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.

Based on what I can find, The Guardian was actually sold to a company called Tortoise Media two months ago in December 2024. And according to Wikipedia:

Guardian and Observer journalists voted to strike on 4 and 5 December 2024 in protest over a sale that they said would betray the commitment of the Scott Trust—owner of the Guardian Media Group—to the Observer.

So not even the journalists wanted this company in control. And funnily enough, there was a Guardian article in 2018 that specifically mentioned Tortoise Media while talking about the “increased involvement of private wealth in the journalism industry” and how that is a bad thing. So from what I can tell, it can no longer be trusted.

Wikipedia article on Tortoise Media here.

Huh that’s pretty cool. Definitely a fun fact!

Unfeeling Sadistic Assholes

Red, white and blue are like the most common country flag colours. USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Russia, Netherlands, Chile, Cuba, Czechia, Iceland, Laos, Liberia, Luxembourg, North Korea etc. I’m sure you get the point. It seems like most countries aren’t particularly creative or daring when it comes to flags. Almost like all the lions and eagles that you see in military or old timey flags and symbols.

Thanks for the nice conversation, btw.

Likewise. It’s always appreciated when you can chat with someone without guards up and needing to counter snark and shit.

I’ve asked to remove them

I get this bad feeling that they’re probably just going to tell you to get lost. I wouldn’t be surprised if the moderators of those subs have okayed it. Another common thing I saw creators complaining about was dodgy Reddit moderators. The moderators of those subs aren’t their friends or allies from what I can tell. If they’re not the usual assortment on Reddit who aren’t even part of the community but like power anyway, there’s also suspected ‘agencies’ or other bad actors running some of these subs and making life hard for people.

But I applaud you for doing this. And I would be amazed if it actually worked.

Hey ICE. You’re a bunch of evil, cruel, walking talking pieces of shit and I wouldn’t waste my piss on you if you were on fire. Sincerely, someone from a country that actually respects human rights.

They’re gonna have to make the great firewall of America if they want to control the narrative so badly because they might not have realised it but ‘www’ stands for ‘world wide web’. And we don’t all have to fucking bow down to fascist thought police.

I’ve never bowed down to Al Qaeda, so why would I bow down to y’all Qaeda?

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.

Even if it’s futile, I probably still won’t be able to keep my mouth shut about it lol. I do enough keeping my mouth shut in the real world, in a country where you have to assume that everyone you meet has conservative views until proven otherwise. So I’m not going to do that to myself online as well. It just feels wrong to me to not at least try when there’s an injustice going on because the easiest way for nothing to change is for no one to even try and change things.

And you’re right, things are at least better for amateur workers now than they were before. So that is progress. Although from what I’ve gathered, OnlyFans isn’t completely immune to dodgy shit either. I’ve come across a couple of stories involving practically human trafficking situations where women are forced into this by pimps and other pieces of shit. So you never really know what’s going on behind the scenes when the camera switches off and the put on smile goes away.

Which is why it’s also just more ethical to get this content from the content creators themselves rather than random 3rd party websites that lift content from elsewhere. At least if you’re getting it from the source, you can have some sense of whether it passes the vibe check or not.

Also, just want to add because I just thought of it. Places that set up bots that lift amateur content from around the web aren’t checking for vibes or doing their homework. So they’re the kinds of places that would be peddling pictures of abuse or trafficking victims, or even underage people, without even knowing it. Or caring.

The whole thing just gives me the creeps. I’m fine with people stealing from Brazzers or whatever because those workers have already been paid and you’re stealing from the suits that get rich off them. But amateur stuff just has too many variables and ethical concerns for me to be comfortable with people treating it the same way as Brazzers.

Fuck ICE. What the fuck are they going to do, deport from my country that isn’t the USA? This makes me feel like I start saying “fuck ICE” on the regular, just to give them more work to do with this thought police shit.

Yeah they’re basically on any platform that will accommodate them. When they’re not filming anything, the bulk of their work is marketing. Their advertising material on Reddit (and other places) is what leads to money in their bank accounts. Their advertising material on Reddit being taken and posted here leads to no money in their bank accounts.

I think that apart from people just generally not caring how they get the content they want, people also just have zero respect for these workers. They don’t see them as fellow human beings trying to live. Or as deserving of credit or respect as other types of content creators such as artists, musicians and talentless jackasses that complain about the woke agenda on YouTube. They’re just something to bust a nut to for these people but not real.

I’m not sure that I can really blame people’s attitudes towards it though. We’ve all been kinda trained by endless scrolling porn sites to expect it all to be easy and free. And I can’t say that I wouldn’t have also been dismissing this as not a big deal if I hadn’t taken the time to get to know what these people are all about on a different level. I probably would’ve still been under the assumption that they’re raking in endless cash and living easy.

So yeah. It’s probably futile trying to change people’s attitudes towards it. And it’s probably a problem that will never go away and is just part of the game.

I’ve honestly been considering that line of work myself for the last couple of years because I’m reaching the point of last resorts. So I’ve spent the last couple of years lurking in the spaces where creators discuss the business so that I can learn from them. And also because I like to enlighten myself with what people from completely different walks of life are doing and saying.

