from moseschrute@lemmy.world to fediverse@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 14:11
https://lemmy.world/post/22316287
I hate big tech controlling social media. I desperately want social media to be federated.
I really love community-driven social media like Reddit. Lemmy feels… too small. I really loved that Reddit let me jump into any niche hobby, and instantly I had a community. Lemmy, you’ll be lucky if that community even exists, and if it does, chances are nobody has posted in ages.
On the other hand, Lemmy is full of political content lately. I’ve basically been doom scrolling everything US election-related, and it’s really starting to take a toll on my mental health.
I know I can filter content. I know I can post and be the change I seek. Yet, it feels like an uphill battle.
Not sure what the point of this is, or if it’s even the right community to vent about this. I just really want to replace Reddit, but I find myself going back more and more (e.g. r/homekit is very active compared to Lemmy version).
threaded - newest
Feel free to block communities with political content.
You can also use an app or alternative frontend to filter keywords. !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca has a post about that.
For communities, !newcommunities@lemmy.world can help
For home kit, the Apple communities are probably more active, and you should be able to post about it there too
To add to this using these two features has really helped remove a lot of the threads that were taking a toll on my mental health from my feed.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/542f4597-6b19-4cb2-b20a-a05e70e76e5c.webp">
definitely agree. this has helped save my sanity in recent times.
How do I do this? Because honestly, yeah, I’ve come to a point where I’m realizing that, while it’s my responsibility to do what I can in the world, it is not my responsibility to just bear witness to suffering when I can do nothing to prevent it. All it’s doing it hurting me for no gains to anyone.
One of the front ends that have keyword filtering is voyager.
voyager.slrpnk.net
And if the user uses Mbin instances, he/she can even block posts that link to other domains, as often political posts link to news sites.
Yes Lemmy is smaller and doesn’t have instantly fully formed communities. Reddit has been around for almost 2 decades. Lemmy is newer, smaller, and actively fights the sorts of shenanigans that Reddit initially used to get big.
If you want more niche activity, make posts and interact with posts. Lemmy is user driven- that means you. It isn’t a giant megasite where you can just expect to be a passive receiver of endless content.
I once read somewhere that mentioned how Lemmy is actually bigger than reddit was at the same age. I don’t know if that is true or not but that’s pretty cool if it is and I think it means Lemmy is on a good track.
The difference was that Digg used to be the site. Then Digg ticked off all their users and 90% of them migrated to reddit, which was already available.
Reddit had its dumpster fire moment over the last couple years, but there was no available place for everyone to quickly migrate over to other than Lemmy, and it didn’t really happen. Lemmy is a bit harder to get used to and figure out, so we missed out on a huge migration.
So its doubtful that lemmy will ever expand out like reddit did. Not for a long time, anyhow. It will be great if we make it to a couple million active users. At that point, I’d be totally content. Things get too sloppy once you go over 10 million users, it seems.
I was their in reddit beginning. There were no initial shenanigans. It was a good place and existed at just the right time, when people wanted to leave Digg because it was turning into a dumpster fire, similar to what reddit has done.
When reddit started turning to shit there just wasn’t anything for the masses to migrate to that was available other than here. Problem is that here isn’t as simple to get into. In lemmy, the learning curve is slightly higher than “bare minimum”.
Shenanigans.
Sort of, but it didn’t really work. Reddit existed in 2005, but wasn’t popular. It only became popular in 2010 after all of Digg went to it, because it was pretty much a Digg clone, but with owners who weren’t Digg.
I’ve presented you with the proof that early Reddit was populated with large numbers of sockpuppet accounts by the owners, creating whole cloth communities to draw in users, which is not something that is happening on Lemmy.
The entire reason the Digg mass exodus was viable was people leaving Digg found these “preexisting” Reddit communities and felt more comfortable joining in.
Lemmy doesn’t have that socketpuppet population to springboard with, so growth is slower and unpopulated communities are not falsely full of fake users.
