As Reddit’s enshittification reaches new heights their attempts to suppress attention for alternatives, like federated Lemmy, has the opposite effect as this Hacker News discussion shows.
Reading criticisms of Lemmy from Reddit and other platforms like HackerNews reminds me of reading criticisms of Reddit from Digg back in 2007-2010, except they’re more based on architecture instead of “it looks ugly”.
Now there are things that will turn away users. There’s obviously a strong leftist culture here, there are less users so less content, and obviously federation is a stumbling block for many people.
But I really think that’s ok similar to what people are saying in that Hacker News thread. I wouldn’t want all of Reddit to come over, and I think it’s better for the culture and growth here to get a self selected trickle/stream of users instead of a deluge.
I don’t think Lemmy will necessarily have the same issues as Mastodon because Twitter/Mastodon requires you to know people or know accounts to follow to be useful. Lemmy just requires communities you’re interested in and a critical mass of users to drive posting and engagement. We’re already seeing greater activity as more users arrive
The strong leftist culture is a plus. I know I’m not going to get flooded with nazi shit like so many of the prior iterations of the reddit exodus (e.g. voat).
UX is whatever. Would like to see more decentralization of large hosts to avoid it inevitably being 1 or 2 big lemmy hosts with everything.
Also cross federation logins. I was so confused why my logins weren’t working on other servers.
That second comment by goplayoutside says it well: “Maybe the modest technical hurdles are a feature, not a bug.”
I think it is a feature, and the same is true for Mastodon and the Fediverse as a whole, imho.
The most disturbing thing I’ve seen is the evidence that Lemmy.ml is controlled by a genocide-supporting red fascist/third positionists. If that’s true, its a massive issue and makes the platform hard to trust.
Very open to learning that this isn’t true, if it isn’t.
Very open to learning that this isn’t true, if it isn’t.
That’s not how this works. If you’re going to make serous accusations like that, the onus is on you to provide evidence to support them.
FWIW, I have no particular loyalty to lemmy.ml, I just joined the first instance I saw.
