It feels like people are a lot nicer here than on Twitter and Reddit, and even when people disagree, it’s generally civil and not an all-out flame war. Also, there’s no algorithm promoting outrage all the time.
For me, the anticipation of toxicity was a huge deterrent for me ever participating in real discussions, but here I feel like I can be myself.
I think it’s healthier this way.
Lemmy is new and it’s not very big yet. If it grows big enough it will be eventually
This, we’re still on our honeymoon
Maybe also because of the learning curve. Those who find to bothersome to set up accounts on their preferred instances will just give up and stick to whatever toxic platform they’re currently using. In other words, I’d like to think of fediverse users as smarter than most.
Sure, but it took years for reddit to devolve into what it is today. It started out as a really great place to read interesting articles on all kinds of topics and have intelligent discussions about them afterwards. Reddit hasn’t been like that in a very, very, very long time but what we have going on here right now is very close to that.
I’m afraid the bots and techniques to troll, manipulate, etc. that have been developed for Reddit, can directly translate to Lemmy. Instances that grow big fast, are likely to get targetted much faster than Ye Olde Reddit was.
this tbh no platform survives a flood of new users
Is it the volume of users or volume of cretins and bigots? I feel that if you flood any site with 100k Shakespeare’s and Dali Lama’s the discourse would improve. Lowering the bar of entry into any technology dillutes the quality, e.g. driving. Perhaps the only solution is to make it easier to move on. The federated nature of this platform is a move in that direction and cause for optimism.
There is always a balance between quantity and quality.
Defederation will likely be a useful tool if we start growing too big. But also reddit, Facebook, twitter will still exist and capture the worst users.
I believe there is a critical mass of smart people that can repel idiots from a platform, which we have and need to protect. But that’s just my intuition, I’m not really sure.