TL;DR - Lemmy’s userbase compare to Reddit just feel more angry and it so offputting when asking a question and getting an answer that sound like their pissed off. Feels oddly worse than Reddit.
Honestly, I want to like Lemmy as I want to try not use Reddit as much. The thing that is holding me back is I hate the users on Lemmy which their often passive aggressive and really snarky. I know Reddit does have those people but I always seen more them on Lemmy where I barely used it as much.
I asked on AskLemmy community if there’s any Gen-Z community around, ideally just talking about nostalgia and stuff like that. Nothing malicious at all. Then got a angry reply saying “Fuck Gen-what, just join community and post!” and telling me about generation are there to “divide” people. Apparently, me asking community which mainly be me talking about cartoon and games I grow up with is evil.
If the tone was at least “This may not matter as much and you find it better picking any community that in your best interest” then I’m be alright, it the way they seem pissed at me for even asking it like I’m an idiot which gets to me. When I told that person to calm down and stop being snarky, I got reply from other users saying they wasn’t.
Might stick to Reddit for now. I know it not great but it in my experince isn’t as easily pissed off and is actually bareable to scroll for awhile. I hate talking bad about Lemmy as I really want to like it but I just hate the userbase so much that it feels pointless to even properly use it as much.
This is a genuine concern and I do get tired if it myself sometimes. Users here can be extreme.
Have you considered beehaw? Their primary focus is to “be nice”, although I think they’re only federated with a limited set of instances.
I hadn’t no. To be honest, I just assume it was just another Lemmy instance but will check it out. Thanks for the suggestion
One thing to know about Lemmy is that they use a very old version of Lemmy. A lot of quality of life features are missing
There is also a set of more relaxed communities
a lot of people came here because they were shitty enough to get perma banned from reddit
im just guessing with that but its probably true with the attitude these people have
Yeah, I keep seeing people posting about how they were permabanned from reddit like I’m supposed to think that’s normal or sympathize with them…? I don’t automatically block them but man is the toxicity making me want to start doing it.
This is part of why I’m not going back to reddit, you can just check modlogs here to see who is actually a victim of a power tripper vs someone who slung abuse and then wants to act like a confused puppy.
Lemmy: What the fuck do you mean, “you use Windows”
When I mentioned the distro that I use in the Linux community there, I got a bunch of sarcastic replies because OMG it looks like Windows.
Regardless of the community, those people exist. The thing with lemmy, and federation as a whole, is you essentially have to curate your own experience.
Joining a specific instance over another gives you a starting point on that, but even then you’re going to have a more wild west than you get from one of the centralized sites. That’s both a boon and a curse as there is no algorithm trying to feed you whatever to keep you engaged. Reddit is less algorithm driven than other sites, but there is some secret sauce they are working with that seems to weight the votes on things.
As for user comments. Reddit has enough people that the assholes can get suppressed, especially if the subreddit is moderated well, but it’s mostly down to how active the community is and what the community vibe is. Mods can’t see everything so rely a lot on user reports.
Also, because of how a lot of people think, most average users went to lemmy.world because it was the easy option. A lot of communities on there are going to be much more rife with that kind of person that somewhere else.
For someone who grew up with the early internet this is a familiar experience, but if all you know is the post social media algorithm driven state things have been for the last 15 or so years then I can see how it could be daunting. There were certainly communities I avoided back in the ancient internet because of overly toxic people who think being mean is being funny because they are a teenager trying to be edgy or never grew out of that mindset.
As for the question you asked them, it’s one of my biggest things I think fediverse stuff could be better on. Like, we obviously don’t want algorithms, but its kind of hard to find communities that are active without actively searching. And many times you don’t know about things you might be interested in. A simple “people you follow like this” or “people who follow this also follow this other thing” and have an ability to turn it off.
About your last point, https://quiblr.com/ helps with that
https://quiblr.com/understanding_your_private_personalized_feed
I’m too new to be making these kinds of suggestions and I’m far from the moderator type myself but multiple times throughout this week, I’ve been thinking that it would be pretty cool if there was an AskBlåhaj. Or even just general Ask Lemmy based here, that could be asking for unwanted attention from shitty people on other instances though.
Not even 24 hours after seeing this post, I’ve seen someone else getting the snark and a non answer for a simple question. And also a Blåhaj user.
As much of a public bathroom as it could be, AskReddit was pretty fun for ‘silly’ questions and general chatting. And a nice place for new users to hang around and gain karma and confidence. But with the gatekeeper neckbeardy types around, maybe what it needs on Lemmy is to be in an instance with rules that promote friendliness and good vibes.
Just an idea to throw out there anyway.
, I’ve been thinking that it would be pretty cool if there was an AskBlåhaj. Or even just general Ask Lemmy based here, that could be asking for unwanted attention from shitty people on other instances though.
