I come on here every so often to see what's going on, and every time I leave disappointed. This is my top 3 grievances at the moment:

1. This place feels dead. It's usually quite, but lately it really feels like a ghost town. Idk what the actual stats say, but I feel like the amount of comments, posts, and variety seem to have gone down quite a bit over the past few months.

2. The amount of genuinely hateful content has gone up. I feel like Lemmy as a whole used to have better moderation even just last year compared to now. Every time I get on here, I'm seeing more and more gross content that's either racist or bigoted or just downright gross. This content doesn't get taken down even when reported. As horrid as Reddit's moderation is, it's still not this bad.

3. Outside of the tech communities, there's no information hygiene anywhere in sight. The news subs publish the most questionable of sources, sometimes outright misinformation... and nobody cares? People don't criticize weak sources or call out false claims or even value accuracy. I've seen multiple instances of users saying something false and getting upvoted for it and a person correcting them getting downvoted for it. Like, what's even happening?

I don't know, I feel like when I joined a couple of years ago Lemmy was so much better. It felt more active, the community felt more down to earth, kind, and friendly, and the content was higher in quality. There was much optimism surrounding the Fediverse that's not there anymore. Now it feels like a more left wing version of Voat than a genuine Reddit alternative. Am I the only one feeling this way or do other people feel the same?

Sad.

Feels dead.

Just like my will to live...

Might pick up ham radios as a hobby if I wasn't so scared and introverted to talk to old white dudes in America... yea that'd feel weird... most ham radio people are right wing libertarians... not my cup of tea... also not white... which might be weird when they start asking what my favorite sports team is or what my favorite music is... not American enough to answer those questions lmfao...

I feel like your comment of (2) contradicts (3) to some degree. I agree the wider culture of lemmy is progressive/left, but that at least indirectly contradicts the prominence of racist content that you claim exists.

That's not how I experience it. A few key blocks and I'm not seeing a bunch of assholery. Content isn't endless, but there's almost always something to talk about.

I suspect it depends a great deal on subs, interests, and sort order.

From the communities ive interacted with, defs feels dead compared to other places. Does suck when scrolling through the news feed and getting caught up way too quickly.

But there seems to be a fair chunk of aussies on here thats kept me on here

I don't really see the widespread racism you claim exists here, with Lemmy being one of the least racist Western online spaces I've ever been in...

And idk what you mean by dead. Compared to what? I feel like I see the same usernames pop up often, because we have a community of regulars. I don't think I need it to be more "active", and it certainly beats the more bot-infested "larger" online communities.

Also, if you really dislike the "leftist" population/takes on Lemmy, why don't you just go back to Reddit? Like, in earnest, they have a lot of uhh "right wing" stances and all big subreddits support the American empire and silence anyone who disagrees. Just make a new account and resettle there, it'll be more to your liking!

I'm in a similar boat re ham radio. It seems like a cool hobby, I'm into the idea of building and running radios. Even better if you add backpacking, DX-ing, "fox hunting" or other ham radio games. But the culture is a little off for my taste. People are generally polite and friendly enough on short contacts but you can hear some bad takes if you chat long enough. It would be cool to see younger, diverse, more left leaning new hams, it would get me more interested in going on air.

Might pick up ham radios as a hobby if I wasn’t so scared and introverted to talk to old white dudes in America

if this can help: you and I we've been chatting around here, and I'm a old white dude (just from France) ;)

BTW, I'm also an introvert too, the thing that helped the most live with it is to... accept it (aka, to stop wishing I was not an introvert) and be ok with feeling awkward when I'm with people.

I think the worst part would be "What do you do for a living"...

Um... sweats profusely I'm a financial consultant and a paralegal for a relative's bussiness? (not entirely false, my mom asks for a lot of help with her stuff)

Like what else am I supposed to say? I'm a loser who is dealing with depression, dropped out of college, unemployed, living with parents...

Might as well as just shoot myself the 'Murican style

(On the other hand tho... I could be very interesting and unique since I was born in a foreign country...)

It is definitely less active than I want it to be. I use Lemmy once or twice a day, but sometimes the posts from the previous day are still the active ones.

I've actually been having a pretty good time lately. I like that the communities are smaller and more personal (especially compared to coming from reddit where some of the communities I was in were massive).

This place feels dead. It’s usually quite, but lately it really feels like a ghost town.

The place has a much smaller population, of which an even tinier amount is active. So there is much less content published. One solution is to participate more but too few people seem willing to do it. An other solution would be to make the space more attractive to more users but, like you noticed...

