Title basically. I was here at the very start of it all and really enjoyed it. However I felt it lost its uniqueness within a few months of mass migration and started turning a bit like reddit again so I deleted my old account. However Reddit has only gotten much much worse since, and Lemmy has stayed about the same. So here again.
Same for the most part. There was a period of time where it seemed like every post and comment was angry. Silly fights over semantics. That still happens but it seems like less. I see more and more English speaking European influence. Still lots of angry Linux guys but Linux seems to be in a winning season so it’s chill.
Its gotten significantly less optimistic and more cynical. Its in my opinion more of a reflection of the state of the world than a Lemmy specific issue but it affects Lemmy users more because this isnt a space that allows people to live in ignorant bliss.
Diversity has increased by a lot. It’s not just circlejerking about Linux anymore. Only positives in my book.
Yeah, I feel like when I first came here every third post was about Linux and every third post was about star trek. A lot of the remaining third was beans. Now only every tenth post is Linux and trek.
It feels more like reddit now, but still is populated by a certain type of person that would seek out Lemmy. Mostly techy, left of center+, over age 30+, etc. I enjoy it.
Heyy! Im not old ye…ahhh, who am I kidding, you’re right.
techy ✔️
left of center✔️
over 30✔️
oh no. incoming targeted marketing
I meet all those criteria except that I’m an eight year-old dog. But nobody knows that…
people here are mostly over 30? 😭
I feel it’s changing positively, as instance admins and our tool-sets mature, and more and more people are becoming permanent residents as they’re either permabanned on reddit (so they have no alternative) or they recognize the value of a system that is not and cannot be controlled by a corporate entity and they US billionaire interests behind it.
However I’m also concerned that our yet small size has protected us from truly existential issues like dedicated spam and propaganda orgs, especially those who would utilize GenAI to be more covert. I’ve already published tools like the fediseer to help prepare for this, but I really hope to see more people per-emptively getting ready for this. I see way too many doe-eyed admins firing up instances without a care in the world, open registration, no captchas, no botnet protections etc and they either burn out and close shop after a few months of firefighting, or get defederated, or they have to re-learn a painful lesson the rest of us did.
This does give me an idea, we do need a more holistic “So you want to open a threadiverse instance” guide to give such pointers to new admins and way to get support from others. Hmmm…
there are increasingly a greater number of nutjobs, spammers, and hostile/miserable/angry people. my block list is like 300+ now. 6-9 month ago it was like 12 people.
2 years ago it was mostly super nerds just nerding about.
I arrived during the API debacle.
Some things are better, content and activity.
Some things are worse, spammers, AI proponents who harrass you despite the clear community-wide dislike of the plagarism machine, fascist chuds trying to mainstream rascism, misogyny, and ableism.
Basically each new wave is another usenet September equivalent, and it feels like we’re approaching the eternal september epoch as lemmy becomes more widely used. Soon we’ll have to deal with state actor bot-nets if we aren’t already.
