I am currently at 100% of the people that I’ve told about Lemmy irl actively chiding me for having mentioned it to them. It doesn’t help that (1) Lemmy.ml is the #1 Lemmy instance in a Google search, and (2) that instance uses Local rather than All when you don’t have an account. If someone told me to consider joining Lemmy.ml, and that first couple of pages of content were all that I saw - especially just before any election in a Western nation - well then now I understand their reaction perfectly, as it is the correct one!?!?

Conversely, PieFed has a number of features that Lemmy lacks, one being the ability to actually block all users from an instance (rather than merely mute communities but not actual users on it - leaving them free to troll you in other communities, reply to your comments, trigger notifications, downvote your content, etc.). Since blocking lemmy.ml, I have had zero regrets, and enjoy interacting with Lemmy communities much better:-).

The real biggest problem that Lemmy has is lack of users and overall dearth of niche content - which ofc wraps back around to why would someone willing come here to be bullied just for being a mainstream centrist or even “leftist” by USA standards (Reddit is based in and its largest userbase is from the USA)?

Bullying is why Lemmy will never grow. That, and how the tools are somehow even more authoritian than Reddit - i.e. there is a modlog but no modmail, nor notification of a moderation event, instead the modlog simply says that a “mod” did something, if you go to the trouble to find out why nobody bothered to respond. And worse, on Lemmy.ml you’ll find yourself banned from communities that you’ve never so much as heard of, citing having broken a rule that seems not written down anywhere. The lack of transparency is very reminiscent of the spez.

Fortunately, PieFed and Mbin offer non-Lemmy options to the Threadiverse.:-)

That’s great!

I was just talking with an admin of Lemmy.zip who automatically puts up a community muting of HB for new users joining that instance, but not going so far as to defederate from it. So… that surely helps a little bit? Except when Hexbears brigade a community located on a different instance.

But the example I gave of a mod throwing out death threats to users involves lemmy.ml rather than Hexbear. Both instances are problematic in that regard, ML mostly for the admins and the mods that they choose to protect, while HB the subset of users that go outside of the instance to engage in trolling. In both, it is also entirely possible to have completely sane and normal conversations on the instance itself, which muddies the waters a bit, though the presence of sanity on occasion does not negate the presence of insanity on others.

And I was thinking of editing my comment but instead I’ll put it here, your own posts such as https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/ most definitely covers both the strong benefits as well as strong criticisms of using Lemmy, as well as solid solutions to the latter problems.

Lemmy has a well-known reputation as being a “Nazi bar”. e.g. as mentioned in this example post in r/RedditAlternatives complaining about toxicity on Lemmy, here is one of the comments therein (not from OP but as part of the overall conversation):

If their experience is anything like mine, it’s populated by mostly far left wing Americans who were banned from Reddit for being too extreme. I disagreed with someone about a topical left wing American position and received death threats. In fact I’ve never received that many death threats on Reddit. Lemmy is extreme.

Even if the threats came from Hexbear or one of the lemmy.ml mods who are allowed to make death threats against users without any repercussions, “we” still expose “our” users to such content when we federate with those communities. i.e., for exactly the same reason that we defederate from instances that share CSAM, if we really, truly, genuinely don’t like it when mods make death threats against users, then we need to put a stop to it - by defederating those instances that are known to do exactly that.

Otherwise we give our tacit approval, and moreover whenever we encourage people to join Lemmy instances, we willingly expose those people to this kind of content. Would you expose someone to CSAM, knowingly and without warning them first? Then why is it different when we can see the death threats, delivered by mods, who are not censured in any way, yet still encourage people to come here to Lemmy communities? Are we truly that desperate for content that we are so inconsiderate to them as to expose them to that without warning?

If you somehow have not heard of this yet and really don’t know what I’m talking about, a lot of details are offered in Discuss.Online’s (successful) Petition to defederate from hexbear.net, although that particular mod in question is from Lemmy.ml.

