TheTechnician27

If nothing else, though, it seems like people might actually be posting OC now. When I first got there, it was like a single account blatantly reposting from TikTok, Instagram, etc. Like the 9gag of short-video content. Seems potentially better going back into it now.

I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs’ absolute credit, they don’t push new users toward any of those, though.

I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there’s a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in ‘all’).

Decentralization actually can be really powerful to give you a backup even if you prefer Signal; Signal’s servers very infrequently go down, but when they do, you entirely lose that channel for an unpredictable amount of time.

Not joining the rooms Element suggests on its own client? Element will show you a list of suggested, popular rooms to join, and a fuckton of these are overrun by spammers and worse. If Matrix has basically zero ability to curate these rooms outside of “here’s what’s got the most members”, then it absolutely should not in any capacity be recommending them, let alone as a way to get started for new users. It’s fucking ridiculous, and before you say “Well why should they be expected to curate the rooms they suggest?”, imagine the fucking disaster Discord would have on its hands if it started recommending servers, and several of its top 100 claimed to be related to popular FOSS applications but were actually completely unmoderated and filled with CSAM and Bitcoin scams.

Is there such a community here? Maybe you could start one.

Not really. In terms of engaging with posts, oh my god, absolutely it’s worse. Twitter and its clones suck when it comes to engaging with things people post (but Mastodon at least makes it a bit better by increasing the character limit). But there’s just something different about following a hashtag versus following a Lemmy community. Like for example, when it comes to getting highly detailed, up-to-the-minute news about things, Mastodon beats Lemmy every time. Additionally, I can see people’s random, one-off takes that wouldn’t really warrant a post on Lemmy.

I would argue too that it’s not even true that you should just be focused on following hashtags, but rather that you should be trying to do both.

To me, Lemmy is the type of place I could kill two hours; for Mastodon, it’s maybe 15 minutes, but that doesn’t make it inferior, just a different use-case. It’s pretty apples-to-oranges.

Quick, someone post “Cascade” from Homestuck and bring down the entire fediverse.

Moreover, they note that it’s a small community with three subscribers, which could actually hold weight as evidence of brigading if we were on Reddit. But on Lemmy? Nah, you kind of just see everything.

If we’re sorting by new on /r/all, I need to scroll back several pages on RiF to even see something that was posted 30 seconds ago; the chance that more than a few users will see the same feed there is tiny.

On Lemmy, by contrast, sorting ‘All’ by new gives me posts in the last 10-ish minutes on just the first page; things just move a ton more slowly. Consequently, there’s a lot more outsiders who are liable to see and interact with your post in a small community.

However, this particular user has deluded themself into believing this grandiose nonsense that they have a club of users who stalk them to downvote their stuff, when in reality we all come across them naturally because:

• Lemmy is a pretty small place.
• They’re a reasonably prolific commenter.
• Every time they show up somewhere, it’s a woe-is-me victim complex about how they’re being downvoted (immediately drawing attention) or making the absolute shittest political takes imaginable, which again draws attention and downvotes. This could definitely be survivorship bias where I only notice their username on comments that are doing these two things and not on normal ones.

I personally do not give enough of a shit about this user to waste any precious time or effort stalking them across Lemmy. (Source: I came across this post organically and would almost assuredly be one of the users Monk is talking about.)