This is completely unsurprising when you're aware of the reasons that motivated PieFed's development (anti communism). Features designed to limit the voice and reach of certain instances lines up with that motivation. PieFed exists to counteract communist influence in the threadiverse.

Some here who helped push it spin it as a way to make the fediverse more palatable to the average Internet user because they care more about growth than culture, but the underlying motivation has always been to try to separate the threadiverse from its communist roots.

I'll take the tankie devs over liberal devs every single time, personally. You can say what you want about them and how they personally run their instances, but I'm not aware of them developing any underhanded features like these and others in PieFed.

They will really do anything before investing in public transit

It's honestly bonkers to have a community hosted on Lemmy this hostile to Lemmy as software and the developers.

I'm sorry but this isn't "world news" to me. Random drunken tragedies are hardly something useful to keep me informed on what is happening in the world.

"I used to have support for the Native Americans, but then a tribe massacred an outpost on the land that was slowly being carved from them by colonizers. Now I've lost all goodwill for their struggle"

The indigenous, oppressed peoples proceed to get wiped out and the colonizing states take over the entire land mass

This type of violence does not need to celebrated. It should be mourned as tragic. Its perpetrators condemned.

But so many are applying fairness or rules to a conflict that has neither.

If you create the conditions for war and terrorism, do not be surprised when war and terrorism come.

"I don't like Reddit.

Its interface is ugly as sin. There are fewer users there and they're all pretentious, extremely liberal, and anti American."

-Some Digg user circa 2008/2009 (probably)

I had a university professor give me a 99 on a written exam because "only Jesus is perfect".

I didn't really care but it's also something I may never forget because of how bizarre I found it

I honestly hate stories like this. What is the use of knowing this? Who does it benefit to hear this story and proliferate it?

So we can all go "wow what a monster" in the comments?

How many things happened today that actually will affect our lives instead?

It makes sense.

Most people who came here two months ago did so because they explicitly wanted to leave Reddit, but not because of Reddit content or the site culture. It was because admin decisions on third party apps and the API.

They still wanted Reddit, just with different Admins and different apps. Ideally, they'd have wanted communities to fully migrate over.

lemmy.world specifically became basically a lifeboat, having been linked to from original third party apps.

Yes, it was created and had the technical and resource requirements to keep up with the new influx of users without constantly crashing (in the beginning), but nonetheless, that meant it got the largest influx of the migration.

It's honestly a bit strange for me to see people in here with two month old accounts saying "oh yeah the culture has just changed so much".

You all were the change. It's that influx of users that basically brought Reddit here.

Anyone who came here before the API changes did so either because they had some kind of issues with Reddit, whether it was the dominant culture or what, and wanted an alternative or because they were interested in the open source and federated nature of the project regardless of Reddit's own decisions.

Though tbf, pre migration, this place was basically dead. Posts would have a handful of comments at best and it was mostly Lemmygrad users and also FOSS enthusiasts. Hexbear was the most active Lemmy instance and was a chapotraphouse lifeboat formed in 2020 but it didn't federate so it was really mostly just Lemmy.ml as a general instance and Lemmygrad unless you explicitly knew and cared for Hexbear. Neither was very "toxic" in their own communities and there really wasn't much inter instance fighting, even if there still were people on lemmy.ml who didn't care for grad, as far as I remember. I honestly mostly lurked and didn't participate often.

The apps also were much worse.

Things started picking up as the API announcement happened. That's probably when we had the best balance of positivity and user growth.

It exploded when the API changes went into effect and voila.

Still, I would say it's mostly still a bit better than Reddit and there's more effort in commenting for the most part.

I don't think I've seen a pun chain or a "he's not your buddy, guy" or anything like that.

I flirted with journalism before getting my degree in CS.

It's not an exaggeration to say that the faculty and many of the students were almost proudly "bad at math" and basically bad with tech too, other than learning the basics of a Macbook.

Doesn't have to be that way and many journalists are smart, great people, but there's a weird self fulfilling culture when it comes to tech. Not totally sure about how tech focused writers would be similar or different.

Edit: Just googling "journalists bad at math" and got this from the Columbia Journalism Review:

“In many cases, they got into journalism to stay away from math.” Journalists love to joke about how we suck at math.

Edit 2: I guess I was bringing up my experience to be an example of how many journalists do not have a strong grasp of technical concepts and sometimes are almost proud of that. So it doesn't surprise me that many may have struggled with Mastodon.

That being said, that attitude is far closer to the average user than, say, the user base of this platform, which is likely far more tech savvy. Streamlined user experience is not a bad thing if you desire mainstream use and is something that could be improved, though Mastodon has been making strides in that regard.

I've been busy all day, but I've just seen through talking with others how threads is basically blowing up today and lots of our local Twitter accounts, companies, bigger celebrities/influencers and more are going to it and sharing their accounts.

And it just makes me so fucking sad to see people embrace Facebook again when a decentralized, grassroots, non corporate alternative was already right there. It's a lot of "liberal" people, too.

Reading criticisms of Lemmy from Reddit and other platforms like HackerNews reminds me of reading criticisms of Reddit from Digg back in 2007-2010, except they're more based on architecture instead of "it looks ugly".

Now there are things that will turn away users. There's obviously a strong leftist culture here, there are less users so less content, and obviously federation is a stumbling block for many people.

But I really think that's ok similar to what people are saying in that Hacker News thread. I wouldn't want all of Reddit to come over, and I think it's better for the culture and growth here to get a self selected trickle/stream of users instead of a deluge.

I don't think Lemmy will necessarily have the same issues as Mastodon because Twitter/Mastodon requires you to know people or know accounts to follow to be useful. Lemmy just requires communities you're interested in and a critical mass of users to drive posting and engagement. We're already seeing greater activity as more users arrive