this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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Privacy
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I think people should experience smaller communities, they are often much higher quality in terms of the actual social interactions (though, we're starting to get our share of trolls and toxic people).
I think there was a big shift for reddit in 2016 after they bought (and then shut down..) AlienBlue and then launch their official app. That moment it felt like when the number of users just exploded, but with that, the quality of posts (and average age of the user) dropped.
Lemmy/the fediverse reminds me of 2010-2015 reddit (which is a good thing!)
I remember when Reddit was run out of spez's Somerville apartment on a little PC. No subreddits, just one top page. Terrible performance and no users. Everyone was at either Slashdot or Digg. Even Kuro5hin by then was dead. Reddit beat Digg because Digg got stupid and abused their community. Reddit is a million times worse now than Digg ever was.
Yup! I was a part of the mass Digg exodus.
I figured that would happen again with reddit, but to my disappointment the internet is a much different place than it used to be.
Back when Reddit was funny and not a bot hive
I remember /r/AskReddit being THE spot, and it was great to read on the go since it was just text. All the novelty accounts were awesome, RamblesOffTopic being a favorite of mine haha.
...and r/conspiracy was 80% stuff like birds ain't real and the rest I always assumed was people posting ironically... now I'm not so sure that that was an accurate assessment.
and r/F7U12. It wasn't just a meme it was an entire meme language, kids these days with their gifs and their template sites... smhing my head
I use user tags pretty heavily, and it is amazing how small Lemmy truly is. I recognize a lot of individual users, and the tag even links back ti whatever post/comment I originally used to tag them.
That's how the OG Internet communities were. There would be like 500 total people maybe and you'd see them randomly throughout the week as they were online. You don't know everyone but you recognize most of the names/pfps.
It cuts down on a lot of toxicity when you can actually know who is a jerk and who is probably just having a bad day. It makes the community a bit more empathic and less reactionary.
Indeed!!
As a side tangent, I used to get so mad on old forums when someone would update their avatar lol I didn't recognize names, I recognized their picture. So if they changed they might as well be a new user until I recognized we've spoken before, haha.
I know! I paid an artist, from the forums, to draw my avatar and paid them to update it for holidays and stuff so it was consistent.
Also, you gotta have a good signature. Why not a live updating image of what is playing in your media player, that could not possibly end badly.
Are you getting user tags from a third-party Lemmy app? I don't see that feature in the web interface.
I think they must be - though I can't figure out which one, haha.
I can't figure out how to do it via the website, or Voyager / Mlem on iOS.
In Voyager, you need to enable the feature under Settings -> User Tags.
Voyager implements it entirely on the client; it’s not a feature of Lemmy. Therefore it isn’t available via the Lemmy website.
However, PieFed does have backend support for user tagging. On a PieFed account, you can tag users through the website or through Mlem.