While I think he’s overreacting a bit, I could absolutely see how he’d come away with that opinion. I mostly agree with him, as a broad assessment of Lemmy.
In terms of content, 90% of whats active is politics. That leaves like, 10% of the already small content pool for users who aren’t interested in it. At the same time, this lack of content (and lack of users) centralizes content in just a few, broader communities.
In terms of his assessment of users, I could definately see this too - esspecially in the bigger communities he was likely pushed towards (by the lack of content). Lemmy does have an elitism problem, both on the tech side and esspecially on the politics side. Making it even worse, there’s a pretty good chance he ended up on .ml or one of the worse tankie instances, or at the very least, was frequently interacting with them due to their size and activity. If he didn’t immediately block the tankie instances, I’d be more suprised if he didn’t come away with a negative impression.
In terms of mods, it’d depend a lot on which communities he tried to participate in, but again, I could easily see how he’d end up having this experience. Even ignoring the massive presence of totalitarian bootlickers on Lemmy, as I previously said, the lack of content causes things to centralize. In theory, you can split off to your own communities, but in practice, its nearly impossible unless a mod simultaneously pisses off the whole community at once as happened with 196. Even then, the community needs to be quite large to jump-start the competing community. Until Lemmy gets large enough to have multiple communities running in parallel or for new communities to quickly and easily grow, mods will continue to be a potential problem.
All that said, I’m still here. I think, despite its issues, Lemmy has a much stronger foundation. Unfortunately its still missing most of the rest of the structure (or rather, content) needed to compete with other platforms.
90% is politics? Where did you pull that statistic from?
I’ll also point out that the statistic, if true, is not at all a universal metric because my All feed and your All feed are not the same if we’re on different instances. Over here, I might see 5% political content if I squint just right, otherwise it’s pretty much negligible.
I don’t agree that Lemmy is 90% politics. But it is pretty political especially since the US election and Elon Musk becoming quasi president means that there is a huge amount of politically related posts about tech. One of the most active topics on Lemmy.
For the most part I have effectively culled most of the politics I don’t want to see out of my feed but it wasn’t automatic which makes it a hurdle for people who aren’t invested in giving the fediverse a shot beyond the first impression.
You will be hit with a deluge of leftist thought when first on-boarding to the fediverse. Offering starter packs for new people on-boarding with a no/low politics pack that…
automatically filters certain politically charged keywords
blocks certain communities and instances
includes some of the more popular lighthearted communities
…would do a lot to improve the experience of people new to Lemmy that are looking for a more casual experience. At least in my opinion I think it would
I think this would go a long way to helping. It won’t necessary hold users, but will at least keep them from bouncing off of it so violently as this Reddit user did. Imo, its a combination of this with the lack of other content that prevents more significant growth on Lemmy. The rough, often politically focused onboarding, scares people, and then when they go to try and find their favorite communities, they see no activity, leaving the impression that the site is nothing but politics.
Its a rough estimate, yes, but I don’t think its an unreasonable one. I mean, one of the biggest Lemmy instances (.ml) is named for a political ideology. Unless you’re defederating from all of the biggest instances, politics will make up a majority of the active content available.
Regardless, thats besides the point. The point is the lack of non-politics content. I can’t find content for Counter-Strike, or War Thunder, or Dota. Even Minecraft gets almost nothing, and its likely the most played game in the world. I know there is some other niches out there, but I’m using those as examples because they’re all massive, multiplayer focused games, with content that lends itself to discussion or sharing, that I regularly have to go back to Reddit for to follow. Lemmy is lucky to get a post a week from all of them combined. If users can’t find discussion on things they’re interested in, at best they’ll end up looking at broad-appeal communities from top or active (like politics) and at worst, they’ll just leave.
Edit: I just did a quick check on my instance’s active feed. Of the top 20 results, 10 were undeniably political, and two more were debatably so. So for a more tame instance, around 55% of content being politics is a realistic estimate. I also checked Lemmy.ml, since its one of the main instances new users are directed to, and it was 14 political to 6 not, so 70% there.
At time of writing this comment, CS2 is most active on Steam, Dota is second, and War Thunder is 16th. Even if you write CS2 off for having too many bots, (which is fair,) the other two are still very active and very popular.
While I think he’s overreacting a bit, I could absolutely see how he’d come away with that opinion. I mostly agree with him, as a broad assessment of Lemmy.
