Unpopular Opinion

I came over in the reddit migration.

I have to admit, the thought definitely occurred to me when I first joined and had a look around, that the people that were already here before would be getting swarmed by masses of redditors that may well not have the same "site-culture" as the people who were here first. I'm actually surprised that this is the first post that I've seen complaining about it.

I mean it, I was legitimately expecting a ton of pushback from the existing fedi community over this, and was really surprised when it never seemed to materialize.

For my own experiences of being here (I'm on kbin), this place has been really good-natured, with a better level of well intentioned discussion than what a lot of reddit had, so it's been a really nice experience so far. What I don't have though, is any experience of what it was like before we all invaded en-mass, so I have nothing to contrast it with. I can totally see how someone wouldn't be happy with what's happened though, the migration has to have changed the space a lot for everyone that was here before.

One thing about my personal experience of how it is here though is that when I first joined I tried to do the thing that you first do with a reddit account, you know, where you immediately un-subscribe from all default subreddits and only join things you're actually interested in (so, niche subs, etc). Found out that it isn't quite how it works, but that the subscribed feed is pretty much exactly that but baked-in as standard. I've then spent almost my whole time on the subscribed feed since (unless actively looking for new stuff).

So the quality that I've experienced here is probably more down to my personal selection of subscribed communities rather than a more holistic view of the platform as a whole. There's the caveat to everything I just said, I guess.

So yeah, I'm kinda sorry that this happened to you, and I'd also prefer if those people (I'm referring to the bad-actors and arsehole's side of things) would have just stayed where they were too, but I'm not sure what to do about it other than just blocking/unsubscribing to the communities in question, or blocking the individual accounts of bad actors. I doubt that the second is even remotely scalable though if the userbase gets significantly larger.

Shut up nerd.

Reddit -> Lemmy transplants are circlejerking about how evil Spez is, how Reddit is "doomed", or how much they hate people like Musk.

Seeing the low-quality comments starting to appear is disappointing.

That is expected isn't it? Both sites are driven by people, and people can be an assholes. Doubt we can do too much to drive them out.

The best thing about decentralized networks is that you can just go to another instance if you feel like this. You're not forced to interact with any communities that you're not a fan of. Things change with time, of course, but that doesn't mean you have to change your tastes.

I’ve definitely noticed things change a LOT in my 5 or 6 weeks here.

IMHO, instances like BeeHaw still have that old vibe. Less shit posting, less zinger comments, more people having reasonable conversations about things.

My guess is that we’ll end up having a split between instances like that, and instances that are basically trying to be fedi Reddit.

It's not reddit's people in my mind. It's how the society is structured in general. The fediverse gets slowly adopted by more and more people so it's natural that there is a annoying group of idiots.

I think they are always everywhere in a percentage. So the bigger the group the more Idiots.

It's possible that this percentage is increasing to be fair.

And yes, I'm a disgusting reddit refugee.

This is something we as mods for communities can combat. It's a rule I enforce across my communities, posters who engage in hostility and attack people have their comments removed. Simple as.

People can discuss things, that's fine but the second conversations devolve into personal attacks that is not okay.

We have the power to decide how we want the communities we have to grow and what behaviour we want to discourage. Sometimes people just need a little push in the right direction.

We can also all do our parts without mod intervention by being just decent and not engaging in the same toxic behaviour. You can also report comments to mods. It really helps us out to get reports in for comments/posts that break the rule as we may not always see it due to our instances etc...

I disagree. I was here before the migration and I really wanted to like it. However, there simply wasnt enough content and most threads were barren. Now, there are full deep discussions everywhere about loads of different topics. I've come back to a far better product than I previously experienced, despite a few more bad actors.

The Beauty of the Fediverse™

The thing with the combative comments/rudeness, in my experience, mostly looks like someone being direct and then a bunch of readers being offended by the bluntness. Whether it was on Reddit, here, or forums and Usenet back in the day. So many problems with "tone" in text is caused simply by the reader reading it in a combative tone that the writer never intended.

Unfortunately I think this just reflects human nature. The more people you have the more people you have at the fringes who are aggressive, or trolling or even just selfish or insensitive.

Also it's easy to come across rude when posting in text - anyone who works with colleagues via email will find the same problem of one meaning being intended but a different meanong (such as tone) being read by the recipient.

When you have a small community your names become familiar and there is something personal about the interactions. Once the you have a huge community people become anonymous and that allows bad behaviour to flourish. I barely ever saw a name twice on reddit and that's happening here too. I got to the point on reddit where I'd post a comment but I wouldn't ever read the replies as I was fed up with dealing with the negativity.

My hope for the fediverse is that there will be multiple versions of the same communities so that we can have closer knit versions of communities as alternatives to the 1m+ chaotic versions. Small communities are where you can achieve decency and kindness more consistently.