Gonna just say it. As a longtime Lemmy user I’m really not a fan of a lot of the people coming over from Reddit. It’s probably just a small but vocal minority and confirmation bias on my part, but I get the impression that they are trying to turn Lemmy into Reddit, toxicity, entitlement, stupid challenges and all.
When we’ve had two major debacles before Reddit even opened back up, one about “how dare these unpaid admins try to lessen their workload with sign up questions”, and the other about “how dare instances block other instances that are being used as proxies for forwarding spam and bot content into their own instances.” The people from reddit seem to still think they’re on Reddit and any perceived inferiority that Lemmy has compared to Reddit is seen as just as bad as Reddit’s corporate decisions. A few people even trying to go to an instance with the intent of “converting” the existing users who may be socialist or communist, by commenting abuse on their posts of course, just like how they presumably do it on Reddit.
People also seem to be refusing to learn what federation is and how that works, despite it being literally the most important aspects of Lemmy. This is evident in people telling instances who block spam or troll ridden instances to “mind their own business” as if that content doesn’t get forwarded over to and show up on the main pages of other instances, you know, what the fediverse was designed to do.
FYI, Reddit has opened back up. Spez has made it clear that he will never tolerate subreddits shutting down and inconveniencing you again. If you’re so unwilling to even adopt a different mindset and perspective when coming to Lemmy, I think it’s best if you went back. Plenty of us came here because we didn’t want to be on Reddit.
Last thing and a pet peeve of mine: stop calling yourself a refugee. You left a meme website for another meme website because you didn’t like one aspect of the management, the entire decision and migration probably took less than an hour of you sitting in your comfortable house in front of a computer. To compare that to being a refugee speaks volumes about your entitlement and privilege. And it’s especially ironic considering what real refugees go through to save themselves and their families, that you won’t even answer a few registration questions.
Yeah, I’ve seen plenty of new communities that have already shuttered to “move to X instance where the users are” that would make me laugh if it weren’t so annoying that they’ve just decided to squat a community that could flourish locally if someone else took it over.
I think there’s a minor quirk of Lemmy’s UI partially responsible for this, at least as far as I can tell from my one user account on one instance. By default, I am shown communities on my local instance only. I have to click “all” every time to leave my home town and travel the rest of the fediverse. There does seem to be an option to change this in my account settings menu. It’s labeled “Type.” You first hear about Lemmy, “It’s like Reddit, but federated, which means…one account on one instance gets you access to the whole network.” you log in, play around a bit, and at some point you ask “I get access to the whole network…how?”
I’ve seen people bring up the worry that because each instance has its own namespace, the Fediverse will be even more fractured and dispersed than Reddit. “How am I supposed to have time to browse 100 different r/technology’s?” Well, some of them are going to gain popularity and become the de facto standard, and the others will wither and die.
Might be a ramification of the idea of “general purpose” instances. I’ve seen a couple instances so far that try to focus on a broad topic and only allow communities within that topic. Which, if your sole interest is in that topic, that’s where you should put your account. I figure it’ll sort itself out, though.