I came to Lemmy from reddit and I find it an incredibly nice place to be, full of polite discussions and fun posts. I haven't seen any of what you're saying.

It’s scale.

Scale is the enemy of social networks. All of them, including Lemmy.

Let’s say 0.1% of the population are just straight up assholes who ruin everything.

If you only got 100 people on a site, no one is an asshole.

1000 people? Well now you got that asshole Andy in the group. Fucking Andy. But we can deal with him.

But we scale up to 1,000,000? Well now you got 1000 fucking assholes to deal with!

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.

This is such an "us vs them" mindset and it just doesn't work that way.

Reddit dominated internet culture for ~15 years. Reddit culture is just what internet culture is now. Any internet community that grows to a sufficient size will begin to exhibit the dominant internet culture.

Things aren't black and white.

After blocking most of the meme subs, I find it a pretty nice place.

I'm one of those Reddit refugees. I can't say anything about how things were before I got here, but I would like to add that I treat Lemmy a whole lot different from Reddit. When I joined there was plenty of talk about the lack of content, people only upvoting but not commenting, that kind of thing.
So I took this as a sign that I should be more of a participant and not the three-posts-to-my-name lurker that I was at Reddit. And I saw similar motivations with other users. So I do hope that at least part of the refugees have added a positive influence, and more so than they ever did when they were still using Reddit.

Lemmy doesn't have a collective culture. Each instance has it's own culture or will develop it over time, even though a lot of reddit vestige remains. (It's only been like 2 months)

I don't think toxicity ever will get too bad here, for the simple fact that if you don't like the say, c/politics of one instance, you are always free to go to the c/politics of another instance or even start your own.

Eventually, the toxic instances/community will bleed users and die out, defed is a factor but doesn't have too much to do with this.

As communities grow from obscurity to populated change is inevitable. I used to use reddit and the #1 thing I hated was the condescending, holier than thou attitude that was rampant. I have seen it occasionally on here but for the most part Lemmy is a breath of fresh air, so I personally don't think reddit culture has replaced it. I can definitely see a strong cultural influence from reddit but I personally think Lemmy culture is significantly different, in a good way.

Can you link to a few comments or posts that you think represent this nasty reddit culture?

lemmy.ml on a good day had like 15 to 30 upvotes on the front page. There wasn't much of a culture before.

See the traffic in April this year, a little over 4 months ago. Lemmy.world only been around for like 2 and a half months now. That's the most active it's been since before the exodus. The exodus definitely helped jumpstart the site.

It's quickly getting more toxic and aggressive. But we're not counting karma, so as soon as you recognize that someone is arguing with you in bad faith just block them.

The important thing to understand is that Lemmy doesn't have an inherent culture. Nor does Reddit, or Twitter, or Mastodon, or any other platform.

They are communities, and communities naturally change as they scale.

So yes, of course Lemmy had changed. But I'd argue that the inherent strength of the whole concept of "federation" is that any one particular instance only has to witness as much or as little of that change as they want to.

If you don't like where Lemmy as a whole is going, find (or create) an instance that agrees with you and de-federates from most others. win-win.

The point is that you are responsible for your own particular Lemmy experience in ways that you never were on Reddit.

Hexbear and lemmy.grad were there before and are as toxic as any reddit sub I’ve ever been in.

Nice. Lemmy is finally big enough for "Lemmy sucks now, the old days were better" posts 🥲

I thought the point of Lemmy was that people could make their own instance if they don't like what's on offer. It can be whatever people want it to be, and none of those are mutually exclusive.

I think I agree. When I first moved here everyone was so nice, respectful, and willing to have an actual dialogue. Now it feels more like Reddit where when you say something every just immediately jumps to shitting on you, even if they interpret what you said wrong, or if they disagree. I also feel like there are a lot more of the “well, akshewally….” Types here now. There also seems to be people who honestly can’t grasp this isn’t Reddit, and brought the same mentality/trends with them.

I think it’s still much too small to have that problem honestly

I find Lemmy much better than Reddit. But this comes down to what communities you follow in my view.

Except for a few power-tripping mods and admins I haven't seen much of Reddit culture here. And the blatant copy of r/place was a little cringe (especially as it was introduced with "let's create our own customs!").

I felt that way until I found out the bigger instances aren't even much older. Lemmy World itself apparently started as soon as the changes were announced but before any big protests began. Instances that were around even before those either were not very active to even have an established culture, or are so niche they're not really affected.

I read that some people on here go about it by blocking accounts that are repeatedly toxic. I like this approach since it directly improves your own feed and if a lot of people do it with time the reduced exposure these accounts get could improve the platform as a whole.

Personally I did notice a change in tone, but it wasn't the reddit influx, it was a couple weeks later, around the time the hacks started.

You mean the circle-jerk of six tankies talking about how the West is the definition of evil? Is that the former Lemmy culture you're talking about? I don't remember there being anything worth mourning.

Beehaw is still pretty nice :) The moderation is part of why I joined it. I’ve definitely noticed other community getting toxic comments in the past few weeks, though

I love when people say they are glad they are bot on reddit anymore and create a new one. Suddenly everything sounds like reddit again. Artporn, foodporn, earthporn we get it you are 16

As a movement/fandom/website gets bigger the more bad actors there will be within it. There's also less consequences to ones reputation for being rude to others when a community gets larger because there are more people in the community you haven't been rude to yet that you can still have positive interactions with.

I don't think it's something carried over specifically from reddit or its community but rather just what naturally happens (which also happened on reddit,) as communities get larger. They become more and more reflective of people at large, and right now people aren't doing so hot.