New to Lemmy

Followed a similar path as you - a few months ago. I went from using the self-compiled infinity app on Reddit, (which so far still works) to Voyager on Lemmy. At first I was sort of opening both like 50/50, but now I'm at the point I only open Reddit like if I do a search and need to see an answer that happens to be on Reddit.

Lemmy was a little too slow at first but I see post volume going up slowly, and I keep subscribing to new communities. I share a lot of the sentiment here and am excited to see Fediverse systems continue to succeed and pull people away from the advertisement machines.

i just noticed the forced log in on mobile, its alot more aggressive on a mobile phone than on a desktop, you can easily use ublock origin to put custom filters on desktop. on the phone if you try to bypass, they will disable the comments(hide it) if you remove the popups. also they are slowly rolling out the forced login, so they can figure out how to bypass ublock origin altogether.

im actually hearing reddit lost quite alot of traffic to the site recently, likely due to sheer amount of AI bot posting, spamming going on. and reddit likely is running out genuine user content which AI is scraping the site for data, so the forced login is way to bring user generate content back.

Plus reddit purges for months on end after the election early last year, it banned multiple accounts of actual users, so now they have less users to datamine from. botters/spammers are not going to be stopped by the stupid login anyways,, they can easily purchase hundreds if not thousands of accounts as throwaway, plus propaganda troll farms can make tons of accounts use automation. and google is the beneficiary of the reddit data, which is why they try to limit the amount of accounts on your devices/phones for a google account. and yes i made one using a hotmail to bypass google, for niche content on reddit.

as soon as the purges died down, the lack of actual users is noticble, and the increase of AI bots as well. it is a matter of time reddit uses facebooks aggressive login tactics. and alot of his were here from 2 migrations, 1 from the API disaster, and 2nd from the massive purges last year.

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 😉 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.

And here on Lemmy, nothing looks like obvious bot posts. Content seems real.

This is one of the biggest positive differences at the moment. We are still (mostly) too small to be worth investing with botnets. You get a lot more actual human interaction here.

my only questiom is how can anyone tell me that what has haopened to reddit wont happen to lemmy?

Welcome cowbo-er, cowperson! Glad you found Lemmy and yes Voyager is A++ primo browso.

Because there’s no algorithm you have to scroll All and block the comms you know you’ll never read, and favorite ones you want to post in later (favoriting just makes it quicker to get to).

I recommend superbowl for a best-of-Lemmy thing, and would point out there are multiple “politics” comms and news comms due to the multiple instances. You may prefer one over another.

dull_mens_club is also kind of a hoot, and justpost gets regular use. And now we’ll introduce the other members of Lemmy:

Bruce teaches classical philosophy, Bruce there teaches Hegelian philosophy, and Bruce here teaches logical positivism and is also in charge of the sheep dip!