Title basically. I was here at the very start of it all and really enjoyed it. However I felt it lost its uniqueness within a few months of mass migration and started turning a bit like reddit again so I deleted my old account. However Reddit has only gotten much much worse since, and Lemmy has stayed about the same. So here again.

  • sydd@lemmy.world
    11·
    2 days ago

    Less lurkers and more people making comments over time. This thread is a great example.

  • Fmstrat@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 days ago

    Feels about the same but bigger, niche communities have a bit more content. If you feel like the uniqueness disappeared in a few months, social aggregators are not for you.

  • Damarus@feddit.org
    179·
    3 days ago

    Diversity has increased by a lot. It’s not just circlejerking about Linux anymore. Only positives in my book.

    • ChexMax@lemmy.world
      99·
      3 days ago

      Yeah, I feel like when I first came here every third post was about Linux and every third post was about star trek. A lot of the remaining third was beans. Now only every tenth post is Linux and trek.

            • AskewLord@piefed.socialEnglish
              2·
              3 days ago

              100% agree.

              What really sucks is seeing an interesting thread grow, say like 50 responses and 80% of them are good and legit. Then at some point the bad actors come along and a few hours later it’s 300 posts, with 90% of the new content being the bad actors telling off the original responders they are terrible people for what they said or how they are tacitly fascists for not throwing themselves on the spikes to fight facism.

              and of course, also reporting the interest and nuanced responses as hate speech trying to get them removed.

    • _spiffy@piefed.caEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      I find a lot of the communities can be pretty negative. Lots of people talking about how bad things are. It would be nice to see more positive outlooks. But maybe that’s just a sign of the times.

      • AskewLord@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        if you try to talk about positive things they downvote you into oblivion, and/or comment about how stupid and wrong you are or you’re an ignorant boomer or you’re a rich privileged jerk.

        you’re not allowed to be happy or enjoy anything if they are miserable. miserable people want everyone to be miserable with them.

        • EvenOdds@lemmy.zip
          1·
          3 days ago

          Be the change you want to see! Stick with the positivity and don’t worry what other people say, you can do it! Don’t look at down votes, or better still move to an instance that doesn’t accept down votes if it bothers you.

    • jimmy90@lemmy.world
      12·
      3 days ago

      true and the lunatic leftist fantasists have been put back in their box, but the population is less than 5% of what it peaked at in the early days

  • StayDoomed@lemmy.world
    73·
    3 days ago

    It feels more like reddit now, but still is populated by a certain type of person that would seek out Lemmy. Mostly techy, left of center+, over age 30+, etc. I enjoy it.

  • paultimate14@lemmy.world
    8·
    2 days ago

    1. It has gotten bigger. More active. More posts, more new content. When i first came over i would check the All page, sorted by eitber Active or Hot, and only find a couple of new posts per day. It is still nowhere near as active as Reddit was back then (probably a goos thing), but it has enough content to help me procrastinate at work now.

    2. LemmyNSFW died and has been replaced by FediNSFW recently. I am sure that it will be better in the long-term, but it still doesn’t seem to be back to where it was yet. I think a lot of the old posters were bots, largely re-posting from Reddit, and not all of those have been rebuilt yet. I have mixed feelings about that.

    3. The Connect app has gotten better and better. Love it.

    4. For the past year or so, Lemmy has been of a size big enougj for patterns to ripple and promulgate through it bht small enough to notice them. For example, almost immediately after New Years several different communities on different instances started to see a drastix influx of webcomic posts. Usually 4-panel ones. Usually low-fidelity ones (XKCD-style, not Girl Genius for example). And usually oned with some sort of error or controversy. Rage bait to get the comments going, but nothing controversial enough to get banned or removed.

    There would be new accounts made that just posted a handful of these comics quickly, and sometimes argue with people in the comments. Once people like me started pointing out the pattern they started deleting the posts and accounts after a couple days. I’m not sure when it stopped, but i have not noticed one for probably a month.

  • Underwaterbob@sh.itjust.works
    12·
    2 days ago

    The biggest change for me was losing Lemm.ee. That was a blow. I had probably the most thriving (not by much) synthesizer community. I haven’t had the heart to try and start it back up elsewhere.

  • AskewLord@piefed.socialEnglish
    291·
    3 days ago

    there are increasingly a greater number of nutjobs, spammers, and hostile/miserable/angry people. my block list is like 300+ now. 6-9 month ago it was like 12 people.

    2 years ago it was mostly super nerds just nerding about.

    • Bazell@lemmy.zip
      3·
      2 days ago

      This actually means that Lemmy has a progress in moving along the adoption curve. These are both very good and somewhat bad news.

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
      71·
      3 days ago

      I’m curious what your threshold for blocking is. I don’t block anyone. I appreciate dissenting opinions. I can totally appreciate that there are bad actors out here, but a blocklist of 300+ sound like a curated echo chamber.

      Feel free to block me.

