this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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Lemmy is thriving enough. Self-sufficient instances like Hexbear are fine without large amounts of federation. I do see Lemmy.world running into issues in the future due to their strong Zionist slant and anti-Leftist stance, but the other major instances seem to be fine.
And their desire to spin off their own version of lemmy in Java
Wait, what? Where can I read more about that?
It's called "Sublinks," I believe. They don't trust the spooky scary commies and want to make their own, worse Lemmy alternative, which is silly.
Idk if it's really to avoid the dirty commies.
Seriously think it's just them thinking they either know better or just don't want to learn rust
They could wait for Lemmy official dev or learn rust, it would take far less time. No, they want control.
https://discuss.online/post/4522403
I think lemmy.world is already pretty bad. To get away from their posts and comments I've considered joining hexbear, since you people honestly have the best content and most wholesome community and aren't federated with .world, but I also don't want to be completely isolated from the rest of the fediverse. However, I just noticed there are only 5 instances in hexbear's blocked instance list and plenty in the linked list. Maybe I didn't notice how all other instances started federating with hexbear again?
I don't know what the "allowed" instance list means though.
Make an account, Hexbear is perfect for you. I made a Hexbear account a few months ago and enjoy my time there much more than I do here, there's far fewer struggle sessions and the quality of discussion is much higher.
The cool thing about Hexbear is that it has by far the most active userbase I have seen, it's fully self-sufficient and you won't likely miss the rest.
Some instances have Hexbear blocked on their side that Hexbear doesn't have blocked, so this can be misleading, however it's mostly the right-wing instances like shitjustworks, lemmy.world, and lemmy.ca that are of note, and their content fine to drop.
Have you visited Hexbear? It's a very wholesome instance overall and posters are very supportive, assuming you're a Leftist. What leads you to believe otherwise?
Lol when I got banned from a major comm for defending a trotskyist comrade, after two years of participation on the instance, I learned all about the wholesomeness of your "non-sectarian" instance.
I think a prime example of hexbear wholesomeness is their trans megathreads: https://hexbear.net/post/3363552
They even have a community to help each other out: !mutual_aid@hexbear.net
I'm genuinely ~~un~~surprised my previous comment got removed but anyway at least thanks for answering and providing an example.
Anticommunism is generally removed on Lemmy.ml, probably the reason.
yes it is known that not being wholsome = not being communist.
This but unironically.
Yeah it is thriving, what I meant is that to have a chance to replace reddit, lemmy needs to find some technical solutions (moving / migrating / merging of communities) and somehow stop fracturing into islands.
But maybe that age of the internet has passed and people are no longer willing because of trolls, bad faith actors, sock puppets, bots... and the increasing polarization of ideology and propaganda.
My point is that it doesn't need to surpass Reddit, as long as its users enjoy using it then that is enough. Using Hexbear as an example, Hexbear doesn't need any more growth, and is active enough to pretty much fulfill anything it needs on its own local instance.
Ok I'm just thinking out loud here...
Part of what makes (made) reddit great is that there are so many niche communities. That you scroll through reddit and find something interesting and new and can just jump in and discuss it.
THAT I think we can all agree would be great to grow in lemmy.
There is no question that lemmy IS the same social media "mode" as reddit, a link aggregator where users can democratically sort news and articles and topics and discuss things. Lemmy is a clone of reddit, this can't be disputed. The question is how to make it better than reddit and avoid the pitfalls. Right now moderation and admins are a bit problematic like e.g. the recent vegan clusterfuck.
And yeah for certain subs like vegan you don't need downvotes since there wouldn't be too many "controversial" topics. I suspect part of what is lacking on reddit is that there isn't enough "tagging" on reddit. Like having ways for users to mark a post "funny/silly" or "unconstructive" or "misinformation" or NSFW, NSFL or hatespeech. Besides upvoting. Maybe I'm wrong with this.
But I think over time reddit degraded because the system didn't support protection against malicious actors. For example tons of meta jokes. Every serious topic has a joke comment on top. You can't filter them out. That might be a great use of AI like chatGPT for this where the AI learns from the tags and then allows to filter out joke comments. Not censor but allows you to filter out things that can be fun and crass but are not good for long term community. Basically to help moderators.
Of course the current problem is that users themselves have become more and more "post-truth", not just the fascists but the "leftists", liberals and centrists too and shout down any dissident opinion because they assume it's bad faith. Nobody wants to engage any more because they've been burned. Maybe that can be reversed if lemmy has the right tools and the community is moderated well enough to "heal". But again, the admins and moderators are currently the problem on lemmy. Lots of power-tripping and radicalism (and I don't just mean the socialists lol).
And voting with your feet is also a problem because it leads to fracturing like mentioned in OP and that does have a negative effect. Like the europe@feddit.de community lost 75% of it's users with the move to feddit.org. I assume similar things will happen to the vegan community now that you moved and people searching for vegan will be confused. Better technical tools are required.
So I think it's not just about surpassing reddit in numbers, even though at least some growth is very curcial for niches to thrive, but to grow the usability of the software.
Anyway, just rambling / thinking out loud 🙂
Yeah thinking about this, individual servers for specialized topics seems like the way to go. I guess it depends on the type of community. Vegan is large enough but still a specialized community that yeah doesn't need size. It's specialized but not a niche.
But other niche communities, e.g. av1, jpegxl or velomobile, are too niche to work without more people. I think.
But it would still be good if you could at least set a community to automatically "forward" to a new instance. And maybe that a community could "export" the posts from existing instance to a new instance. Then you could move or merge. I believe something like that is needed.