. Remember spez is the guy who live edits the production database.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 days ago

I used facebook way too much and the thing that got me to finally delete my account in 2011 was I had made a post about discovering diaspora and linking my account. Hung out with a friend a month or two later and he loaded up my facebook profile and could see every post I had ever made except the one about a federated facebook alternative.

Veering a little off-topic now, but facebook contacts being my irl friends made that feel so dangerous to me. If half my friends have opinion A and the other half opinion B, then if one opinion is entirely censored but I still see everything posted matching the approved opinion, that will have an enormous sway over how my worldview develops, in a way different from seeing strangers agreeing on those same things.

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

We know reddit used bots at the beginning to generate activity to make the site look popular.

That's not quite it. The founders made a few of throwaway accounts and posted a bunch of links that exemplified what they wanted people to post. It was fake activity, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't automated. It was maybe 50 posts and I don't think it was a bad thing to do.