Hi! In thinking about how to help the fediverse grow, I wonder if there are more mainstream Lemmy instances?
I’ve pointed a couple folks to Lemmy.world and it’s uhhh, pretty hard Left for them (as one girl, who volunteered for the Democrats said “I just got yelled at because I can’t be Left wing unless I want to destroy capitalism? Which feels weird.”) We’re much farther Left than reddit which itself was definitely Left of centre…
I don’t know if decentralized open source social media actually attracts many mainstreamers but assuming we want to grow the fediverse, I’d like to have somewhere I can point people to without feeling very nervous for them.
Thanks!
You’re going to get yelled at by lefties on any instance. That’s how federation works.
Yep, I got an absolute novel length comment from some far left .ml person as one of my first interactions on Lemmy.
I got told to go back to reddit on my very first comment. 🤣
Ouch.
Is your username a reference to this song by the way? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4LWIP7SAjY
Not really, ‘murmel’ means ‘marmot’ in Swedish but it’s often taken already so I’ve just evolved it into a marmalade-pun
That’s cool!
Leftists famously hate other leftists
Well_theres-your-problem.gif
I guess… Well, I have trouble seeing the fediverse expand that far then. Which is fine but there have been a lot of pleas to make this a viable alternative to corpo social media.
Please do stay!
Yeah, a lot of the fediverse has an extreme left slant, and that’s coming from someone living in a rather left-leaning country.
As someone who jumped the reddit ship during the blackout protest and has been here ever since, mostly out of principle, it has slowly been getting better as more people filter in.
The key is finding the communities you like and blocking the others, and users, that you dont.
There’s an up-front time-cost but it’s easy to adjust and makes for a great experience.
I don’t think it helps that politics absolutely dominates Lemmy, where Reddit has enough diverse subreddits that you could probably just avoid politics all together.
It’s much harder to get away from it here. But hopefully, as Lemmy grows then we start to see more and more users in the non political communities and people can have a laugh without people jumping down their throats. People just need to stick to it and give it a good go and help build something great.
It’s a circling the drain problem. Even though Lemmy is (slowly) expanding.
Lemmy doesn’t have the raw numbers userbase to just have anyone come in, and find a niche topic with an active community.
But because any average user can’t come in and just find their niche community, they don’t stay.
Meanwhile politics HAS active communities. So politics grow. And thats where Lemmy is growing.
But I can’t find a community for “How I met your mother”. A tv show that concluded like 10 years ago. But the show takes place in the future, recounting stories from “the past”. Which means, in real life, Tracy, the mother who Ted is talking about, died in 2024. The story is being told in 2036. But the show aired in real time during “the past”. Which means if Ted is talking about April 2008, that episode aired in April 2008. But the whole
98 seasons (real fans don’t count the 9th season that never happened) is being told in one afternoon in 2036. Which means we could be talking about the last ciggerrette of each character as they happen in real time. I think the next one is in 2028.Instead…we talk about trump here…and seemingly nothing else. Ever.
I’d like [email protected] and /c/Cleveland to grow so we can talk about eyebrows and how great Jose Rameriez is.
I will join an HIMYM community if you create one. I am a big fan.
That’s the thing though American politics get discussed here. With their perceptions of left and right.
Last season was great. It was only the finale that sucked…
(and, yes, if you want a HIMYM community, just let me know and I can make it on https://metacritics.zone/)
I mean, yeah, go ahead and make it. But based on my quick look of your instance, none of the communities are active. That’s the part we need to work on for ALL your instance.
Yeah, and this is the part where Fediverser was supposed to help. Not just with the mirrors to help bootstrap the content, but also with the whole part of Community Ambassadors. Sadly, no one got into the ambassador part.
An idea would be to allow “plug-in able” content sorting algorithms or content filters.
I hear so many stories of people slapping tons of filters in their clients (block all comments from ml users, block “Elon” and/or “Trump” keywords)… I think tons of people are running almost identical filters. Why not bake right into the Lemmy core the ability to pull filter sets from say, a public got repo?
Same with sorting. I’d love to have a “hot” algorithms that “punishes” posts based on comment sentiment analysis. Again, let me choose my sorting algorithm from a git repo. Let some person or persons develop a “good vibes” algorithm which keeps toxity off the top of my feed.
IMO, this is the way. Sorting by engagement has obvious issues. Introducing other weights to augment a system would make a huge difference in user experience.
You can’t change the people. Look at this comment section. OP said they don’t want to be yelled at and everyone took that cue to give a lecture. Completely no self awareness. Can’t change that.
But you can improve the algorithm. And IMO if you could crowdsource that dev in a way that doesn’t impose on mainline development.
Yeah, I like all these ideas. I wondered about some sort of pooled “ban/ignore” options at the individual level. So, rather than ignoring by an instance, if I trust that Janet has good tastes and filters out children and trump, maybe I can just have an ongoing list that draws from her blocks and vice versa if she feels similar.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. I really like the idea of people with likewise sensibilities being able to act as their own cross-community mod team, without impacting other groups with different sensibilities.
I think that’s the problem with all “alternative” social media… both ones that I like and stand behind like lemmy… and the opposite end, the Parlors, MeWe’s, Truth Social etc…
The point is… mainstream people talking about shows, video games etc… rarely hit any kind of limitations in the public spaces. I myself still go on reddit to see communities of specific shows, games etc… and… it’s fine for that. If I were to try and make the suggestion for a show or movie subreddit to move to lemmy, it would be a tough case.
The ones who see the flaws and limits of the corporate platform… are the ones either teetering at the edge of socially acceptable, or over it.
Whether that’s say us lefties that believe All Cops are Bastards, or right wing guys that think america was better in Jim Crow era. Bottom line is… people looking for alternatives, are doing so because the existing platforms are likely to censor them… which means the alternatives will be disproportionately more extreme.
Speak for yourself.
There were a lot of people that looked for a Reddit alternative not because of particularly strong feelings politically or towards corporations in general but instead because Reddit broke their main method of interacting with Reddit (third party mobile apps) while simultaneously completely breaking the moderator tools to quell the shitstorm and maintain quality discussion.
I left Reddit because I saw it going further to shit faster than it ever had before, and they communicated loud and clear that they didn’t want users like me that cared about having control and options over how we interacted with the site.
None of my accounts there ever had a single comment removed by a mod, although I had been preemptively banned from multiple subs due to posting in others.
Well yeah I wasn’t saying all of them are. I was saying a disproportionate amount of them. IE say anti-capitalist views that are 1 in 1000 on facebook, are 1 in 50 on reddit, and 2 of 5 on lemmy.
Yeah, please don’t give up. I need more people like you here.
Some instances have blocked the furtherist-left instances and banned the most abrasive users from those that remain. It’s not at all how jeffw described.