I hung out on reddit long enough over the previous couple of years when people were up in arms to leave. It wasn’t the lack of subs or community size that kept people away. It was simply that it was harder to figure out how to get up and going. You can’t just go to lemmy.com, create a name and password, and start doing stuff. Further still is that now people want an apk for phone browsing and particularly when the masses wanted to leave reddit, there was also no “use this apk and its easy”. Plus, creating an instance is much more work than creating a subreddit.
It was never about the size of the website already appearing to be in place. Lemmy just has a harder entry fee. It keeps lemmy at a lower user base in the same way every subscription service in existence knows it wants to make things super easy to sign up, but time intens8ve and difficult to cancel. Because it takes a bit of effort, lots of people don’t get around to doing it.
old.reddit.com/…/post_to_address_the_usual_critic… ?
I think the Lemmy devs political stance and instances such as hexbear are more detrimental to the success of the platform than the entry bar.
Edit: Discuit is a centralized site, and now has 209 weekly active users: discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/OiU8YjZ_
This is great for people looking now, but the info, the apks, and the knowledge to get there was less known or not very good a year or so ago.
Also, I’m personally a big fan of “thunder” for my phones lemmy apk. It’s awesome.
Reddit is still crap, so hopefully people are still looking for alternatives
On Lemmy you feel like your voice is heard more because it’s smaller, IMO.
I hear you dude! 😜
reddit was once smaller than it is now too
Funny cause I reduced my recent reddit usage cause I got tired of the toxic post election political liberal cope
One suggestion I saw a while ago was to use more general communities for things you’re interested in and as it grows then the more niche communities can be made. Ex: post about a specific game you like in gaming up until enough people like it to make a sub for that game. Or post about a song you don’t know in asklemmy until enough people do that to make whatsthissong
I totally get wanting the niche communities and, personally, I just lurk reddit completely not voting, posting, or commenting unless as a last resort if I really need to find info that Lemmy isn’t able to provide.
It’s a slow process and I don’t think there’ll be another boost of users in Lemmy until reddit does another thing that enshittifies it to annoy people to leave.
And some times, having the initiative to create such more specific communities could be a change factor for the growth of a social media. Also, with federation, not just the person can choose where to create the community on while not making it a walled garden as other sites would still have access to it, but also if a community for the given subject already exists but the user thinks he can do better, he/she can more easily do it with how expansive the "fediverse" is.
Yeah there are times where I’d want to make a community but the necessity of moderation makes it a big hurdle to even want to begin that process.
Our community !homebrewing@sopuli.xyz has for now everything beer, wine, cider… it didn’t reach the point of creating another specific, niche community. So I totally get the niche interests aren’t represented here yet and the number of homebrewers is big.
Still we get good engagement for lemmy and there are active people from industry, so I wouldn’t call it exactly small.
Unfortunately, community building is work, and it’s work that users actually do on the bigger, corporate sites. Those community builders helped get those spaces going, helped make them appealing, and help trap users there. In smaller spaces like this, we need to be the community builders, not just the content consumers.
One thing I find really helps is to use something that doesn’t look like the space you left. Lemmy looks an awful lot like Reddit, but it has themes, and even alternative web clients that can change the experience and make it feel like something new.
Lemmy also isn’t the content and communities, it’s just the website’s server software. You can access… ugh… the “threadiverse”… from websites using other ActivityPub enabled servers. There’s an ActivityPub Discourse plugin. nodeBB is adding ActivityPub support in its next version. Friendica and Hubzilla have group support, and work with Lemmy-hosted communities.
Find a new window on social media, and it might help you engage with it differently.
The other thing you can do is just niche down a bit here. Find a few active communities that you’re interested in, and focus your attention on them. Lemmy is actually much, much more like classic forums, where communities or spheres of interest have their own website. The difference here is that you can actually look outside of those communities to interact with other forums, too. It works a a lot better if you treat it that way. Find your home, as it were, and branch out from there.