And maybe that’s why I’m currently looking at them as human beings that are trying to make a living and not objects that everyone is entitled to for free.

I think a lot of people think that these creators are raking in thousands of dollars a day because of one or two success stories in the media years ago when OnlyFans was new. But these guys work fucking hard and often go through months where they’re battling to put food on the table. So personally, I think it’s pretty fucking shitty that a bot is taking all of their promo work and posting it here where people will never even look at their links.

And yeah, no one has disagreed here directly to me but I’ve seen what people are saying about it in other places here on Lemmy.

An account literally called ‘Bot’ (so probably run by the admins of that instance) that seems to pretty much mirror entire NSFW subreddits, specifically subreddits that content creators make use of.

But it doesn’t matter, I’m probably gonna delete this comment and my first comment soon. Because I’m really not in the mood to hear all of the justifying of it and excuses for it from people who like to go around acting like paragons of virtue in all other areas.

This comment section is a dumpster fire.

social media is only as good as its user base

I’m with you on this one. Honestly I’m starting to consider jumping through all of the hoops required to get going on Reddit again myself. I can make do with few entertainment related subs but I keep thinking about how there’s a reason that no major women’s spaces from Reddit have been able to ever take off here on Lemmy. And the fact that LGBTQ+ communities needed their own instance with downvotes disabled as a solution against vote brigading. It gives this place a pretty dark undercurrent despite all of its supposed left wing fervour.

And then there’s the smart ass sarcastic replies to everything, like you’re experiencing in this thread, that I see in almost every single thread. I’ve seen a new user come to this platform and ask if there’s a gen z community, only to get no answers to the question and a bunch of people going “wHo CAreS abOUT LabElS and GrOUps? Look at me, I’m such a free thinker!” Yesterday I saw someone posting that they wish there were more pop music and sports related communities, only for all the replies to be along the lines of “FuCK pOP muSIc, wHo waNTs to SEe that? Look at me, I’m such a free thinker!” And it’s fucking annoying, if I’m being honest.

I don’t want to feel this way because I love the idea of this platform. But I dunno, I’m missing being able to discuss certain feminist issues in communities where I’m not going to be called a sexist, have people comparing nazism to astrology to try and make a point that women bad too instead of addressing issues that need addressing, and have comments removed.

There’s good people here too. People that have been very cool and encouraging. And who make the effort to actually answer people’s questions about communities without just shitting on them. But to me, those people seem to be a few lights shining in the darkness that covers everything else. And it’s starting to affect my mood negatively.

repost everything from reddit to their own instance

And steal potential business away from amateur DIY workers trying to make a living. But the same people who tell you how pro working class they are and who complain about AI stealing fan art, won’t see any problem with it because there’s this weird entitlement thing going on as far as people’s attitudes towards porn goes.

OnlyFans provides them a platform to sell their wares but doesn’t pay them in advance. So it’s not stealing from OnlyFans, it’s literally stealing business straight from the worker’s hands. Part of me has been tempted to start contacting them so that they can maybe take some sort of action against it.

Removed by mod

It also helps nothing and no one to “both sides” this conversation every time it starts. Astrology and homeopathy doesn’t even begin to fucking compare with nazism. Also, why do you call out astrology but not christianity? One is a dumb little thing involving sky magic that is mostly harmless and the other is also a dumb thing involving sky magic but the followers of that dumb thing are actually very dangerous and harmful to a lot of people that have to grow up with them. Haven’t met too many female priests in my life either.

Fascism relies on traditional gender roles and that has less appeal to women who would lose rights and power compared to men who would theoretically gain power. It’s less “there’s something wrong with the men” and more that fascism itself is designed to appeal to men.

Oh, is it? So what you’re telling me is that fascism appeals to men more than women because men don’t give as much of a shit about other people’s rights? Fascinating. Totally means there’s nothing wrong with men that needs addressing or changing. Sure.

Edit: in fact this whole fucking conversation is stupid considering that the stats are there at the top of the post for all to see. There is clearly a fucking problem. And the way to fix that problem is to actually address it instead of comparing it to astrology and calling it a day.

Edit 2: the moderators here in this community are actually fucking pathetic. Actually cannot see a good reason they removed my most recent comment too now. And I’m realising that this place is actually kinda worse than Reddit in this regard because it even removes the comment from your own profile. And these fucking moderators don’t notify you or give you an actual concrete reason with whichever word or phrase broke the fucking rules. Dodgy as fuck. They’re actually just out to control the conversation.

Which is very Reddit of them. It’s easy to forget that a lot of people here are ex Reddit moderators that pissed the users there off so much that no one was willing to join them in solidarity with the API debacle. Guess I’ve found my first Lemmy community to block.

You aren’t being funny here.

Good thing I specifically said I wasn’t trying to be funny then. I suppose you’re right though. There’s absolutely nothing to be learnt from 11% of women versus 26% of men supporting nazis. It’s a mystery. Martian shit.