Probably something you can suggest on !main@lemmy.blahaj.zone
I’ll ask it there (or here) a bit later then, if you think it seems like a good idea. Currently about halfway through a j and a cup of coffee, just scrolling and throwing 2 cents in here and there.
From my limited knowledge of Blahaj, that seems to be the place to post such idea.
I’m sorry you’re experiencing this kind of behaviour, you deserved better than that interaction.
Personally, I have met a lot of hostile users from sjw and lemmyworld. So I’m going to do what Beehaw did and block out their instances completely. Besides the smaller instances need more love, the fediverse works best when it is decentralized.
Keep this in mind and stay. We need and want you here.
I asked a vegan what the word “carnist” was and got banned, lol. You’re right, there’s a lot of angry folk on here…and it’s hilarious
Bad example removed
There are some communities which expect people to lurk and learn the terminology before asking questions. Asking what carnist is on a vegan community can be considered as sealioning.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
To show an example of of what vegans face, !carnivore@lemmy.world got locked as it was a community which was willing to dunk on vegans, which is against LW terms of service.
https://lemmy.world/post/24429479?scrollToComments=true
(For people actually interested in carnivore diet, !carnivore@lemm.ee is a better community)
The fact that you find it hilarious shows you were not being there in good faith.
To show an example of of what vegans face, !carnivore@lemmy.world got locked as it was a community which was willing to dunk on vegans, which is against LW terms of service.
Honest, but tangential question: is dunking against vegans specifically against the LW terms of service, or is it a more general violation against dunking on any group? I’m asking you because you seem to be familiar with the history of the carnivore@lemmy.world lock and also their terms of service.
Dunking on groups of people I would say. But I’m not that well versed in the LW ToS
I’ve seen multiple posts on vegan communities about how they’ve been going onto some random carnivore communities for no other reason than to stir shit and get banned. So most of those arguments have lost all credibility to me personally; being angry and rude to people who ask honest questions makes you the asshole, full stop. You can never assume everyone knows all the exact things you do, and banning them from the community for not knowing them, while it is a choice you can make, is going to make your community look terrible.
people who ask honest questions
That’s the principle sealioning is based on. Trolls pretend to be asking “honest questions” and then start trolling.
There are toxic people in every community, I showed an example above of a carnivore diet community which got locked as it wasn’t complying with LW’s ToS. !vegan@lemmy.world is still open.
Am I now going to say “A carnivore community has been banned, those people are nuts” based on that anecdotal evidence?
It’s people like you who ruin it for people like OP
I assume this is a link to something in posted before? You have linked it wrong if so
Curious, the link works on my side, are you using a specific client?
Anyway
I take back what I said.
But still doesn’t work, I use the mobile app connect
No worries.
Hm, curious, I guesz this of links aren’t handled by Connect.
Anyway, have a good day!
… Yes? Yes you would and you would get an answer…
Okay, I’ll rephrase and find a better example
Edit: done
Lemmy really needs to focus on improving the default UI, and making it as easy as possible for users to sign in and start seeing posts etc.
Especially on mobile, it was a nightmare for me to figure out which app, which instance etc. most people would have given up by then.
People are used to having a very smooth process when using social media etc. and Lemmy is really lacking in that department.
My experience getting started here was a rollercoaster for sure. I think that one thing that would improve the experience immensely is if there were a way to have one profile no matter which instance you sign up on. I’m on my 3rd instance right now and the first 2 were both within my first 2 days of trying this place out.
It’s like if you want one permanent profile, you have to first research the politics of an instance, and its politics with other instances, and hang around long enough to check out the users and see if your first impression was true etc. etc. And just kiss your old profile and history good bye if the politics change and you need to move homes.
Account portability is a challenge from a technical perspective. There are some discussions about it but it’s never progressing much: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-7952-roadmap-for-actor-and-object-portability/4332/26?u=erlend_sh
never progressing much
It’s not my place because my own work rate isn’t much to speak of, especially in terms of the amount of times that I’ve started and abandoned programming tutorials over the years now. But that phrase seems to be the answer to a lot of missing / possible features around here so far, from what I’ve seen. It’s like this place reached a certain point in development and now it’s just being maintained. Which is sad, I heard about this place a couple of years ago already and from what I can surmise, it hasn’t progressed much since then.
Not complaining, I like it here. Just an observation from my uneducated but not completely uninformed viewpoint.
Seems nobody subscribed from your instance, so here’s the direct link: https://piefed.social/c/piefed_2025
Thanks, I did sub to a different Piefed community. This one doesn’t show any content for me, at least in the app I’m using.
Yes, if nobody from your instance subscribes to a remote community, you won’t see it. This is to avoid every instance having to fetch content from every community.
There is a tool like https://lemmy-federate.com/ to solve that issue, but I guess Piefed isn’t registered there yet. The other link in the comment above should still allow you to see the community’s content.
