Really? I thought Reddit was fairly right-wing, and loved to ban leftist viewpoints? Reddit definitely has trolls though, that’s for sure. And bots, and perhaps a couple irl humans occasionally here or there mixed in as well 🤪.

You are offering solutions that every single one of us here has done to handle the trolls in this place, but remember that non-technical normal folks think different. Also, when they first browse a place with anonymous guest access they do not have an account yet nor the ability to ban anyone or anything - they simply see what they see, and that is it. (which is why they leave rather than stay)

Or for someone who joins, later after that the trolliest places never honestly announce their true intentions, so they have an enormously steep learning curve. We know the unwritten rules, but to a new joiner the process of catching up is overwhelming. Look up the Wikipedia definition of “Nazi bar” - hint it has little to do with actual irl Nazis and everything to do with the Paradox of Intolerance. We host tankies here, hence we are a tankie bar, like it or not. And just as a Jewish person might not feel comfortable around actual Nazis, American centrists do not feel welcomed in a space where tankies run the major portion of the show. Plus they get relentlessly trolled, e.g. by hexbears, and hence they leave. And after they leave, they complain about us, which causes others to not want to join us over here.

My argument is that I wish that we were not the incels that we clearly, collectively, are. DoN’t YoU rEaLiZe WhAt A nIcE mAn I aM? If we are going to be offensive to people, I would hope that we could at least do so honestly and genuinely, not living in ignorance of that fact (as the tankies themselves do).

And yes there’s genuinely great stuff here - there’s also genuinely great stuff over on Reddit btw, and even on Xhitter and Facebook, not that I want to go to any of those places to see it, but I acknowledge that it is there. I choose to be here. But most people do not choose that, and that’s okay. Or at least it’s facts, which we should own up to imho.

I think you wildly overestimate “leftist infighting” as a reason people wouldn’t join

I showed you direct evidence of many people stating exactly this. It now sounds like you agree with me, but have nothing to point to as to why besides the notion that reality isn’t real. Believe it or not, I know what you mean and tend to agree, though nonetheless… (the reason being that those who enjoy leftist in-fighting are here, while those who do not are elsewhere - although in this case that isn’t a contaminating bias but rather the whole point underlying what we are talking about!)

I was arguing against naive optimism, not wanting to swing over to naive pessimism but rather realism, to open our eyes and see what is truly there. You seem to be arguing for a different method of finding truthiness, which however valid I would definitely find it difficult to discuss in the terms that I am most familiar with.

In any case, people definitely aren’t joining here, whatever their underlying reasoning. In fact our numbers are going down, not up. As is also true of Reddit, and most social media, which is probably the healthier alternative, though it would still be nice for it to exist to look at occasionally, especially for such things as hobby enthusiast forums that are much harder to bring people together irl.

I think you missed the concept of what I was saying. I am talking about what people think of when someone mentions that someone should come over here and join Lemmy. Posts like https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/16hkxua/why_im_giving_up_on_lemmyfediverse/. Since so few people seem curious enough to research things on their own, and before I get accused of making stuff up again, I’ll just copy the whole thing in its entirety:

Hi everyone,

When Reddit introduced its bullshit changes I very early on decided that Lemmy was the best candidate and put my support behind it as I imagined that it would be a freer climate for discussion which would foster more creativity.

After now having spent a few months on the platform, I can say that I’m not really seeing an improvement over current Reddit. Yes, you can use it on mobile, but who the hell cares when the content is 90% just repost bots from Reddit? I’d rather just not use any social media on my phone in that case and have a book available instead.

But what really makes me want to come back here is the fact that most instances are super extremist towards the left to a degree that makes me feel very uncomfortable. We’ve also got tons of Russia/China apologists who openly support their agenda. You’ve also got a lot of FOSS extremists which makes browsing any technology related subreddit a chore for the same reasons. The thing though that completely kills any nuance in the discussion though is the fact that there’s peer pressure via defederation that more or less forces the political views of the biggest instances onto ever other instance lest thee be defederated from the network.

So no thanks, I’m out. I’d take a moderately center-left site anyday rather than endure another day of the bullshit Lemmy has going on as a universe right now.

This was from 2-3 years ago now. The content has gotten better, and the UX too, but the in-fighting has gotten worse (see calls on \0 governance community to defederate from Lemmy.world). You legitimately might have missed a lot of this - many of the BS posts end up getting deleted - but it is here, and when \0 defederates from LW it is going to affect us all, especially if they defederate from all PieFed instances too, and every other instance that they have accused of Zionist moderation practices.

And even (much newer) posts that are aimed at being strongly positive towards us, such as https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1ixf1gb/lemmy_may_seem_small_but_its_the_most_viable/, get heavy pushback in the comment sections. e.g. calling us “Reddit but decentralized”, and “Lemmy is dreadful. Sorry but it’s true.”, and wow this one hurts:

It is just as much of a virtue signalling hive mind circle jerk as Reddit. Still has shitty moderation and you get Lemmy sites trying to bully and censor undesirables or wrong think via defederation. If anything it is even worse of an echo chamber.

