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
    38·
    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.

  • Wander@yiffit.net
    30·
    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
        2·
        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
    27·
    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 😅

  • ono@lemmy.ca
    9·
    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.

    • 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?

      • Aurix@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        There is a lot of activity to spend many hours here. Discover more communities here. There is a dark mode, go to the settings page. You will find it in a drop down menu.

      • Mintyytea@kbin.social
        0·
        1 year ago

        yeah that’s what I’m struggling with too, like it’d be great if we could encourage people to try these, but at the same time I don’t want to give them a bad first impression to turn them off forever if they can not stand it’s still a baby project (understandable). I honestly don’t think it’s that hard to start using these fediverse products though, and I feel like the posts saying “lemmy will never take off”, “kbin is too hard to use” only gave me barriers to start using it. And then when I did start, I was like oh this is great, everyone’s talking, it’s a close community

        • moon_matter@kbin.social
          1·
          1 year ago

          The biggest issue is how easily people are taken “off-site” when linking to another instance, leaving them essentially logged out and unable to subscribe or otherwise participate. Users should be presented an option to be redirected to the relative view within their instance or go external. With the “external” link in much smaller font below the preferred option. Kind of like how Steam or Discord has a pop-up asking if you “trust this site” whenever you leave their spaces.

    • FaceDeer@kbin.social
      2·
      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.

      • 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?).

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
          1·
          1 year ago

          I’d say we’re at “okay platform” level, and “okay content if you’re into the specific things we’ve got okay content for at this point.”

          It’s a gradual process. The Fediverse is slowly getting better, and Reddit is slowly getting worse, and eventually someday they’ll pass each other in the wilderness.

    • Dav@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      Amen, if Reddit ever died it would probably survive living rent free in Lemmy users’ heads.

  • Warped@kbin.social
    5·
    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.

  • bunnyfc@kbin.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    I don’t think it’s necessary for them to be trolls, I think some people want to believe that there is no alternative, since that means they don’t have to change anything. The guilty conscience for supporting something they know is bad can be rationalized away by external factors.

    I suspect people are that aggressive because they have to explain themselves, towards each other and towards themselves why they’re staying.

  • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net
    4·
    1 year ago

    I think there’s truth to some of the “not ready” claims… and this is coming from someone who really tried to get into Lemmy, ended up creating their own instance (as demonstrated by my user handle).

    A few issues I think Lemmy dev team really need to address ASAP, from least technical (thus affecting most users) to more technical (this affecting less users) are:

    1. UX/Discoverability – Finding communities are a huge pain in the backend right now, and with multiple communities on different instances serving same purpose (i.e.: !reddit@lemmy.ml and !reddit@lemmy.world). Sure, Reddit had same issues (the example I’ve heard is /r/meirl and /r/me_irl), but Reddit offered solution (multi on old reddit, community+community on new reddit). There must be a way to streamline it with meta-communities or lists on Lemmy such that the contents can be viewed in a unified fashion. I recommended !community@ (note the lack of domain) to streamline all of user’s subscriptions with same name on different instances as an example; and perhaps we can use #list$user@lemmy.domain for users’s maintained lists to unify !homelab@lemmy.ml, !datahoarder@lemmy.ml, !homelab@lemmy.world, etc.).

    2. Trigger happy defederation hubs – a certain instance has unceremoniously de-federated a couple of other larger instances. This is not the way, but here we are, with users on those instances not able to access the broader Fediverse, and vice versa. Until discoverability gets taken care of, it will be challenging for users to find a good home – this leads to next point:

    3. Authentication – The Fediverse at large needs to separate authentication out from instances. Instances may provide their own authentication, fine, but there needs to be better way to authenticate against something else other than an entire new instance of Lemmy. The ActivityPub protocol has clear definitions on what is an actor, and users shouldn’t need to deploy a Lemmy instance to identify themselves, separately from a Mastadon instance to identify themselves, separately from a… etc. This is because frankly…

    4. Deployment of Lemmy is utter garbage. The official documentation’s getting started guide gets users setup with an instance where the UI container cannot talk to public, but the lemmy backend can? Why bother shipping an nginx container if the backend will just expose itself to the whole wide net? Also, let’s just pretend postgres container isn’t open to the whole world with a basic password… Trying to get it up and running with Traefik was a pain, just do a quick Google and see how many people have asked and gave up, as well as how many different ways people have tried to go at it (something something xkcd 927; I’ve contributed to a new one of my own per linked post on top!), and the dev basically just straight up going ‘we don’t support traefik’… also, each approach is not without problems…

    5. Federation is a bitch. I am pretty proud of the way I’ve used override to not edit original docker compose, and locked my setup down a little. But, I’m not ready to have the instance open to the whole wide web without CloudFlare in front… but allegedly, Federation doesn’t work with CloudFlare… why? Good luck trying to get to even a popular sub’s scale without getting hit with DDOS when someone disagrees with something someone else posted.

    There’s many more problems, and I genuinely want Lemmy to work. But, Lemmy is, lack of better words, “not yet ready” for prime time. It is thrown into the spotlight with Mastadon (which feels a bit more mature, at least from reading the docs) because of bad leadership at mega techs… It will take a lot of work for Lemmy to evolve and mature, before it can be “ready” to really absorb the mass of Redditors leaving Reddit.

    • pingveno@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Regarding #2, I think not defederating might be an easier sell if users had the ability to block instances. Right not it’s just users and communities. Hate lemmygrad? You can block its communities one by one, but it’s kind of a pain. So instances only have the option of a full block.

        • pingveno@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Lemmygrad is thoroughly obnoxious. Full stop. Also, you clearly have no idea what western chauvinism is if you’re calling me one.

          Edit: To clarify, I don’t want Lemmygrad being defederated. It breaks up the Fediverse for little reason. But I do want users to be given the option to block instances on either the community or user level. Would I say the same thing about a right wing instance with a history of bigotry and hate? No, that’s another matter that goes beyond mere discomfort.

    • bankimu@lemm.ee
      1·
      1 year ago
      1. That certain community is beehaw.org by any chance? They also ask you to write pretty much an essay to join, and didn’t accept mine.
  • NRVulture@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

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

  • 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

  • _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.