Now that a lot of the commotion has subsided I’m just curious to know how y’all are finding the Lemmy experience in general and whether you use it regularly like you did reddit?
Now that a lot of the commotion has subsided I’m just curious to know how y’all are finding the Lemmy experience in general and whether you use it regularly like you did reddit?
In general, it’s been pretty good. Stuff is a bit unstable every now and then, but most of that changed when I switched away from lemmy.world.
There’s a couple of things to contend with though. There’s less content than there was on Reddit. This ultimately doesn’t matter that much for general browsing, as there is still plenty. But for more niche communities it now means barely any content. Even with larger topics like Formula 1 it’s quite noticeable that there’s a lot less people in there. It’s great during big discussions, but any smaller links or discussions often only have like 1 or 2 responses. For other communities it’s even worse. Some of the genres I listen to have basically nothing going on, while on Reddit the community was at least large enough to have a few nice discussions every moe and then. The same with many games that I really liked.
Another problem is federation with more (politically) extreme instances like lemmygrad, hexbear, and some right wing crap that was luckily defederated before I could remember their names. On the one hand, I don’t want defederation based on political opinion alone to be the norm. But neither do I particularly like getting constantly called a “lib” (even though I’m quite left wing compared to the national average) or get to read constant discussions on these topics wherever I go. I come here to read about fun stuff, unwind a bit, not to constantly read about people defending dictatorships. Hexbear is especially interesting, since their users also add a lot of fun memes and good content. But then equally they brigade comment sections and overwhelm anyone who disagrees with them.
Ending on a positive note: the software (apps, backend, frontend, etc) have really gotten a lot better over the past months. I’m using Connect at the moment and I really enjoy it. Bugs keep disappearing, to the point where I now have very few complaints. Apps is why I left Reddit, so seeing that we’re now (imo) in a better place than Reddit is a good thing.
Just thought it was worth highlighting. Obviously, the view of Hexbear is that the people you are here calling autocratic aren’t autocratic, but that gets into discussion of political opinions and my point is that this is a political opinion.
My main problem with hexbear people (or at least the annoying ones) is that imo they’re a bit too vocal about it. I’m not browsing Lemmy for political content most of the time, yet it seems like some hexbear people feel the need to turn everything into a political discussion. That kinda content is fine in some places, but less welcome in others. In my personal life I interact with people all across the political spectum, and with most people I can totally have a normal chat. That works because we bond over shared intrests. It’s very annoying when people constantly try to start discussions, whether I agree with them or not. There’s a time and place for everything.
I don’t think it’s the majority of hexbear, I see plenty of good content from them. But there does appear to be a (relatively to all of Lemmy) quite large group of aggressively political people in there, to the point of trying to spread their ideology everywhere.
I would never deny that the Hexbear people have been overly aggressive and operating on a hair trigger, but it’s not like they are coming into a thread on Right to Repair and saying “let me tell you about the Korean War!” They are nearly-always responding to topics that other people bring up.
I think we have differing experiences in that regard then
Can you link an example?
'Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you. ’
This is exactly the type of response I would expect lol