I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but threads or comments about Lemmy or the Fediverse get downvoted a lot on Reddit and trolls who claim that it’s “dogshit” and “not going anywhere” get systematically upvoted.

Some of those trolls get then exposed when you ask them what Lemmy instance they tried and one of them with whom I had a surreal exchange answered with something like “yeah ofc I used Lemmy, this is the instance: join-lemmy.org” 🤦‍♂️

It’s frustrating that these trolls keep contributing to the big lie that “Lemmy is not ready yet” and that there’s “no viable alternative to Reddit”.

This and the overwhelming number of comments being “against the mod protests” just prompts me to question whether there isn’t some brigading being organized straight from the Reddit HQ.

  • Zebov@lemmy.world
    33·
    1 year ago

    Probably bots. Reddit has been using them for some time, but recently got caught using chat gpt or something similar to argue against the blackouts.

    • FelipeFelop@feddit.ukEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I think there’s also some Redditors who seem to think the story is Lemmy stealing their favourite subreddits and users. Rather than the loss being a reaction to the childish petulant CEO and his hare brain scheme.

      It’s not a surprise as your stereotypical Redditor is somewhat uninformed.

    • Mon0@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      The majority aren‘t bots. Most of them are legit no lifers to whom Reddit going down the drain would be a huge blow. I mean you work full time as a cashier for taco bell and you are not really happy with that situation. Some people go to school again, learn a skill… others spend all their time one Reddit stockpiling karma. Those are the people who really hate lemmy and anything that could remotely make Reddit worse, because they are heavily invested in the platform for the wrong reasons.

    • bloodtide@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      Which is fking insane since one of Steve’s excuses for upping API pricing so high is to fight LLM from training on “their” dataset! Fucking LOL

      • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        it does make sense as a business strategy, since they probably have plans how to analyze the data themselves and sell that as a service or sell a more curated access than the current api.

        it’s certainly not about protecting the users data, but how to monetize it best.

        I also doubt them to have done the whole chatgpt bots just this week. Providing organic marketing where users are unsure if its just a regular comment of someone super happy with product xy or a bot.

        Shilling for certain products or political views is already sold as a service by quite a few companies. I think reddit just wants to take in that business.

  • Wander@yiffit.net
    15·
    1 year ago

    Unfortunately there’s probably a large amount of users who simply don’t care.

    But that’s okay. What matters is content creators, not content consumers. Anyone with half a gram of decency and self integrity will have realized that they need to take steps to move away from Reddit.

    • YolkBrushWork402@kbin.social
      6·
      1 year ago

      When the content creators leave and go to Lemmy/Kbin, eventually those content consumers will leave and go with them too. Will be a bonus for the Fediverse

      • Wander@yiffit.net
        4·
        1 year ago

        We need to ask Louis Rossmann to join the fediverse. He’s been super critical with Reddit on YouTube.

        • impulse@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 year ago

          I’m sure he’s already aware and will make an account if he wants to.

          There’s no point in shoving the Fediverse in someone’s face.

    • Houdini@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      Exactly. Let the milquetoast mouth-breathers stay behind. With sufficient brain-drain, Reddit will eventually look like Quora.

  • Extra_Cucumber_2979@lemmy.world
    13·
    1 year ago

    Once - unfortunately - Apollo app will be down, in less than 2 weeks, I’m pretty sure Lemmy will surge and they will come complaining here 😅

    • FaceDeer@kbin.social
      0·
      1 year ago

      Also, people have a natural tendency to form “teams.” Even if they don’t particularly like what Reddit’s admins have been doing they may identify as part of “team Reddit” and so see other teams as the enemy.

      • HopeOfTheGunblade@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        There was a legendary episode in social psychology called the Robbers Cave experiment. It had been set up in the bewildered aftermath of World War II, with the intent of investigating the causes and remedies of conflicts between groups. The scientists had set up a summer camp for 22 boys from 22 different schools, selecting them to all be from stable middle-class families. The first phase of the experiment had been intended to investigate what it took to start a conflict between groups. The 22 boys had been divided into two groups of 11 -

        • and this had been quite sufficient.
      • GunnarRunnar@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        Besides, the way to convert isn’t by arguing. You do it by providing a good platform (not there yet), good content (not there yet) and good community (kinda there?).

  • Warped@kbin.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    Reddit is known for it’s use of bots. Bots helped Reddit grow in its early days. I’m not surprised that bots are being used now. As more people leave, I’m sure more bots will get used to give the impression of an active community. Just lie they did in those early days.

  • ono@lemmy.ca
    4·
    1 year ago

    Some subreddits are also using automod to remove comments linking to Lemmy.

    I hope some journalists put a spotlight on the deceptive tactics Reddit is using.

    • Soltros@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      Also, Lemmy is a great alternative, simply because regardless of the devs political views, literally anyone can fork it on GitHub, make Lemmy2, and link it up with OG Lemmy and Kbin.

  • PortugalSpaceMoon@infosec.pubEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    As a tech savy person, I can confidently say lemmy is not a viable reddit alternative at this stage for an arbitrary reddit user. The UI and clients are just terrible and full of small bugs, annoyances and inconsistencies. Sure, it will eventually get there, but negative opinions about lemmy are not completely unmerrited. Just as I’m typing this, I get screen tears and flickering elements. It’s just very, very bleeding edge and I can absolutely see how someone trying it for 5 minutes would be turned off. If you want to capture the masses, the user experience has to impeccable.

    PS: my first try at submitting this response timed out. This is my second try.

    • killick@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      It doesn’t have to be impeccable. It doesn’t need corporations to buy ads. It just has to keep getting better and not die. Look at Linux. It never did overtake MacOS & Windows on desktops. But it keeps getting better and it didn’t die and it took over server rooms. Look at Mastodon. It’s nowhere near as popular as Twitter and maybe never will be, but it’s 5 years old and is steadily growing. I like hanging out there. Oak trees start as acorns.