Unfortunately, the modern mental model of social media is the fire hose, not the node-and-spoke that is actually best supported by the technology.
Growth is a process, not an immediate switch. Every social media started small and then grew. If immediatism, or however it is called, was the predominant factor for any struggle to become an achievement, nothing would be achieved.
And on lack of contents, I, for one, block everything that is not of my interest, quite a lot to be honest, specially with certain niches spamming the federated platforms, but even then, I get a feeling I should trim even some of the communities/magazines I follow/subscribe to as I can barely catch up to those already.
you gotta realize reddit didn’t just “appear” one day with those obscure niche topics built out. There is a network effect large communities have. We need hundreds of thousands more members before that is possible.
I think you probably weren’t there for early reddit, but most of the active posters here on Lemmy were. It was tiny. Like Lemmy.
You can’t force those niche communities to exist here. It doesn’t work. But what you can do is post and create valuable content. and eventually we may get there.
It’s so weird to me that people are so spoiled today that they feel inconvenienced when there isn’t limitless content in their niche fields of interest being served to them on a platter every single day.
Those of us who remember the before times can tell you that the absolute best of a platform comes before that point. I’m sure it’s lovely getting your full every single second, but the best conversation, the best education, the best introspection comes when you’re allowed a few minutes between stimuli to think.
I feel like “Old woman yells at cloud” but I really feel like our younger folks who crave endless, mindless interaction, don’t know what they miss out on.
I can’t blame them, because they’ve been conditioned to be consumers of content. While they idealize creators, they also put up barriers in their minds as the the level of quality a given comment, piece of content, whatever, needs to achieve before getting involved.
I try and think of Lemmy as the equivalent of the Linux. We’re just going to have lower adoption because there isn’t a corporate juggernaut behind us promoting this thing.
But if people really want to know why reddit was able to become reddit, it happened here yesterday with cats. It’s bean memes. Its Stör. Its us developing culture of our own as a community.
So its fine. I’m not too worried. We’re doing great.
I didn’t get a wall of voids and honestly, I feel a little left out lol.
Pardon me for wanting to have a place where I can discuss my hobbies, I guess.
You can still do that.
Start the conversation. That’s what we all did, and where these communities got their start.
I've tried, believe me I've tried. Posting a bunch of threads out into the void doesn't suddenly manifest a like-minded community to reply to and engage with those threads. It won't truly be viable until there's a much larger userbase to begin with.
And honestly, it just comes across as patronizing to say the only reason my hobbies don't have traction here must be because I didn't try hard enough.
It is absolutely patronizing for people to say that. And you are right to feel that way.
Maybe think about it like this. I collect and propagate one species of orchid as a hobby. Its an obscure species among orchids, which are relatively obscure plants among plant collectors, and plant collecting is a relatively obscure thing among people growing with and interacting with plants, which is a relatively obscure thing in the grand scheme of all things.
So lets assume a 5% conversion rate at every step: There are maybe 40k active users on lemmy?
So of 40k users about 2k are into plants.
Of the 2k users into plants in some manner, about 100 are into plant collecting.
Of the 100 users into plant collecting, maybe 5 are into collecting orchids.
And of the five users collecting orchids, I’m the quarter of one user who collects Vanilla planifolia and Vanilla planifolia var. tahitensis.
So if I acknowledge this, I’ve got a couple options. First, I could just start a vanilla community. But I really shouldn’t expect other people to participate, because I recognize that I’m probably the only vanilla grower on all of lemmy. If I do that, I should probably think about it as a place more like a personal blog or place for me to record my story. And maybe over time, it can grow in popularity and get a following.
Alternatively, I can share my exploits on larger subs, like c/plants, where I’ll probably do well because there are more users, and the content I’m sharing is interesting and unique because so few people are into/ do what I do.
So if you can adjust your exceptions, there absolutely is a place for you here. But we’re the flea market to Reddit’s mall of America approach. But remember, Reddit too started as a flea market. It was a place for internet weirdos with weird hobbies and senses of humor. But appreciate you’ll be a lone diamond here, but that gives you a chance to stand out.