In terms of content, 90% of whats active is politics. That leaves like, 10% of the already small content pool for users who aren’t interested in it. At the same time, this lack of content (and lack of users) centralizes content in just a few, broader communities.
In terms of his assessment of users, I could definately see this too - esspecially in the bigger communities he was likely pushed towards (by the lack of content). Lemmy does have an elitism problem, both on the tech side and esspecially on the politics side. Making it even worse, there’s a pretty good chance he ended up on .ml or one of the worse tankie instances, or at the very least, was frequently interacting with them due to their size and activity. If he didn’t immediately block the tankie instances, I’d be more suprised if he didn’t come away with a negative impression.
In terms of mods, it’d depend a lot on which communities he tried to participate in, but again, I could easily see how he’d end up having this experience. Even ignoring the massive presence of totalitarian bootlickers on Lemmy, as I previously said, the lack of content causes things to centralize. In theory, you can split off to your own communities, but in practice, its nearly impossible unless a mod simultaneously pisses off the whole community at once as happened with 196. Even then, the community needs to be quite large to jump-start the competing community. Until Lemmy gets large enough to have multiple communities running in parallel or for new communities to quickly and easily grow, mods will continue to be a potential problem.
All that said, I’m still here. I think, despite its issues, Lemmy has a much stronger foundation. Unfortunately its still missing most of the rest of the structure (or rather, content) needed to compete with other platforms.
90% is politics? Where did you pull that statistic from?
I’ll also point out that the statistic, if true, is not at all a universal metric because my All feed and your All feed are not the same if we’re on different instances. Over here, I might see 5% political content if I squint just right, otherwise it’s pretty much negligible.
I don’t agree that Lemmy is 90% politics. But it is pretty political especially since the US election and Elon Musk becoming quasi president means that there is a huge amount of politically related posts about tech. One of the most active topics on Lemmy.
For the most part I have effectively culled most of the politics I don’t want to see out of my feed but it wasn’t automatic which makes it a hurdle for people who aren’t invested in giving the fediverse a shot beyond the first impression.
You will be hit with a deluge of leftist thought when first on-boarding to the fediverse. Offering starter packs for new people on-boarding with a no/low politics pack that…
…would do a lot to improve the experience of people new to Lemmy that are looking for a more casual experience. At least in my opinion I think it would
!home@lemmy.zip latest announcement included default blocking of politics in All
I really like the way they handle onboarding and wished that kind of tooling was baked in as the default experience for all Lemmy instances
I think this would go a long way to helping. It won’t necessary hold users, but will at least keep them from bouncing off of it so violently as this Reddit user did. Imo, its a combination of this with the lack of other content that prevents more significant growth on Lemmy. The rough, often politically focused onboarding, scares people, and then when they go to try and find their favorite communities, they see no activity, leaving the impression that the site is nothing but politics.
!communitypromo@lemmy.ca has a pinned post trying to address that too
Its a rough estimate, yes, but I don’t think its an unreasonable one. I mean, one of the biggest Lemmy instances (.ml) is named for a political ideology. Unless you’re defederating from all of the biggest instances, politics will make up a majority of the active content available.
Regardless, thats besides the point. The point is the lack of non-politics content. I can’t find content for Counter-Strike, or War Thunder, or Dota. Even Minecraft gets almost nothing, and its likely the most played game in the world. I know there is some other niches out there, but I’m using those as examples because they’re all massive, multiplayer focused games, with content that lends itself to discussion or sharing, that I regularly have to go back to Reddit for to follow. Lemmy is lucky to get a post a week from all of them combined. If users can’t find discussion on things they’re interested in, at best they’ll end up looking at broad-appeal communities from top or active (like politics) and at worst, they’ll just leave.
Edit: I just did a quick check on my instance’s active feed. Of the top 20 results, 10 were undeniably political, and two more were debatably so. So for a more tame instance, around 55% of content being politics is a realistic estimate. I also checked Lemmy.ml, since its one of the main instances new users are directed to, and it was 14 political to 6 not, so 70% there.
Are those three still that popular? I’m a League of Legends player, and the game is much less active than let’s say 5 years ago.
!stardewvalley@lemm.ee or !pokemonTCGM@crazypeople.online on the other hand are quite active here
At time of writing this comment, CS2 is most active on Steam, Dota is second, and War Thunder is 16th. Even if you write CS2 off for having too many bots, (which is fair,) the other two are still very active and very popular.
I guess the overlap between those games populations and Lemmy is quite small.
When you think about it, !Football@lemm.ee isn’t that active for the most popular sport on the planet