I am not a number.

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Joined 27 days ago
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Cake day: January 16th, 2025

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  • won’t recommend Lemmy to many of my friends or family because I know they will give up

    Yeah, when I first started out here, my experience was like this:

    • I went to the join Lemmy page, then clicked to show all servers. Then waited. And waited. Then I went to bed.

    • By the next morning, the list of servers had managed to load. I spotted one that was advertised as “recommended for users to join to reduce load on the Fediverse”, which seemed like a good idea after seeing how even the join page was battling to load.

    • Found out that the server I joined seemed to have all sorts of issues loading content. And was apparently de-federated from a bunch of instances that align with my interests. So search results were showing me little to nothing in regards to queer communities for example, only dead communities.

    • Signed up on world instead and encountered multiple posts that said they had comments but loaded nothing. Found out that there were no languages selected in my settings. So I selected ‘undefined’, scrolled down, selected ‘English’, then saved.

    • I was still missing a bunch of posts after that, so I went back to settings and saw that ‘undefined’ was deselected again. That’s when I realised that you have to ctrl click each language you choose or else it just deselects the previous language that you clicked on.

    • Finally success! 3 or 4 days later. And now I’m here.

    I would love to recommend Lemmy to the few people I know who use Reddit. But I can’t see any of them trying without just giving up and going back to the place where all you need to do is sign up and hey presto, content to look at and interact with.

    I have a feeling that even the process of choosing an instance would probably put them off. I could give advice but there’s only so much I could do or explain without being there in person helping them. If they have to read walls of text explaining how to get started, it would probably end there.

    I’m not sure what the solution is though, or if there even is one. It might just be a little bit like trying to recommend Linux to people who just want to be able to push a button and go. Which is the majority, based on what I’ve seen.

    Also just one last thing and something that has been discussed to death. There’s just not enough content here yet for the average person to see any reason to switch over from the place with all the content.

    And on that note, recommending this place to people that I know in real life would be too risky right now that they would see my account and figure out who I am. Because there isn’t a crowd of a million people to slip into and disappear here. And this isn’t Facebook. I don’t want people to know about the very personal things I sometimes say on anonymous social media.


  • In the '80s and '90s, everything these people didn’t like was ‘satanic’. Then that nonsense seemed to disappear for about a decade. Until those people returned with updated terminology that makes them look like ‘free speech’ warriors to all the kids and not the dogmatic psychos that they are.

    So since then we’ve gone from SJW to woke to now DEI. But it’s always been the same fucking people, or types of people, that told me that all the cartoons I watch and music I listen to was ‘evil’ and ‘satanic’ when I was a kid.

    I actually almost fell for the SJW thing myself back in the day. I was circling that drain. Until I opened my eyes and saw the company that I was in. Since then I’ve been borderline ‘SJW’ myself because fuck those people.


  • One thing at least is that when you search “Reddit alternatives”, most articles that I came across seemed to make out like Lemmy is the best option in terms of amount of users and not being advertised explicitly as a “free speech and censorship free platform”, which we all know really means “bigots are welcome here.” In fact when I was searching Reddit alternatives, it seemed to me that Lemmy is really the only option.


  • Yup, especially when we’re all being bombarded by the same propaganda in the places that we meet online and spend a considerable amount of time in, we’re all in this together. I’ve seen the discourse about the USA and the culture wars over the last decade in my own country. And from what I’ve gathered through my years of lurking is that shit is darkening the skies and affecting everyone from the UK to Sweden to Australia.

    And as far as I can tell, all of our governments have been mostly happy to sit back and watch everything slide into enshittification and misinformation and ruin. Like they all thought the fight was won and the job was done and they could just spend the rest of their lives collecting bloated paychecks and sleeping in parliament. Even Australia’s recent effort to curb social media for children is too little too late I fear.