Could vanilla orchids do well as a houseplant? I’m zone 7b/8a so I’ve had success playing around with semi tropical plants, but I don’t have greenhouse space to overwinter frost intolerant plants.
I grew them in green houses for years. If you can keep the humidity high (60%+), they’ll grow, but you’ll won’t get flowers.The leaves will be very diminished, and the plant less robust. Two things very different about vanilla compared to other orchids: they aren’t an epiphyte; and they grow as a vine.
Typically, in the wild (and many of my cuttings are from ‘adventures’ to abandoned plantations) Vanilla has a “grow and fall over” vegetative habit. It grows tendrils down to the soil (which turn to accessory roots) following a support plant or structure. Its also extremely apically dominant. It barely branches, and it really, really wants to grow ‘straight up’. It takes a substantial amount of training to get them to grow sideways. That was many words to say they do best in high humidity, regular potting soil, and need lots of space (especially vertically).
If you are still interested let me know or DM me. I’d be happy to send some cuttings.
Legit, I’ve always loved the idea of orchids, but I know they have a reputation, and I’m… forgetful at best.
Thanks for the detailed response. I intentially dehumidify our living spaces so I don’t think I have a spot that would match your stated requirements for the time being. I will definitely bookmark your comment in case my dreams of installing a greenhouse come to fruition in the next couple years.
Yeah, I had to run mine with lights and humidifiers.
And how do you think that larger userbase is going to come into existence?
Not overnight, that's for sure. It's going to take a long time to ever get that kind of critical mass.
What I’m trying to get at is that people need to stay for a critical mass to be reached instead of going “there’s nobody here” and leaving.
I'm here, not planning on leaving any time soon. But I'm also acknowledging that Lemmy can't fully be everything Reddit was, not without a Reddit-size userbase.
Which particular niche topic(s) is it?
Fighting games and Riichi Mahjong. !fgc and !mahjong exist, but are pretty barren. I'd also previously tried to start communities for them on kbin.social, but that's gone now.
Also arcade-style versus puzzle games, but those are so dead these days that even on Reddit they didn't have an active sub.
I hope you get more engagement in the community. But you should probably engage more with others posts as well.
Have you tried promoting the fighting games community on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and generic games communities? That could help you find at least a few other people who would like to discuss that topic in the fgc community
Also, !fedigrow@lemm.ee is a community dedicated to community growing, we have regular threads to discuss “shouting into the void”
That would be pretty patronizing if I said that, I agree.
What I did say was, you need to start the conversation.
However, now that I’ve looked at your account… unless you have a secondary account to the one I’m replying to now, the whole 21 posts you’ve made over multiple communities, and that being your whole history for a year’s worth of account… maybe I am saying “try harder.” If you want to feel like that’s patronizing, that’s fine.
All the bigger communities on lemmy (like tenforward) happened because first one person posted a lot, every day. And then they were joined by others. And then the community they were in had drama so they moved to tenforward, but my point is, if you want people to talk to you about something, a single post once in a while doesn’t do it. You gotta pump out content, post memes, attract people who want to be part of the conversation. Reply to like, everyone. Be friendly. Be engaging.
Okay, now you literally are saying I didn't try hard enough.
This is not my first account (it's also not anywhere close to a year old, not sure where you got that idea). I'd tried to start a few communities over on kbin.social, but that's gone now.
I don't have the energy to spend several hours a day flooding threads nobody will engage with, just in the hopes that if I keep it up forever eventually one of them might get a reply or two. It's not that easy, and it's patronizing to act like that's such a simple solution I should've thought of.
This is what I was getting at: communities don’t come from nothing. You’re welcome to stay where they’re pre-built for you but posting endless content is how communities get started.