Just joined from my recently created Piefed account. Not sure that I see an option to join / subscribe from my Lemmy account.
I see, it was an app issue. Both of those links show an empty community for me via Eternity. But jumping onto my laptop quick, I see that the working link leads to the Piefed interface (duh), which obviously isn’t compatible with apps currently.
Lemmy is still being developed and regularly receives new features: https://join-lemmy.org/news/
Piefed development is a bit faster, I linked you the meta community the other day, here’s the one for their roadmap: !piefed_2025@piefed.social
Yeah I made an account there to check it out actually. I’ve just been lazy at it. And I’ve made the assumption that it doesn’t have an app yet. So I need to be in the headspace to feel like getting a little bit of shit done on my laptop.
I can always use Firefox Android if it comes down to it though, I’ve just got a garbage slow phone that struggles a little with Firefox these days, which is why I rely on apps more.
I’m giving myself about another week to shop around and hopefully find a more permanent home. For now I’m learning a lot about the politics and general lay of the land around here.
And yeah, it really wasn’t my place to talk about development, considering that I haven’t even been here for two weeks. It’s just that looking up the what’s what regarding multicommunities, and the way the downvote blocking thing is and seemingly always has been implemented didn’t inspire much confidence in me. But I think I need to take a backseat in that conversation until I’ve been here longer.
That would be great yes
I think a good start is to just join lemm.ee or even lemmy.world
And then figure out if you really want to switch or not.
Yeah it seems obvious to me now to choose the busiest server first but when I first came here, the join page was taking forever to load anything lol. So at that point the obvious (to me) choice was the small server advertised as for reducing load.
Here’s the message I usually post on Reddit when people are looking for an alternative. What do you think?
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions"
That’s great thank, I’m going to steal this.
You’re welcome!
Yeah I use connect, probably could be better apps but I don’t mind this one
Obviously I’m generalising here, but I feel like this is largely the outcome of putting a bunch of middle-aged white STEM bros on the same small social media network as a bunch of queer communists who trend a lot younger.
The latter group would be mostly content keeping to itself (albeit with the usual amount of infighting), but the former group sees it as its god-given duty to barge in and disrupt any and all “echo chambers” they happen into online. They have all the social awareness and political literacy of the stereotypical facebook boomer, they’re just more technically literate.
To be clear, a lot of folks here are perfectly amicable, but if the quality of the experience on Reddit hadn’t dropped so drastically in the last two and a half years that I found myself questioning my sanity I probably wouldn’t have come back here.
My advice is don’t hesitate to block someone for being a dick, and be ready to report anything you think is actionable by community moderators or site admins.
Be nice if most of Lemmy had mods and admins who removed hate speech
Yeah, I guess it would.
It’s absolutely been worse here lately. I don’t know that I’d call it worse than reddit, but Lemmy is definitely trending more toxic. I’m certainly not a heavy user by any means. Idk if the more reasonable voices have just become less active or if more toxic voices have arrived or what, but where as 6+ months ago things tended to be more discussion prone than antagonistic, it’s now mostly antagonistic, especially in the more popular communities.
I will say, I’ve left many of the lemmy.ml communities in favor of similar communities on other servers and that’s helped as far as making my feed of posts less toxic to boot (and less spammy).
I haven’t done much of my own moderation in blocking so I’m running mostly based on the server moderation.
American election season with a userbase opinionated enough to leave Reddit on principle, as the world burns and the holders of the most important positions in it decided to start fiddling.
And then a fascist party won.
It’s going to get spicy everywhere.
Removed by mod
angry, leaded-petrol-huffing gun-owning cowards
Seems xenophobic
If I mentioned a specific country, it would’ve been
Fact is, you knew who I meant lmao who’s the xenophobe now?
Are you now dog whistling? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)
Holy Reddit batman 😅
I will say, lately lemmy has been in uncharacteristically confrontational. It’s been a rough year so far, hopefully things chill out
US elections didn’t help
Agreed. I’ve followed less and less of all content since probably mid October.
Americans are mad, everyone else is mad at us for what happened. I don’t fault anyone for being mad, but I feel we’ve only got like a dozen Trump people on Lemmy, so everyone’s just taking it out on each other.
We’re gonna be screwed for a long time if we can’t stop infighting.
I totally understand that. A lot of people here are arseholes.
I think my experience has gotten much better now that I have a long blocklist and am on an instance with downvotes disabled. But yeah it doesn’t feel super friendly all the time here.
But I feel the same way on reddit.
Speaking of which, I was in a discussion about that yesterday:
I specifically avoid .ml and .world because the collective behavior (i.e., hostility, downvote trolling, etc.) is so much like Reddit.
Beehaw, Hexbear and Blahaj have all disabled downvotes, but Blahaj is the only one that’s decent, which is why I’m here.