    • XGC75@kbin.social
      01·
      1 year ago

      Here’s an example: how can I subscribe to the topics I want to follow? I don’t want to see the 198 or whatever it is posts. Nor programmer humour. Lemmy has a great community of fans and users but if I can’t see only what I want I’m not going to use it.

      • maegul@kbin.social
        0·
        1 year ago

        “Oh no … my very new free software that’s not selling my data and run by VC overlords has some bugs”

        I know I’m being an asshole there, but this is about more than usability, it’s about values and speaking with your feet. Not that your comments about usability and bugs don’t matter … they do! My issue is that it is way too normal to put convenience and usability front, center and above everything else.

        So many conversations with intelligent people about things like this end with “but is it as convenient!?” If that’s all we care about, then we don’t really deserve anything better. In the mean time, we can try to adjust what we and others care about.

        • XGC75@kbin.social
          0·
          1 year ago

          I could really care less if it’s a part of something “good”. I just want somewhere to kick back and relax, maybe learn something or gain a new perspective. For that purpose convenience is king. In any case the better the product the more others will use federated alternatives and better/more diverse the content would be. And yeah, I already threw money at the devs to show my appreciation for what’s been built so far.

          I mean, I’m willing to subscribe to a Reddit service, too, if their in-house app wasn’t hot shit.

          • Account5600@lemmy.world
            0·
            1 year ago

            Couldn’t.

            If you COULD care less, then you still care to some degree because there is a level of caring you COULD go down to.

            If you COULDN’T care less, then you are literally already at the lowest level of caring and could not possibly go lower.

  • _haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    1 year ago

    There’s definitely corpo sockpuppets and bots involved, some of which have even straight up posted AI bot warnings about not being able to generate offensive content (oops!) but there’s plenty of ignorant people too.

    That said, I’m kind of OK with them staying on reddit because people like that had been making reddit progressively worse for years and years at it gained popularity. Hopefully the relative obscurity of Lemmy will prevent that from happening for a while yet.

  • lachjeff@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 year ago

    I reckon it’s mostly bots set up by Reddit admins and sad-sack mods who consider Reddit moderation to be a full-time job

    • jpenczek@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      My biggest issue with Lemmy is lack of userbase… which is fixable by signing up for Lemmy.

      Figured best case scenario other people make the switch, worst case I’ll forget this service even exists.

      Also does anyone know how to enable dark mode, or if there is a dark mode?

  • NRVulture@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    Of course there’s no viable alternatives to Reddit. Why would someone create another dumpster fire?

  • SterlingVapor@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 year ago

    Here’s the thing - we’ve been raised from birth to think “people don’t make things, companies do”.

    Most people have never used software that isn’t company branded, they’ve never sat in a chair made by someone they know, they’ve never pulled food out of the ground. Almost all jobs set someone up doing a service with a supply chain behind them or doing one small step of something bigger.

    It’s learned helplessness. They don’t have the concept of how they could do things outside of the hierarchy - solid chance they’ve tried, and since their skills are hyper-specialized and rely on big, expensive tools, they found they had a lot of gaps.

    Anything you do outside of a company is a hobby to most people. And even then, people organize into sports leagues and buy fancy toys instead of just meeting up in the park with a ball… Do you really need to play by professional rulesets when you’re just trying to exercise?

    This time around, I didn’t bother to explain why the decentralization is so important to my friends and family - even the technical ones are almost afraid of the idea of it.

    Instead, I told them about the ways Reddit has picked up the harmful strategy that Facebook used, and that makes mobile gaming so addicting yet so unfulfilling: show them less of the content they want to change the reward schedule, training you to use the app longer for a smaller dopamine hit. Show you content that will make you feel angry, driving up engagement. And most importantly, always wave the promise of another dopamine hit.

    The app is eggregious - it sprinkles in stuff from top communities I left a long time ago because they suck, it gives you suggestions for new communities and presents them like interaction from other users, and it sends you notifications to tempt you back in all the time.

    And this is just the beginning, it’s going to get a lot worse With all the other social networks eyeing their own strategies to squeeze their users, it’s going to suck across the board, and good luck trying to build relationships outside these platforms

    I think it’s important to remember we’re animals, and we’re not just trainable, we’re the most trainable by a large margin. The best of us have just a handful of moments where we see beyond our instincts and conditioning, and decide to train ourselves

    This project is important, because it can give us back communities small enough to get to know each other, while providing a larger forum for ideas, and with a design that can shrug off attempts to control it.

    It’s going to fragment. Sections of it will break off into echo chambers, admins will sell out their users, and parts will offer a curated walked garden hosted. But it can survive all that because of one simple truth - unless one person captures the majority of the network, they’re going to have to cut off the best part of the network. Social media can be profitable without sucking, but to rake in profits it has to suck - and even then, we can start up servers for friends and family, and rebuild the network organically

    I’m working for an app streamlined enough I can send it to my mom and have her sign up without getting scared off, and I think I’ve got a solid idea of how to improve discovery of communities without becoming distributed rather than decentralized. Other people are building their own visions of what this can become, and a lot of people are writing impressive code (Lemmy has no business scaling as well as it has), and the beauty of it is that it all competes while adding to the whole.

    I’ve been at it for 30 hours now, but I can’t shake the feeling that me getting this out this out in the next few days is going to matter if this is going to become what I hope instead of another shard of Reddit.

    But every time I step away to take a breather, I end up back on here and see a glimpse of what this could be

    The only way to change the world is to release something self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing and intrinsically positive, and hope it grows