I have noticed that I interact a lot more in Lemmy than I ever did in any social media. Let it be Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… I am used to be the lurker, but here for some reason things are different. Wonder if more people feel like I do.
I try not to. This place bans you for “not being nice”, which is an arbitrary metric that changes from mod to mod and let’s all be honest, being nice is exhausting. Ask anyone working in retail.
The comments here are correct though. As long as you focus on your niche and it’s relatively active, then stay away from propaganda media, Lemmy can be an useful place. The default All is worthless in anything but lurking and you need to find the communities about your interests or make them yourself if they don’t exist here yet.
Edit: That was close! I almost commented on some dumb take in a doubly dangerous post that involved both current wars. That’s a definite no-no. Just don’t get involved, it’s not worth the trouble.
Reddit bans for not being nice, Facebook, hell even 4chan does. What are you looking for, a place where people can be assholes and “correct”? You don’t want that at all
Well, this ain’t any of those sites. Why would anyone want it to be. Also, your imagination of what i want and my imagination of what i want are likely very different imaginations. So let’s not imagine either of us is “correct” while the loser by popular vote gets banned in the process.
This place bans you for “not being nice”, which is an arbitrary metric that changes from mod to mod and let’s all be honest, being nice is exhausting.
Lemmy is many places (individual instances with individual moderation policies). If it’s important to you, you can find a server which matches your expectations, or host your own.
Even though i used different words, i believe i said pretty much the same thing in the part of my post you’re not quoting. Or perhaps we’ve been taught different kinds of English. Might explain the lack of understanding around here.
Ah, my mistake. I wrote communities, you wrote instances. Yes, the difference is immesureable. My apologies.
I don’t think we were talking about the same thing. You’re talking about restricting your behaviour, “focus on your niche”, “stay away from propaganda media”. My proposal was to use an instance which makes it unecessary for you to restrict yourself to certain areas, if their moderation policy aligns with your default behaviour.
Of course it ultimately comes down to similar things, since instances which do not care wether you’re nice aren’t allowed in all places which require you to be nice. The key difference is still that you don’t have to be wary yourself. It sounded as if you would not like that.
Yes, we might be talking in parallel. It’s true i might be on the wrong side of the fence since i expect that even the hateful deserve their chance to speak, at least until they become irremediable. And i do disagree with this safe space isolative behaviour. Perhaps you are correct and i should instead visit those, and i’m paraphrasing, ‘bigotry-infested phobic hellholes’ for a while and see what’s what.
I’ve always disliked the current state of social media, because it always felt like everyone is shouting at each other rather than talking to each other. That’s why I like having penpals to writing letters back and forth and shoot the shit on whatever, and I’ve blamed Facebook and Twitter for killing that.
I lurked reddit anonymously but I don’t comment much, because it felt like the only place that you can discuss various topics with random people and learn cool things. But part of it is that slowly, it made me miserable, the hivemind with all the arguing and smugness and unfunny one-liners and most of all, the cynicism.
This place is a bit different I think, I really didn’t expect to get as involved as I am, but it kind of brought back that feeling of writing back and forth to random people and having a conversation again.
I’ve made it a goal to read and write more and talk to more people when I have the time to spare right now.
I was mostly a lurker on reddit for many years. Before that was a forum board user, moderator, and even setup a few for sports leagues. Despite being sports centric there was usually off topic sections for politics and other off subject debates. Often these sections became more popular than the sport.
Then it would became drama filled and once a year there would be complaining about all the new summer users once kids were out of school. They would flood the forums with newbie stuff and people would leave the forum and find a new home. Seems like this pattern repeats to the newer socials too.
With FB etc the forum boards seem to lose a lot of that daily traffic over time. FB and other Socials delivered that quick dopamine hit and it didn’t even need to be in the niche the forums were. For those that wanted the niches, FB groups came on the scene.
For me with Reddit it came on one of my early Android phones which was great for reading with. I didn’t comment much as the threads were usually fairly deep with comments and sort of done by that stage. It didn’t have that small town feel like the old forums so I wasn’t as inclined to add much. Still there was plenty to read, perhaps too much as books began to be replaced by socials too. Since I was only a mobile user, the API changes were a great reason to get off reddit and read books again. Still working on that.
I’m finding myself commenting more on Lemmy but like the life cycle of the forums and reddit, it’s only a matter of time when the users reach the tipping point and the feel of the place will change.
So I’m trying to enjoy things as they last these days. Hopefully get some books in there now too…
I miss having pen pals, social media really ruined that for me as well. I still remember when my, then, close friend moved over to Facebook. Our usual bi-weekly exchanges slowly changed into her posting updates and dozens of followers writing simple replies. No longer having the time to write individually. I still don’t know how exactly, but we just drifted apart after that. Still hurts a little when I think about it.
