It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base.

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[–] fizzbang@lemmy.world 213 points 11 hours ago (6 children)

People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement. Not in this article so much. I’m sure there were fewer posts in the past too. But what I found is that there are real people on here and you don’t have to wade through bots and shills which makes this community feel much more whole to me.

[–] mo_lave@reddthat.com 3 points 1 hour ago

People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement.

I do. And that's also why if you consciously choose Lemmy as your first line of internet discussion, I encourage you to help build a critical mass to sustain your particular niche or topic.

[–] badgermurphy@lemmy.world 74 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (5 children)

While that's true, I don't believe it to be a fundamental property of the medium or federation in general. I think what we are experiencing is the result of lack of mainstream attention and traffic.

The people here are much less demographically diverse than the public at large, and have intentionally sought out this space and others like it, so they have more of a sense of ownership and community about it. The more attention it gets, the more the demographics will change to reflect the broader public, and the more it will become like a public space, complete with all the ills that come with that, like advertisers vying for attention, shills posing as enthusiasts, and influencers saying what will get them the most followers, rather than what they think.

I believe it would take extensive moderation and amazing tools to keep places like this the same as they gain users. I haven't ever seen a community survive that kind of growth and retain its original spirit, but I also haven't seen one with no profit motive. If we can get the moderation tools where they need to be, there could be hope!

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 1 points 11 minutes ago

There is no effective way to ban a person. As long as that remains true, moderation tools don't really matter.

Israel alone is putting $760 million into propaganda. Lemmy may not be big, but it's worth 0.2% of that budget.

And that's just Israel.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 4 points 3 hours ago

While Lemmy lacks those, PieFed already has both advanced automated mod tools plus other features that dramatically increases the democratization of moderation itself.

e.g. if someone wants to see less Trump and Musk content, keyword filters allow someone to personally set that up, without having to rely upon a moderator to make that decision for the entire community.

Another example along those lines is the automated collapsing or even hiding of content that falls below a certain score threshold - personally I have that turned off, but if someone wants that then again, they don't have to rely solely upon the efforts of a moderation team, and can rely instead upon the community engagement. Again: if they want.

Still another example is showing icons next to usernames - e.g. one shows new users that are <2 weeks old, another shows someone who receives ~10x more downvotes than upvotes, and so on. These are not "filters", just helpful indicators so that you know more about someone's reputation prior to responding. Most conservatives for example have warning labels next to their usernames, in these more leftist spaces.

Also - and I cannot emphasize enough how crucial this is - PieFed moderator reports actually federate. This has been a source of huge pain in Lemmy, and tbf I think a future Lemmy release is planned that will do that... but meanwhile as with so exceedingly very many other features, PieFed has had them for months.

PieFed thereby helps avoid some of the major issues that cause community fragmentation. Which ironically PieFed also helps solves that issue too, by collapsing comments (old example of this phenomena), and with the Categories of Communities suite of features, including the user-customizeable and shareable Feeds.

Also PieFed is easier to install, requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources (even sending 25-fold less data to end-users), and so on. So yeah, I don't think Lemmy is capable of scaling up, despite its reliance upon its sourcecode being in the hyper stable Rust programming language, because of all the other issues with it (database issues requiring constant restarts, and especially lack of moderation capabilities), so I am putting all of my hopes into PieFed. Sorry if this reads like an advertisement - I feel like PieFed is to Lemmy what Lemmy is to Reddit, except that analogy does not begin to come close since PieFed has added features that even Reddit never bothered to, plus some others that it continually tried to take away from people by not retaining it in new-reddit despite how it was present in old.

[–] cinoreus@lemmy.world 25 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

True, Lemmy feels this way almost exclusively because it's small and hasn't been noticed by mainstream media enough. The second that changes this place will become what reddit was pre-ipo.

[–] PlantJam@lemmy.world 11 points 8 hours ago

My hope is that it will always be a little too disjointed to hold that kind of attention for long.

[–] thethrilloftime69@feddit.online 4 points 6 hours ago

I think even if shills, bots and influencers gain traction in the fediverse, it's still better than reddit or Instagram because of federation. There won't be one corporation algorithmically feeding you ads. You can curate your experience more than you can on another platform.

[–] errer@lemmy.world 4 points 8 hours ago

I think the community is a good size right now. Popular enough that we guarantee getting any content of relevance I care about, but not popular enough to have all the problems you mentioned. I hope the community stays this size and off the radar indefinitely.

[–] blinfabian@feddit.nl 16 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

unless you enter .ml environment...

[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 5 points 9 hours ago

Yeah, there's definitely still some bullshit and editorialized clickbaity headlines to sift through, but it's not nearly as much and overall the content here feels much more human.

There's just not much incentive to generate engagement for the sake of it (unless you're funhole), and far fewer bots and bad-faith trolls in general. Not to say there's none though.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2 points 8 hours ago

As soon as there is "unlimited" content, the vast majority of said content is shit

[–] solrize@lemmy.ml -1 points 8 hours ago

Lemmy as far as I can tell is mostly dup posts and blind links, especially links to youtube. The absence of Spez is of course priceless, but otherwise Lemmy is duller than plenty of single-issue blogs or forums, or even the still-decaying corpse of Usenet. That article is about Mastodon, which has a different crowd than Lemmy does. I'm not big on the "follower" model though, so I'm not there very much.