Just saw this on AskLemmy at .ml, thought this and chuckled, and now here we are.

Will take the opportunity to thank our admins for what they do, and all you humans for being here and generally being cool.

  • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
    75·
    16 hours ago

    This is upsetting as fuck. This one picture just made me realize that Lemmy is likely never going to get much bigger. The top is just an exact clone of Reddit, meaning there’s no reason to use it over Reddit, and the next three are active propaganda mills filled with fascists and tankies. After that you get normal servers. That’s a terrible look. That guarantees anyone new joining will likely join one of those 4 and will either think “what’s the point, this is just Reddit with a percent of the users” or “JFC these people are all Nazis” or worst of all which seems to already be the case “finally, somewhere I can speak freely about those dirty Ukrainians/Palestinians/Americans/Women/LGBTQ/OtherMinorities!”

    • OpenStarsEnglish
      51·
      13 hours ago

      It is far worse than that imho, sadly.

      For one, we are most definitely actively getting smaller, both since the Rexodus and also since just earlier this year. I think people are returning to Reddit but wherever they are going it is not here. We lack sufficient content for them, despite having the good apps that Reddit used to. This is software built by tankies, and has authoritarian purposes baked into the core.

      And for another, a Google search for “Lemmy”, after the singer, pulls up as the top instance lemmy.ml, which notably uses a Local rather than All feed by default. So it’s just absolutely full of posts hating on the USA, UK, Germany, and anyone else who opposes the interests of Russia and China and North Korea. THIS is what “Lemmy” is, to people who don’t use DuckDuckGo as their primary search engine.

      It may already be too late to reverse this trend: we lost the momentum of the Rexodus, and we won’t even be honest about who and what we are now, which would be a prerequisite for change - we are a Nazi bar.

      An example of our authoritarianism is the modding tools here. The fact that we have a modlog at all is awesome, but the fact that it just says “mod” rather than who removed something, while simultaneously offering no modmail to communicate with whoever did it in order to ask why, is not. Also reports don’t federate. Lemmy was built by the admins of lemmy.ml, and if we want more of a non-authoritarian experience - e.g. a modmail - it seems we would have to build such ourselves?

      Also, on Reddit (at least, prior to the Rexodus, I dunno if it still does today?) when a post is removed the post link remains viable, and people can still have discussions within it. On Lemmy, a capricious mod can remove something entirely. Imagine writing our a long response (such as I’ve done here:-), only to find after all of that that the post has been removed in the meantime and I can’t even respond to the person I was talking to, even if they were not the OP. Nor can I even finish reading through the comments - they are just, poof, gone.

      As authoritarian as Huffman made Reddit into, we are so very similar - not at the top, obviously, bc open source makes all the difference, but when it comes down to the actual user experience, e.g. how a Redditor will look at us and judge this place to be, based on how we will treat them (and I haven’t even begun here to get into how centrists from the USA will feel in this leftist dominated environment!:-P). We have the seeds to be more, but we won’t make the computer code to make that happen.

      • timestatic@feddit.orgEnglish
        3·
        6 hours ago

        Pretty good assessment! When I was using Reddit I used it like a lot and the way the Reddit admins treatet it made it not feel like home. I spent like so much time there so I ended up deleting my account. It wasn’t even the powermods or admin scandals although what kinda pushed me over the edge was the exclusivity contract with google. Only google was now supposed to be able to use web crawlers on Reddit. I use Qwant as my main search engine and didn’t like the way they gate kept the content made by people. Then only google is supposed to be able to train their AI with this data. They act like they own what I upload and create and I loved the idea of lemmy so I migrated to a german instance. After the big FUCK SPEZ on r/place I think a mod of r/ich_iel Hubi got like banned or something for a certain time so they decided to push for a migration to feddit.de, later feddit.org after feddit.de went down.

        Reddit is already a left leaning platform in a political sense and lemmy is on another level. Even if you block out all the tankie instances. Sad to see the number of users slowly dropping bit by bit. It around the same but I’m kinda like just waiting for it to get better but it might never will. I’m a real sucker for FOSS and privacy so to think lemmy might now ever become more popular is sad to me.

        • OpenStarsEnglish
          3·
          3 hours ago

          If we don’t grow then we’ll shrink merely due to attrition. Or perhaps I’m overblowing things out of proportion, but I definitely am saying that we won’t simply grow as if by magic - that would take effort, and part of that is making this place welcoming enough for others besides ourselves to want to come here. Which we really struggle with, despite how great this space truly is, in part bc perhaps the people that we most want to come here - comic artists and the like - are not like us.

          In particular they may not care about politics at all, or even have a different stance than most of us. I mean centrist, bc Alt-Right MAGATs can just fuck all the way off! So… do we want to remain as we are, or change to become more inclusive and invite them in? We can do whatever we want, but it takes being honest and then making it happen. And right now we are an Alt-Left Nazi bar, just as X is an Alt-Right one, leaving the biggest place in the middle as… sigh, Reddit.