      • AskewLord@piefed.socialEnglish
        5·
        3 days ago

        people calling me/others names, spamming agendas, or generally being hostile nutjobs pushing some extremist agenda and accusing anyone who isn’t in agreement with them as being the enemy, and that the enemy should be killed.

        oh and people who personally harass you, like going around commenting on multiple unrelated comments you made to repeatedly call you names, and downvote you, of course.

        • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 days ago

          And that all sounds absolutely reasonable. I’m just having a very different experience on Lemmy, and that’s the main reason why I found it odd, so appreciate your clarification.

          And this is not to say I haven’t stumbled upon some shitheads, it’s just the frequency is low enough to be not so noticeable, not something I really put effort into addressing. If it were higher for me, I’m sure I’d find myself doing the same thing you are.

          • AskewLord@piefed.socialEnglish
            1·
            2 days ago

            I have been on here for about 20m this morning, and blocked 5 people already.

            Why? Because they made hostile/unhinged replies in another threads insulting other people over an opinion or a story.

  • SlippiHUD@lemmy.worldEnglish
    131·
    3 days ago

    I arrived during the API debacle.

    Some things are better, content and activity.

    Some things are worse, spammers, AI proponents who harrass you despite the clear community-wide dislike of the plagarism machine, fascist chuds trying to mainstream rascism, misogyny, and ableism.

    Basically each new wave is another usenet September equivalent, and it feels like we’re approaching the eternal september epoch as lemmy becomes more widely used. Soon we’ll have to deal with state actor bot-nets if we aren’t already.

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    181·
    3 days ago

    It has gotten much better. More content and general activity and nutjobs at .ml and similar got mostly isolated from the rest of the network.

    I think fediverse is really shaping up as a strong reddit alternative. Most pop subjects are mirrored here and the vibe is very similar to early reddit so there no real reason to go to reddit other than super niche communities like of a tv show or something.

    Most props go to the lemmy.world team as it kept a consistent big sane network running that keeps the project stable! If .world never happened I think Lemmy would have remained cess pool of social rejects like most reddit alternatives like Voat or lemmy.ml

      • Bazell@lemmy.zip
        4·
        2 days ago

        It is actually sad that some good comunities try to occur there and are forced to deal with the consequences of whole instance’s fame.

      • FosterMolasses@leminal.spaceEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        If you haven’t been banned there you have not truly lived

        Damn, you guys really make me feel like I’m missing out lol

        • INHALE_VEGETABLES@aussie.zone
          1·
          23 hours ago

          You don’t have to try hard or even do anything particularly bad I think I got a ban for calling a mod ‘my ruski friend’ or something iirc. They have that super rare brittle bone disease but it’s only in their brain.

  • Zomg@piefed.worldEnglish
    56·
    3 days ago

    I like it here, I only lurked on reddit. There isn’t much reason to comment when it seems that everyone was in a competition for “who can post the best zinger comment first”

  • whaleross@lemmy.world
    71·
    3 days ago

    My main gripe with mainstream Reddit now is the engagement baiting that people are falling for all the time. “What are you thoughts on [Controversial Topic]?” If there is a new exodus from Reddit coming, I really really really wish all the baiting to be left behind and moderators to remove it on the Fediverse.

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
    20·
    3 days ago

    Its gotten significantly less optimistic and more cynical. Its in my opinion more of a reflection of the state of the world than a Lemmy specific issue but it affects Lemmy users more because this isnt a space that allows people to live in ignorant bliss.

    • FosterMolasses@leminal.spaceEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      I run on another reddit alternative that was apparently an offshoot refuge after Squabbler shit hit the fan (so extremely niche yet somewhat active community) with a completely different demographic of users to Lemmy (mostly middle-aged centrists/liberals that couldn’t tell apart a Linux distro from a macbook), and I can tell you.

      It’s universal.

      I posted something the other day about how nice it was to wake up and have your feet hit a warm rug that’s been baked in a sunbeam first thing in the morning, and shityounot the replies I immediately got ranged from “Why even bother getting out of bed” and a list of things that are “far superior” to a warm rug. Just blatant whataboutism all the way down, and almost made me consider that if I had posted the opposite, about how much I dislike that sort of thing, if people would have then flipflopped and disagreed lol

      Then I came to Lemmy for a break, and the first post I saw was a photo of someone’s pet bunny next to some food they’d ordered, and every single comment was about how OP was a bad person and should be ashamed of themselves for using a delivery app. It was fucking wild.

      I think it’s genuinely just the state of the world right now. Everyone’s enraged as hell and seemingly have zero real world outlets for it. So it all just gets funneled into stranger interactions online.

      I just try not to read replies and generally move on with my day rather than absorb all that insanity. If people really need an outlet or whatever that badly they can go scream at ChatGPT for an hour lmao

  • Adulated_Aspersion@lemmy.world
    9·
    3 days ago

    Significantly, and for the better. The is significant engagement, a large increase in new communities, and we have even had our very own memorable, memeable instances!