When I was younger, I was someone who ran a few of those communities myself. If it’s patronizing to say you didn’t try hard enough (while you’re also declaring you, yourself, don’t have the energy to do it) then it should be less patronizing, but still fair, to say… if you don’t want to do it, don’t complain that someone else isn’t doing it for you.
If you don’t want to be on Lemmy, then don’t. Come check back in periodically to see if someone else had the energy to do what you didn’t. It’s fair to say you don’t want to do the work. Whining someone else isn’t doing it doesn’t get it done faster.
I never said I don't want to be on Lemmy. But when people talk about the downsides of this platform's still niche userbase, it isn't productive to jump in and admonish them for just not trying hard enough to manifest a critical mass of users through sheer willpower.
You, specifically, admitted you don’t have the energy to do it, and your only evidence you’ve ever tried is, “trust me,” but answering the question of “what do we do to get more people” with the answer of, “post every day and be engaging” isn’t helpful?
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5566ae46-b5f0-43e4-ab9f-cc8ae555784b.jpeg">
I'm saying that when the problem is a low userbase, responding with "you're spoiled for even wanting niche hobby spaces, and it's your fault for not putting in an excessive amount of energy that isn't even likely to pay off (because the userbase isn't there)" isn't productive.
I feel like this entire conversation isn’t productive. You have a talent for putting words in my mouth, and quotes around things I didn’t say.
Real tired of it, so I will no longer be responding here. Have a good one!
A lot of people want that, it’s not that easy to find and it never was.
We just got spoiled by the good days of the internet.
Maybe that’s part of it, but it’s not just that.
For example, I preordered a Nanoleaf Sense+ switch, which just shipped for everyone on the preorder. I’m excited to hear other people’s experiences with the product as it uses direct communication with lights via the Thread network.
If I go to Reddit’s r/nanoleaf, there are enough members that I see people posting about Sense+ within a few days of the product shipping.
And it’s not just consuming. I want to help people set up the switch too. For example, Nanoleaf has a very confusing menu in the app that took me a while to figure out. I saw someone else with the exact same issue and left a helpful comment.
Seems to be a good topic for a thread on !homeimprovement@lemmy.world ?
This is usually how it goes. The larger communities keep growing until they can branch off into the more niche ones.
Doesn’t seem that obvious, some people in the comments here point out that they prefer to have a dedicated community for their niche topic rather than posting on a generic community
And a lot of those people arrived when those communities were already built up on reddit.
This seems to be a type of post that keeps popping up more and more. Some people are venting and mourning their loss of reddit, which I get… but others have a sense of entitlement, of wanting to have things without needing to work for it. They want someone else to put in the blood, sweat and tears and be the ones to reap the benefits.
Imagine pilgrims coming to early North America and no one wanting to participate once they arrived, because no pre-built cities exited? We wouldn’t have a country in the US (though I’m sure that must have been the attitude of some)
Yeah, the reason I like Lemmy is because it reminds me of old reddit. Like old old reddit, before the Digg migration.
Lemmy is amazing. I am so glad I found my way here. I was doom scrolling as well. I had to unsubscribe from all my political communities I had joined and just keep one of my news committees. I then expanded the groups for my other interests. This really helped. You are in control of your time line here.
Build Lemmy and they will come!
<img alt="" src="https://www.metal-hammer.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/23/12/lemmy-kilmister.jpg">
I have really been enjoying Comic Strips. There can be some political content, but there’s plenty of other interesting and funny stuff too.
Rather than trying to replace something else, it’s a good idea to look for what’s new to you.
Does lemmy have flairs? Would be useful if they had a mandatory flair for objectionable content
Someone has to be the first on the dance floor, and you don’t want to be it.
<Elaine dancing>
Most people are obviously more lurkers than contributors. I don't think one should expect that to change, given the vastly different mindsets behind it.
I’m happy to create posts, but it’s hard if you’re the only person. If I could get a few active people, just all it feels collaborative, I would.
Admittedly, I haven’t tried that hard, but I’m going to make more posts in communities I want to grow.