It took awhile to find a pic where she’s smiling rather than frowning.

It’s… terrifying, isn’t it!? 😮

Also I just really enjoy this one:

Hrm, seems a bit… familiar.

Like this one, which I share in “honor” of this occasion 🤪

Fair warning I might just be too tired for this to be intelligible but here goes:

Be careful, she’ll hear you… - OH NO, TOO LATE!

You can read in my (successful) Petition to defederate from hexbear.net some stories not only about that instance but also some for Lemmy.ml, including an incident where a mod told a user that they (the mod) wanted to kill them (the OP), then double and tripled down on that thought, all entirely protected by the admins (discussed further here).

When I first considered leaving Reddit, this kind of thing gave me strong pause, and it was only the fact that Kbin.social also existed that got me even a toe-hold into the Lemmyverse. This despite me not caring about Mastodon and thus any of its Microblogs, which lead to me mostly interacting with Lemmy magazines remotely, though with different sorting metrics which did help a little for me to see content that was not merely highly upvoted by people using Lemmy (including hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, etc.) and instead prioritized more by like-minded people using Kbin, and then later Mbin.

PieFed goes MUCH further, providing not merely different voting metrics on mostly the same content but actual tools that even pro-authoritarian Lemmy users want (categories of communities, combined comments across cross-posts, hashtags, etc.), as well as people who want the opposite, it’s really extremely flexible.

And I think PieFed is the only hope for the Threadiverse to go mainstream. I’m not saying that I think that we necessarily will, or even that we all want to or should, just that if it were to happen, it won’t happen with Lemmy. I’m currently at 100% of people I’ve told about it irl actively chiding me for having so much as recommended it, which makes a great deal of sense only once you realize that (i) a Google search pulls up lemmy.ml as the top instance, (ii) that instance shows Local rather than All by default, and thus (iii) what someone will be exposed to is content making fun of Western society. Mainstream normal people don’t want that! I don’t want it either! We learn how to block it, but mainstream normal people don’t want to expend hours upon hours to make Lemmy usable - and by hours I mean like tens of, continually, as they keep swatting off the bullies, but there are always more.

The alternative would be to make better mod tools. Which on Lemmy are barely happening, extremely slowly. PieFed is still catching up to Lemmy in terms of base features though, e.g. there is a Preview option but only for posts but not for comments, and many Notifications point to things to read but then won’t actually show you the thing when you click on it (due to many reasons, possibly having been removed in the meantime, or being hidden by an auto-collapse or auto-hide feature, or you’ve blocked all the users from an instance but nonetheless notifications are still sent, etc.) - i.e. it still needs some polish. Hence in the meantime I am not recommending Threadiverse tools to anyone irl atm, unless they are already reading something here and then I recommend to check out PieFed:-).

A highly relevant post, particularly the part “Address the Elephants in the Room”. Just imagine, for a moment, if all the people who were banned from Reddit for being too toxic were to come over here? In that case you would get… Lemmy.

Yet we are here as well. It is an odd mixture. And it is why we aren’t really growing (well, barely) despite all the fuck-ups done by Huffman. Meanwhile e.g. Bluesky is really gathering people together! That’s the difference that listening to people makes: they go where there’s a nice environment, which addresses their concerns, in large part bc it makes them feel heard.

People most definitely don’t come to Lemmy to be heard. Well, to be more precise, they do not stay once they learn that it isn’t going to happen, without MAJOR efforts on their part to block a goodly fraction of the Lemmy userbase that will not control their own words, hence making anyone who does not enjoy listening to such need to put in the work to do that for them.

I’m torn between this:

And this:

So I decided to make both:-).

Okay, I’ll stop

Oh wait, actually… in the pattern buffer, we CAN!

I hear that the problems of climate change and rise of authoritarianism all around the world have been solved… in the pattern buffer 🍾. Everyone except Alexander is invited!