Anyway… That was about 15 years ago and until now I haven’t really been vocally active online, just spend my time lurking like so many others. I really had to make a conscious effort to get more interactive and I took the move to Lemmy as my excuse to do so. People were already complaining that no one commented and only upvoted, so I’m trying to be the change I want to see :)
It’s not like the old interactions I had with my pen pals, but I do like the human connection I sometimes get with others.
I don’t. Not much less either, I don’t interact much with social media. Not that I don’t want to, but I rarely have anything of worth to contribute. To make matters worse, Lemmy is mostly missing the communities that I’m interested in, of if they’re there, they have little engagement. On reddit it was a little better, and Facebook is just insane in comparison.
But mostly I don’t have anything to say, and if I do it’s mostly stupid. My primary means of helping Lemmy is to not interact (much).
I go through cycles of activity and lurking, but generally interact more than I did on reddit.
The other side of this is Lemmy is the main social media platform I interact with (including lurking) period these days. For anything else I either don’t use it or my profile’s a ghost town.
I have read so many thoughtful comments on this thread that made me say to myself “Yes, that. Exactly that’s the reason I mostly rarely bothered formulating a comment or opinion on Reddit.” The whole atmosphere on Lemmy seems so much more mature, considerate and genuinely interesting to read. I really hope we can maintain this as Lemmy is (hopefully) growing.
I’ve seen it fairly often by now; many people seem to enjoy posts with moderately long comment sections. I believe this is what contributes to a more wholesome experience.
Similar to how groups meet a natural breaking point when they grow too big and people cannot know each other anymore, I imagine huge comment sections create a sense of being meaningless and unheard. This discourages sensitive voices, and may appeal more to people who don’t care anyways, which isn’t exactly a great attitude for social encounters.
I can further imagine large comment sections create FOMO for the reader, and can overall be more stressful, which leads to aggression.
Just guesses and impressions. No idea if true. Also no clue how to foster that environment in a growing network.
That is probably a part of why I do comment more here, I would see comment sections on reddit sometimes already with hundreds of comments and just felt like I was trying to slip into a convo that had already been well established or whatever, here I feel more likely to comment because the sections will be sparser and my comments will actually get replies from the users in the thread.
Definitely comment more than I did on Reddit. I feel like if I comment on Reddit post that has been up for a couple hours, my comment will never get seen – haven’t seen that here
It’s not even comparable to reddit. Like 80% of posts I see are blatant political propaganda or rants at the system, the other 20% is memes and Linux discussions. Where are the niche communities we all wanted to see? Oh right, they are so niche that they are dead 👍
It certainly doesn’t help that Lemmy had and still has absolutely no sensible way to actually surface niche communities to its subscribers. Unlike Reddit, it doesn’t weigh posts by their relative popularity within the community but only by total popularity/popularity within the instance. There’s also zero form of community grouping (like Reddit’s multireddits) - all of which effectively eliminates all niche communities from any sensible main view mode and floods those with shitty memes and even shittier politics only. This pretty much suffocated the initially enthusiastic niche tech communities I had subscribed to. They stood no chance to thrive and their untimely death was inevitable.
There are some very tepid attempts to remedy this in upcoming Lemmy builds, but I fear it’s too little too late.
I fear that Lemmy was simply nowhere near mature enough when it mattered and it has been slowly bleeding users and content ever since. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, though.
Agree to everything but the doom. Yes, most people will only give 1 chance to a platform, but we haven’t churned through most people yet. Most people are yet to honor Lemmy with their first visit, at some point in the future. We will be better prepared than ever. This wil be true for a long while. So I think we should make (reasonable) haste, but nothing is lost yet. In the long run, we’re still growing.
Compared to reddit, yeah, kinda. On reddit it often feels like it’s not worth it commenting on a post if it’s popular and 14+ hours old. On Lemmy I will see new comments with the default sorting of comments.
I only used Reddit and none of the others and so far Lemmy has been a decent replacement but I’m nowhere near as active. I had a nice curated setup and it’s just not possible yet to have the same experience on here.
Same here. One of the biggest issues is that Lemmy is currently terrible at surfacing content from niche communities: no weighted activity, no “multi-reddit-syle” community grouping - pretty much any main view mode is dominated by a few large communities only. This makes the death of the small communities a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The next version of Lemmy is making some very tepid improvements in that regard, but it’s nowhere near enough.
With larger communities I just bookmark them instead of subscribing now because , like you say, the main feed just becomes useless. Also the amount of cross-posting doesn’t help.
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