I'm an old reddit user, going back to '08. Like many of you I'm sure, I've seen the site rise and fall. Killing 3p apps was a major blow, along with the purge of so many subreddits, and now you have to log in to even view it...it's getting real bad.
I had heard of the fediverse back when Mastadon was first announced. Briefly checked it out, but didn't give it much mind. This morning I was browsing reddit and read a thread about the continual degradation of the site. Someone mentioned Lemmy (new to me), but I thought "hey! I'll check it out, why not''. A brief google search gave me some iOS apps, and I wound up using Voyager (10/10 btw, Voyager reminds me a lot of Apollo in it's hayday). I applied/logged in....and just...wow. Wow y'all. Lemmy reminds me so much of reddit circa late 00's. Sure, there is a smaller user base, but so was reddit at the time. I remember the subreddit you were supposed to go to when you made an acccount and introduce yourself :D
And here on Lemmy, nothing looks like obvious bot posts. Content seems real. In correlation with that, the post titles seem pretty reasonable and not based around rage bait / click bait.
After setting it up on my phone, I found the desktop site (I'm on a laptop some times) and I adore a.lemmy.zip. To me its the perfect layout. The other incredible thing about Lemmy is just how seamless it was to set up, on both mobile and desktop. It feels super accessible to non-technical users, which is something I don't think is true for a lot of fediverse things.
But seriously, I used to adore reddit so much. Watching it fall apart has made me sadder and sadder over time. There was seemingly nothing in its place. I really felt like that era of internet over entirely. Just my first few hours on Lemmy has made me realize I was wrong, in the best way possible. It gave me chills. I'm looking forward to this platform growing. So anyway, thanks for any/all of you who developed/are developing Lemmy. It really, truly feels like a return to the golden age of social.
The Fediverse in general and Lemmy in particular aren't necessarily immune to poison and bots and the like, but we do have some resistances that might keep us safer.
The first and most obvious is that there's no ads, and because there's no ads there's also no benefit to the site admins or devs wanting to trick you and addict you into using the site more with algorithms and stuff. Like, we could write dark patterns... but why? We don't get any money or anything from you being here... in fact if anything all the usage you do technically costs the hosts money! I mean, don't stop posting stuff, it's worth it, but the people running it really are running it just to facilitate community and communication.
The second thing is that there's no karma. There are upvotes on posts and comments, but those are basically just used to sort things relative to other things. But what it means is that people want to engage either because they're interested in making the community more vibrant, or because they're a perpetually online loser ๐ but they don't actively benefit from posting just to farm.
These two things make the community more organic. That having been said, there can be exceptions still. I could make a bot that posts "you should buy these headphones: AMAZON_AFFILIATE_LINK", and essentially run my own ads in the posts and comments sections of communities just because there are eyeballs there. We don't see a lot of those because we're small, probably, but if we grow we'll probably see more of them, and we'll have to figure out what to do then. There's also a version of this which is NSFW posts where they're advertising their OnlyFans (or equivalent) in their profile, so their whole thing is kind of an ad. I'm not saying there's necessarily anything wrong with this second one, but it's an entity with different goals than conversation, for sure.
And then there's the kind of bots that are politically motivated rather than financially motivated. The kinds you sometimes see on other social media who aren't trying to get eyeballs really, they're not trying to sell you anything, they're just trying to make you sad or angry or distrustful of the people around you. We don't really have any built-in defense against that any more than other social media. We're currently small enough that maybe it's not worth it, but when it comes for us it'll probably hit the same here as anywhere else.
So some benefits from the tech and ethos, but some benefits just due to newness and smallness.