Lemmy is like all the folks that bought that paid astroturfing and continue it, but sincerely.
And Reddit had corners, where people could hide and talk about interesting stuff, Lemmy doesn't seem to be able to compete in that, probably due to number of users (I'm not sure though).
I wonder what experiences other users here have made. Do you consider programming.dev a suitable successor, or are there better recommendations?
In the more general channels, it turns out I made a poor choice of host server, because it was still federated with lemmy.ml. Some specific hosts have historical revisionist tankie viewpoints and make deliberately bad faith contributions to discussions.
It was interesting to see this from tankies since I usually see such behavior from the far-right. But "North Korea is an ideal state" loses novelty quickly, so it became frustrating to read discussions.
The volume of r/ProgrammingLanguage posts went down to a few per week and maybe one interesting per month.
The biggest shot Lemmy has is that Reddit is taking every possible step to drive users away - just today I had to install another block rule because I started getting obtrusive overlays to drive me to the mobile app even when browsing it logged in on my desktop.
But even then, the fact that so many of us are willing to go to increasingly extreme lengths to keep using Reddit for various subreddits even as the site gets worse and worse shows just how sticky the network effect of the existing communities is.
I've been in some of them for nearly two decades, and finding a community with the same topic elsewhere won't reproduce the set of people.
I suspect that Reddit is running into similar problems with a slowly dying user base. The reason I suspect this is because Reddit has slowly started to try and hijack the UX to force me into seeing and interacting with subreddits I don't want to see or interact with. The default UX is now "You might be interested in this because you viewed that".
I've noticed a number of formerly pretty active subreddits to be ghosts of their former selves. I've also noticed a ton of new subreddits pop up that appear to be just a mass of bots trying to hook in real users.
A big part of the Reddit problem is that reddit has made it as hard as possible to tell whose a bot. You end up noticing a bunch of 3 month old accounts swarming whenever certain topics come up but you can't dig into their history to see if this is what they always do.
All and all, it feels like the social internet is just dying. I feel like I'm getting more value by revisiting the old forums. (See ya'll at anandtech).
Same here. r/ProgrammingLanguages was great until about four or five years ago. Now the contributions guide is mostly about what you may not post and you almost need a lawyer to find out what is allowed, and the mods again have another opinion about this than what is written and just delete stuff. The result is that I didn't see an interesting post in month.
As soon as they reach a size where they become actually interesting to use, they also reach a size where they become interesting targets for attackers.
- People creating endless sportsball subs for a single team or even a single player
- Duplicate subs for the exact same thing across multiple instances, e.g. you might find two dozen Lewis Hamilton subs (forget the Lemmy name for them). And then duplicate that for ALL the topics...
- Endless subs in foreign languages because, why bother to specify your language for a sub if you're on a not-english-langiage instance?
- Getting shadow banned because your instance administrator and another instance administrator have beef or have political/religious/moral convictions or whatever and decided to de-federate, you know, just how telephone companies decide you aren't allowed to speak with someone THEY don't like...
- Endless, endless furries, especially trans/non-binary furry subs
- Breaking version changes every year or two, as in your (main) instance maybe literally being broken
- Struggling to share a link because maybe you'd open the upstream sub and not be signed in, maybe synced via your instance and you would
- checking that you are signed in on the right account to the right instance and that the instance itself is synced and on up to date version...
I checked out when I realised I had hit 1000 blocked subs and was trying to sync them across a dozen or so accounts to multiple different instances