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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I honestly don’t have a strong sense of how Tate can be so popular. But if I had to guess, I’d say the “no sense of community” is probably the biggest thing.

    The internet has become a gathering place where communities and social bonds are formed. I can imagine a heap of people who are struggling socially in the real world seeing, and then seeing Tate and his community offer an ‘answer’ to that - supporting those who feel rejected, and putting the blame squarely on others. That’s what I see as the draw that brings people in. They feel safe and secure in their haven of hatred. Any opposition to them is from people that are weaker and less important. – Which then makes leaving the group almost impossible, because you’d have to degrade your own view of yourself - joining the people who you think are weaker and less important.

    So this Tate thing is rot that has taken root because of a gap in more healthy support structures. (I don’t see an easy solution for it though!)




  • It has a similar problem, but a better version of it.

    From my point of view, Lemmy creates its bubble just by being friendly to one subset of views and hostile to another; and so people with some subsets of views don’t feel welcome - and they leave. This creates a kind of bubble effect; but I’m ok with that - because frankly there are some views that I really don’t want to see here anyway. Having diversity of views is good, but establishing social norms about what is acceptable or unacceptable isn’t necessarily a bad thing either.

    On the other hand Reddit (in addition to the above effect) also has a big dose of top-down enforcement. Effectively it has a small hidden group of people who can control what everyone else is allowed to say. They can ban certain words and sentiments; and use techniques like shadowbanning or just algorithmic demoting to reduce the influence of stuff they don’t like. So they get a bubble as well, but the bubble can be guided and influenced by the people who control the platform. For my point of view, that makes it worse.









  • It stands to question that with a fraction of the users on Lemmy, why is the interaction/engagement considerably higher?

    I think the answer is fairly clear. Lemmy’s topics & votes system funnels condenses the user-base to focus on particular things at particular times. The total number of users may be smaller than Mastodon, but basically everyone on lemmy is looking at the top posts on the front page first, and then exploring to other stuff later; whereas on Mastodon everyone is just doing their own thing.

    Focusing people on one topic means that there will be discussion at that topic at that time; and discussion leads to people checking back to read and reply to responses…

    I routinely use both Mastodon and Lemmy. I see a lot more varied content on Mastodon, but it is more fleeting. i.e. very little discussion, and fairly short window of interaction with posts. Lemmy has a lot less ‘stuff’, but a lot more conversation.

    I think the difference is interesting, but it definitely isn’t something we should use to say which platform is doing better or anything like that.