The amount of genuinely hateful content has gone up.

I've been saying it since I first joined the Fediverse: default experience is... trash, unless you're looking for some echo chamber for your pre-existing biases that is. Some may enjoy that experience, I certainly did not, and most people won't either.

1. New/default experience should be an empty feed, with a few limited broad suggestions allowing them to slowly get in whatever they're interested and willing to read (even trash content if that's their thing).
2. Learning to use the filtering tools is key and should be encouraged.
   Personally, I have had a real nice and pleasant experience browsing Piefed because I learned to use those tools: 1) limiting my home page to 'Subscribed' only (filtering out all political/memes/low effort content, because 2) I carefully select the communities I'm subscribed to, 3) Piefed making it so simple to filter out keywords and annoying users alike, I never hesitate to use that and, no, I don't care to block them even if we're already short on users: my time is too precious to waste it with serial haters and complainers, or self-proclaimed white knights for such or such 'noble cause'.

Outside of the tech communities, there’s no information hygiene anywhere in sight.

I've never seen much of any kind of (an information) hygiene, anywhere online. Certainly not on Reddit... save on very few selected subs... exactly like I can see here.

But once again, one can easily filter the worst offenders in a matter of seconds. Then, it's up to anyone to stick to it: once I blocked them, I certainly don't 'check from time to time' to see if they're getting any better. I let them play in their shit pool to their heart's content, throwing more of it at one another: it doesn't concern me anymore. And for that I must say I quite like the filtering tools piefed gives us.

the community felt more down to earth, kind, and friendly,

It depends where you look at. When I joined (two or three years ago? I was on Lemmy, before switching to Piefed) the amount of sheer hate that was expressed and that I witnessed was... disturbing, to say the least. I don't think it has become worse but I could not tell since I learned to filter the sources out.

I wish for the devs to more seriously consider the out of the box experience for a new user and, maybe, consider that not all new users will share their political/personal/philosophical values or biases. I certainly don't agree with many of the ideas I can see expressed around here, but I'm also old enough to be fine with people having different opinions, and patient enough to see if I can make the tool work more like I want it to and reduce what I consider noise.

edit: typos.

Why are you looking for the approval of people you haven't even met yet?

All those "where are you from, what do you do for a living, what do you do for fun" type questions are just to establish a common ground. You don't have to take them so seriously.

And like, you're already going to share at least one common hobby of being into HAM at the very least. Ask questions, engage in conversation and dont be super introspective about whether your conversation was optimal.

Genuine question: is there a moderation or federation difference between Lemmy and PieFed? Because I don’t feel like Lemmy is dead or racist. Idk maybe I just blocked a bunch of communities and forgot. I think it probably because discuss.online is doing it right.

I think the worst part would be “What do you do for a living”…

Depends what you want.

Do you think you should be the person they want you to be? Then, yes, their opinion matters. If no, why give a crap about their opinion?

Many, many years ago, I quit my dream job.

It was the job I dreamed of doing since I was a teen, a job I was quite good at with reasonable successes, earning decent money with even some ‘prestige’ associated to it... but it was also a job that was quickly killing me, literally. It was not just grinding my soul to dust, it was destroying my body to the point that, one morning, I died (I was dead and would have stayed so had my spouse not been there). We decided I had to quit, to let go of the ‘dream’, the money and the perks associated with it. We've watched the vast majority of our 'friends' turn their back on us the moment I stopped being useful or valuable to them. Had it not been so sad to witness it would have been hilarious, they left en masse (it was more useful for my spouse and I to realize how poorly we had made friends so far, real precious lesson). We’ve also heard a lot of talks, most being mean spirited. So what? I don't give a crap what anyone can think: it's not them I'm married with ;)

I'm now much older and still much poorer than I once was. But I also live a much happier life. My spouse and I, we've been through all the hardship together and we're still holding fine after 25+ years together.

Might as well as just shoot myself the ‘Murican style

Take that for someone that was once dead : it’s probably not worth it. Your time on this planet is already very limited, it’s the most valuable gift you were ever given. Use all of it, don’t waste it.

If something is sour in your life, it’s probably worth fixing it, one way or the other. Even if it’s painful.