I’m not talking about whether we deserve to be liked, I’m saying that those of who want to be here already are, whereas among Redditors in particular we have a certain… “reputation”, and it is not a good one. Some of those people might be happier with Nostr or Voat or Truth Social, and we definitely hope that those people go there rather than here, but the centrists…? Yeah they don’t like us here. They say so and everything. Anyone can read these messages. I’ve seen the same on Bluesky too, when I’ve gone looking.

I’m not suggesting that we make any changes necessarily, just saying that an honest diagnosis of the situation is helpful if we ever did want to make this place more welcoming. Which we do not, it would seem, but if we ever did… then we need to realize that for primarily American centrists (who are the majority audience of people on Reddit?), they don’t want to come to a 4chan version of Reddit. They are on Reddit for a reason - it meets their needs, no matter how enshittified it also gets alongside that. Spez was (at least partially) right - he did in fact get away with calling us all landed gentry. The company remains profitable at least.

Every month or so I see a post such as https://tarte.nuage-libre.fr/c/fediverse/p/198468/do-we-need-more-users discussing this topic. I barely look at Reddit myself anymore, but this is what people say that Redditors (and people on Bluesky, and even X) say about us here. Which also matches my own experiences too - although yeah if you personally block it all, then your experiences will ofc differ. I’m talking more about what someone who has no account would see, by default, as they just check us out.

Here’s another relevant discussion post: https://piefed.social/c/fediverse/p/1897818/how-to-sucesfully-post-about-piefed-on-reddit, with links to actual discussions that took place on Reddit about us here, if anyone wants to read primary source material.

We all did, and agreed it is better here:-).

Here is the last discussion about it afaik. Here is a quote from the comments in that discussion:

While the Fediverse may be “strong” overall, the individual pieces are too fragile to handle a significant Rexit onslaught. If even a small fraction of all Reddit users came to the Fediverse en-masse, this place as we know it would be gone.

Here is another quote:

I don’t want people from Reddit here. The fact that half of Twatter moved to Bluesky instead of Mastodon is a blessing. ActivityPub is by design a data harvesting goldmine, the fact that it flies under the radar is the only saving grace.

These were both highly upvoted, with tens of upvotes and almost no downvotes. I could go on… and in fact, here’s one more:

Ready for a bunch of teens coming in and trashing the place? No.

(this one had many downvotes, but it had >3-fold more upvotes than down so…) Another one is:

No, not ready for another USA spam shit. Other than that, the rest is fine.

On the bright side, the upcoming Lemmy 1.0 software should help a bit, as moderation reports will finally federate out to mods on other instances besides exclusively the one that the community itself is on.

But there are more downsides too - such as the fact that since that discussion the anarchist flotilla has been pushing strongly to defederate from lemmy.world, and any instance that runs PieFed software too, for being “zionists” - thereby further fracturing the Threadiverse into tankie-tolerant vs. tankie-intolerant spaces, and increasing the complexity of someone having to pick an instance. This includes lemmy.dbzer0.com that is the #7 most popular instance.

Leftist in-fighting and the complexity of signing up are the top 2 reasons why people do not join. Lack of content is the third, which is further aggravated by defederations and in-fighting.

I am so very glad that you felt welcomed here. I am so glad that you persevered through all of this. But… I can understand why people choose not to. At the end of the day we cannot control how others feel.

They still won’t come here even if you do.

They are centrists, we have tankies here, it simply is what it is.

Some people don’t enjoy reading the incessant calls for murder e.g. Luigi-ing or guillotining. We can be anything that we set our mind to, I’m just trying to illuminate how we are - wishful thinking about what might have been does not help us in any way.

We turn them away, we routinely say that we don’t even want them here, we (collectively) don’t want them here. So they both do not want to come nor are welcomed if they did. This matter has been settled and decided and seems extremely unlikely to change.

The world is not fair - we need to move past that point.

The EU has some amount of resources, and could invest more into scientific advancement if it wanted to. China is, although that’s a whole can of worms…

What can be done now, is the focus that will be needed moving forward.

Not according to this article.

Yeah what will happen when both the USA and Russia decide they want in as well?

(Please let this be just a joke…)

I wonder if it is more limited in certain contexts, such as on a mobile device (like on iOS? I don’t have one to test).

Do you mean… columns?

“three”

We’ve seen this already! So here’s more scifi:

Don’t fall for this sea-lioning (intentional or otherwise) situation - if the person you are responding to has never heard of the terms “social media” or “news”, that is not your problem.

-source

Scrolling through it all would have been more fun if it were in spoiler tags though… 🤔

We can all see that…