Am I the only one feeling that the quality of discussion here felt big time after big instances got created and federated (think lemmy.world)?

TLDR : we can block communities we dislike but we have no choice but to interact with instances we dislike. (Also main points in bold in the text)

I have barely any interest in conversations here compare to before and I feel it is due to a lot of very bad takes and nonconstructive comments being the norm now. I can’t help noticing/feeling like the majority of them comes from the same instances.

I was annoyed from the early days (before Lemmy got some traction after the reddit debacle) that I had to block all the ‘meme’ communities and some others. This is a sample from my block list :

cryptocurrency
Memesich_iel@feddit.deShare
Funny Videos, Images, Memes, Quotes and more Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world
Political Memes@lemmy.world>
Greentextmemes@lemmy.worldmemes@hexbear.net
RPGMemes @ttrpg.network
ADHD memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
SurrealMemes@sh.itjust.works
Microblog Memes@lemmy.world
Memes@midwest.social
Star Wars Memes@lemmy.world
Risa@startrek.website
Memes@sopuli.xyz196@lemmy.blahaj.zone
solarpunk memes@slrpnk.net 
Funny@sh.itjust.works
GenZedong@lemmygrad.ml
AI Generated Images@sh.itjust.works
Lord of the memes@midwest.social
Furry@pawb.socialScience Memes@mander.xyz
Comics
People Twitter@sh.itjust.worksich_iel@feddit.org

This is fine by me as at least I have a way to not bother and not be bothered by those communities I have no interest in. I feel like some conversation that could be interesting and deep get bombed by the sheer amount of terrible interaction from other instances.

There are surely better and worse instances, and depending of our interests we’ll have preferences. Because of the way federation works now I cannot filter out the ‘noise’ and things like “top of week” is… not going well in my opinion. There is no community-blocking equivalent way of blocking votes/post/comment for specific instances.

When I read ‘Hacker News’ it is so refreshing to see such a community with deeper interactions and sourced arguments and points. I feel like I am learning things there. It would be perfect if not America-centric, start-up minded place (also only about tech there). But the moderation there is amazing.

I am starting to give up on the current state of Lemmy now and looking for non-federated places that would have better communities. I haven’t found any yet (not that I’ve searched that much). I feel like there might be a way around all-federated or isolated silo choice here. I guess that would also imply a lot of technical work (thank you very much too all who contributed to Lemmy so far).

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    1 month ago

    Eh, I was a pure lurker before the reddit move.

    I can’t really say that the slippery quality of discussion has gone down because discussion would be an exaggeration of things before more people jumped over. There just weren’t enough interactions between people to use as a reliable indication of quality.

    Now, any forum I’ve ever been on, even back to ICQ days, and old school bbs stuff, there’s a certain degree of “poop in the peanut butter”. You eat enough peanut butter, and your chances of also eating bug poop go up, with it becoming a certainty eventually. You get enough human beings in the same place, you get assholes. The more people, the more assholes.

    You can’t really escape it entirely. Even the best possible moderation has delays, and judgement calls. All you can do is drop the numbers until the amount of poop in the peanut butter is low enough to pretend it isn’t there. The only way to entirely get rid of the bad elements is to host your own forum, and make it invite only, while also not letting it get big enough you can’t moderate it.

    But, my impression is that the good discussions are still way higher on lemmy as a whole than anywhere else currently. Mbin counts as part of that, though it isn’t the same thing.

    Blocking instances helps. You’re right that some instances have a certain proclivity towards personality types and/or beliefs that go hand-in-hand with bad behavior. And the bigger ones (the one I’m on included) have big enough numbers that even without those proclivities, you end up with good bit of poop with your pb&j. Sadly, even blocking an instance isn’t going to fully prevent running across users in comments here and there.

    But overall? Way better than reddit was in the five years or so before spez spazzed. Better than 9gag ever was. At least as convivial as one of the forums I moderated back in the late 90s, where the user base was pretty decent overall by virtue of it being homogenous in several ways.

    As pissed as I was that reddit went all the way into stupidity, I’m happier on lemmy now than I was on reddit a decade ago. And I’m happier with the average interactions I see on lemmy than I was with lemmy before last year. And that’s including the truly abysmal run ins I’ve had over the last year here.