I feel like the voting culture of Lemmy is not conductive to good conversation or anything more than blind agreement. It's certainly helped by the fact that Lemmy's algorithm is more willing to show newer posts and comments (as opposed to merely popular ones), but people on Lemmy seem to be very willing to downvote content that they don't agree with, or downvote news that they don't like (regardless of the informative quality of said news), or just downvote anything that may contradict their pre-existing notions of how stuff works. It's more hostile than Reddit, and it seems like everyone, especially in the political communities, is wanting to start an argument here, sometimes over the dumbest things. Look in your average Reddit comment thread, and you see pages of jokes, memes, people sharing stories, and just generally having a good time. Look in your average Lemmy comment thread, and you see two people arguing over a dumb political point.

Building critical mass is difficult because people created communities that have barely any activity.

The way you build a platform is to encourage less categorization until a specific topic needs to be split off.

discuss.online is doing it right. There is a significant overlap between discuss.online and lemmy.world's admin teams, and I generally think they handle it about as well as could be expected of a general-purpose instance of their scale.

As for piefed, I think the primary things that help users filter their experience are the additional blocks that are at their disposal; blocking communities with a word in their name, blocking posts that match keywords, blocking posts that point to certain domains, etc. However, it can only help if a user actually goes through the effort of setting them up.

Genuine question: is there a moderation or federation difference between Lemmy and PieFed?

I could not tell. For me Piefed is just an entry point to the Fediverse, the same Fediverse with the same users we’re all part of. What I can say is that, back then at least, Piefed seemed more intuitive to use the way I wanted to.

Because I don’t feel like Lemmy is dead or racist.

I don’t either. Like I said, I filter out the noise and crap and have a nice experience. The sad thing being that I first had to learn to filter that noise out which, based on what I can hear, does turn off quite a few new users.

My issue is not just with racists or the right, or the fascists (if that was what you meant to say). I consider the most excited leftists around here at least as toxic (and stupid), and as… fascists, btw. No matter how hard some are trying to convince us of the contrary, fascism was never limited to right/racism. And fascism should always be opposed, no matter the flag its waving.

Depends where you're looking. It's not as active as Reddit for sure, but it also has far fewer non-humans too which seems to be the majority of Reddit these days - either repost bots or even comment bots so the activity isnt real, it's a mere simulation. I don't fear that here. PugJesus is real. 😃

Your last paragraph is probably what OP was writing about. You don't have to be right-wing to dislike Hezbollah, Hamas, the Ayatollahs, Chavez and Maduro, and the Castros. But you'll get shit on quite a lot here for that. "Centrists just enable fascism" is a common take.

Yes actually you do kinda have to be right wing to oppose any political project that resists western aggression, because that is literally the only thing those groups have in common.

I use feeds, instead of just looking at "all":

• non-tech, low-political non-memes: https://piefed.social/f/highsignal
• non-tech, low-political memes: https://piefed.social/f/highmemecontent

Im seeing unique things with different perspectives here.

Maybe try looking at different communities?

I meant it. And I'm sure you have valid reasons to support/like your own corrupt and bloodthirsty leaders and policies before these folks, lol. If being a "centrist" means you support the status quo of Western dominance, you're just a shy "right winger". Regardless of these somewhat nebulous labels, countless innocents have died and continue to die to feed the American empire and the Western war machine, you simply can't be a good person and support the status quo.

Yes, that's why I joined PieFed instead.

Yes there is. Check this out - https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/

It's up to the instance admins to make use of those but I certainly have on https://piefed.social. I have no qualms about banning negative, bad-faith or douchy losers to save people from blocking them. And if a community is bad enough, I'll ban the whole community.

Also by deciding what to include in the starter-packs used during onboarding the admin can encourage people to join good communities while leaving toxic ones harder to find.

Thousands of disinfo websites are blocked out of the box and I've manually added warnings onto dozens more that are frequently posted on Lemmy.

There's more, way more. But you get the idea.

The hate is definitely spreading, and nuance is going out the window.
Threads about some subjects legit scare me, with the rabid hate and demand for ideological purity that oozes out of the comment section.

God forbid you tell anyone you used to be in the police.

I left news@lemmy.world, politics@lemmy.world & world@lemmy.world and noticed an instant improvement! YMMV

I think all the negative things you said are true of the other place as well, you just can’t see it.

Lemmy communities (at least by default), don’t rely on votes but on recency and activity.

It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.

As some others of said, I block communities that are not for me.

I've spent close to three years now blocking the worst users and communities, tweaking my mile-long list of content filters - and even after all that, this site is barely usable.