(I would link directly to these if I could, but am having issues with that.)
For what it’s worth, Discuit is also a generally friendly place.
For what it’s worth, Discuit is also a generally friendly place.
Less than 200 weekly active users. Beehaw’s Local feed is around the same, and still allow to access other Lemmy communities
I gotta check out Beehaw sometime. They’re part of the friendlier bloc of instances and they have rubber stamped Lemmy.ca the seal of approval.
Look, I really appreciate your numerous posts and comments in the RedditAlternatives subreddit, promoting Lemmy.
As for me, it’s Discuit and local Lemmy feeds because I prefer that village vibe.
Ive found myself actually reading a ton of threads from hexbear, and ive found them to be some of the most civil and welcoming lemmy users PROVIDED they dont think that youre arguing in bad faith. They can be quick to dismiss anyone who seems like a bad actor, and i think thats totally fair, because its rude as hell to go into someones safe space and start acting like you know better or being dismissive of their beliefs. Especially when you dont actually want a well reasoned answer, you just want to stir shit. Hexbear users are great, opinionated people. Lemmy.world users (and mods especially) seem to be terrible, opinionated people. Hexbear totally doesnt deserve the bad rap they get imo, and their trans community is awesome.
because its rude as hell to go into someones safe space and start acting like you know better or being dismissive of their beliefs. Especially when you dont actually want a well reasoned answer, you just want to stir shit.
You’re running on a lot of assumptions.
I made a comment that had nothing to do with any of that. It received quite a few upvotes (10+), then someone misread it and accused me of antisemitic dog whistling, which was not the case. In other words, they were stirring up shit and making a bad-faith argument.
So I clarified my position, then other users piled on, the mod(s) deleted my comments, and I left.
And the user who made that accusation had made what could be perceived as an anti-Italian remark in a comment a few days before. My paternal grandparents were Italian. Needless to say, I was a bit upset that this person didn’t follow the very strict standards that they held me to.
(By the way, Blahaj is also an LGBTQ+ safe space. The difference is, they’re not assholes.)
Feel free to check my post history.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with some recommended reading, here and here.
Im not assuming anything, im sharing my experience with theeads that ive read and commented in. You can share your experience too, im not going to invalidate it, but it might be helpful if rather than just alluding to some comment that got deleted, you posted what the actual content was. Also a comment getting deleted is a pretty tame response to something thats generating controversy, regardless of what that content was. I notice you didnt mention being banned.
Regardless people can make up their own mind. Hexbears threads are all there out in the open. Im just saying i vastly prefer the majority of discourse and conversation that ive seen over there than i do most .world threads, which end up being incredibly hostile, childish, and ignorant, in my experience. I have no complaints about blahaj users at all.
but it might be helpful if rather than just alluding to some comment that got deleted, you posted what the actual content was.
I can’t recall the exact wording of my comment, but the gist of it was that three celebrities were protesting an attempt to bar Israel from a music contest because of the ongoing genocide. I pointed out that the three celebrities were Jewish, so it was kind of cynical for them to do that. Those who upvoted understood what I meant, but then someone else accused me of antisemitism – because I didn’t specifically identify them as “Zionist”.
How am I supposed to know whether they’re Zionist? As far as I know, they’ve never publicly identified themselves as such, and it could be perceived as offensive if I did.
I notice you didnt mention being banned.
No, I wasn’t. Hopefully you’ve read the two items I had posted before, which pretty much validated how I felt about what I’d experienced, and why I left.
Listen, if you like Hexbear, fine; that’s your business. I don’t.
most .world threads, which end up being incredibly hostile, childish, and ignorant
Agreed, and that’s why I also avoid them (and Beehaw, Hexbear and .ml).
My experience with hexbear was similar to my experiences with 8chan in that it was full of unreasonably hostile people with poor education and social skills.
To be fair, the person I had mentioned before seemed reasonably intelligent but unreasonably hostile.
Hey there! A lot of users on hexbear are from various countries, living in poverty, unhoused, and/or part of a marginalized community. It’s very cool of you to say a lot of us are unreasonably hostile and uneducated.
If I told you to go fuck yourself as a response would that be an unreasonably hostile response? How about I told ypu that your entire family should be murdered because you exist, would that be unreasonable? I would say yes to both and yet my very first two replies on hexbear were those.
They were uneducated because at the time it was a forum filled with “leftists” who seemingly understand leftism through memes, infographics and social media rather than the books you can find online for free. If they can find Lemmy they can find archive.org and other places with free books to provide real education on leftism. Not surprisingly most know fuckall about economics while thinking they do because that seems to be a common thing for younger leftists. This has nothing to do with wealth as how would I know what people are worth just by knowing where they live?
As you know literally nothing about me at all maybe don’t pass judgement because you don’t have any clue what you’re talking about.