It's honestly staggering how much content gets voted to the front page that doesn't interest me at all. Even when something does catch my eye, I close the thread after 10 seconds of reading the comments. There's just no point in trying to have any honest discussion here.

I simply have no theory of mind for the kind of person who actually enjoys the "default Lemmy experience." Sometimes when I browse someone's profile, wondering whether to block them, I see that virtually every single one of their replies is in threads whose headlines contain terms that trigger my filters. It's bizarre. It's almost like some people enjoy being angry all day every day - or if not, at least feel obligated to be.

I don’t like reading a lot of the defeatist, angry, antisocial type comments on here, but I feel like if I start blocking that stuff (like a lot of the political comms, but it’s also everywhere…), it’s going to feel too quiet😭

Personally, I haven't noticed a decrease in content, but I have noticed a significant dropoff in quality of content, and in it's place, has mostly grown toxicity. None of the racism, or anything that extreme (although, from what I've seen, my instance moderators have been doing a good job,) but so much of the content is insults, unhelpful snark, doomerism, elitism, and just general bad-faith arguments. It feels like all those who wantted to be helpful or supportive have given up or left, meaning no high-quality content and no meaningful discourse.

That said, it also feels like a wider cultural shift thats happened in the last year or so. Online culture as a whole feels more toxic, with fewer places to go for positivity or constructivity, and far more hate and abuse.

It feels like activity has dropped off a bit since the last Reddit exodus. And I worry that this platform is never going to see the kind of critical mass I'd want out of it, to be big enough that I can use it to discuss more niche topics and fandoms than what's currently on offer here. I see communities get made and die off on the regular from people who want to use this platform they way they used Reddit but quickly realize they can't.

I'm still here because I believe in the ideals of a federated platform, but I just don't know what the future holds at this rate.

OP has commented 800+ times though, which, is modders of magnitude more than 99% of people in the world.

Maybe there was a less spiky way of making your point?

be the change you want to see

I'm absolutely guilty of it too so this as much for me as you but if we want more folks to engage, maybe we ought to try to be kinder to those who actually do.

Yep, avoiding politics-focused communities helps a lot.

This isn't the flex you think it is. In fact it makes no sense.

and how does that really help, it is the same content on piefed

I see this thread has many people saying that they don't see a problem and it must be because of the local and personal blocklists.

I see comments saying it's because they are using Lemmy or Piefed.

I've blocked nothing. I scroll through /c/all every day and I don't feel like there is a hate or dodgy content problem.

this is an interesting point, I think my /all was much better before cm0002 made an account on my instance an pulled in a lot of marginal communities

Thank you. I thought I might be hallucinating.

Likewise. I think people are forgetting what it was like on reddit. Shits kind of popping here now and running into the odd tankie or chudd is nothing like having them in a full brigade or admin team like reddit

Eh. It only feels dead if you let it.

oooh another how is lemmy doing post

meh it's ok, look at the graphs the numbers are massively down but making a very slow recovery maybe

so there's about 40k active users, so it's quiet

It's fine. There's enough activity to keep me in content (as much as I need content), and I don't see the hate as much as you report.

The only thing wrong with it from my perspective is that Trump and American politics is poisoning it, but they're poisoning the entire world so...

This place feels dead.

I've been here every day for the last few years and it doesn't really feel that way.

The amount of genuinely hateful content has gone up

I haven't really encountered any "hateful" content. There is however a lot of far left teenage dweebs who can be just relentless. Over time I've become more trigger-happy with the block button.

no information hygiene

I suspect you may have encountered this on posts from some of the instances I have blocked. They're very well known and many instances have defederated from them. the news communities on lemmy.world don't seem terrible ?

All of that said ...

I don't particularly like the fediverse myself. I find I spend an equal amount of time on a redlib (reddit) instance. There's more content, it's more engaging, and news seems to drop there first.

As a tangentially related aside... switch over to piefed. The lemmy devs are supporting all three problems you've mentioned IMO.

I think this place starts to feel dead when atrocities are committed, then we get zillions of the same posts, rightfully so because these things should not be ignored, but then it seems like nothing else is really happening here.
I agree with you on the shitty sources. The ones that spread misinfo will spam a wall of text with links to 'sources' and trying to call them out becomes an overwhelming chore. Then the extremely toxic 'did you read the article??!?' when the source is just some shitty opinion blog. It's exhausting, which is why they do it.

It is old enough to have niche communities but they are very rare. It is still dominated by memes, politics and the bad side of tech