I don’t want to simply repeat what others have said, but on a personal level, I’m actually enjoying the smaller overall community - it makes it a bit more personal, I feel. I enjoy that. Yeah, fair enough, it’s not great for niches, but you don’t have to be tethered down to one place for your content.
Back in my day, you had to go to completely different websites for your niche content! Forums were the mainstream!
Ya I don’t mind and I think it’s because this place reminds me a lot of old forums or old reddit. I really miss some of my old forums and the community that would be built there.
. The smaller feel also encourages contributing over lurking, because every individual’s comment can actually get read, unlike the huge megathreads of reddit.
I think the people who grew up a bit later may feel this more keenly than some of us olds who used to have to use the yellow pages.
Thing is, it can be great for niches! The Star Trek instance is very Star Trek. The TTRPG instance has a lot of potential. If we try to build the fediverse out from these niche nodes first, instead of starting from the general and trying to branch out, it could work a lot better than what we currently have.
I agree that, asking with the bad things OP mentions, there are good things about a smaller site. I remember a lot of times on Reddit when I had something to say, but when I went into the thread there were thousands of comments and I’d feel like there just wasn’t a point in adding mine.
On Lemmy, when I make a comment, it’s very likely to be seen (for better or worse), and I have much more of a feeling of adding to the conversation. It’s more like joining a conversation at a party.
I guess maybe the reason I fell into niche communities on Reddit was that I liked the smaller feel. So I do appreciate how many people actually see my comments. But I also appreciate communities that are focused on specific topics. Maybe I need to consider broader categories on Lemmy.
I think you’d be surprised how many people here share your interests. You may not be able to scroll through an album of other people’s projects relevant to your hobby right now, but I bet you can post to a more general community with a very specific question (or show off your own project) and get a good amount of engagement and feedback, maybe even with broader perspective than you might get in a subreddit with an established “meta” for your hobby.
Hmm maybe I should post to niche communities then repost to broader categories.
Or just assess whether your niche is sustainable at all, if not then just use the broader category
One time I complained about a response I got in a separate post and then that person found me and responded again.
I wasn’t even mad, that’s good dedication.
Browse by “subscribed”, and subscribe to a lot of communities. Only do it by “all” when you can’t find good stuff in the subscribed view.
I do this and, while I do see a few intrusive US politics posts, it’s far less than when browsing by “all”.
The problem, as already stated, is that there are not many communities in the first place. And if there are, they're likely more or less dead, with weeks or even months old posts.
Yes, it is a problem - depending on your tastes “subscribed” won’t be enough. But going “subscribed” and then “all” is bound to show less political posts than going straight for “all”.
Disagree. I use subscribed and I get plenty of content, a couple hours worth a day. You may just be used to reddits firehose. If there’s a missing community, you can always create it and start posting consistently
I'm not here to post stuff, that's the opposite of what I want. And the things I'm subscribed to I can scroll through within a couple minutes before they're dry. It's just too empty here with only a few threads and comments here and there.
Well then I can tell you you’re in the wrong place. There aren’t algorithms. There aren’t bots. Just people like me posting. It is run by and for individuals, and all posts are made by individuals. If you don’t want to post then you are the one to be mad at for not enough content
The fuck are you talking about? It's not about algorithms (which there are some, just not content based), it's about the lack of people. Maybe work on your reading comprehension. It's simply a matter of the fediverse lacking critical mass.
And you are welcome to be part of adding to the critical mass by posting, but for lurkers this place is going to be empty for a very long time.
I don't know why you people keep suggesting people do something that's not within their interest & use case.
Don’t know why people come here and get upset that we haven’t provided enough free content.
My guy, I added my two cents about the topic. Maybe keep your fragility in check and don't feel attacked by everything.
Lol okay dude, sure, my fragility. I run a server for myself and a few others, I pay out of pocket for it, we here don’t owe you anything.
Which I see that you comment a lot, which is great, it seems like you enjoy it here. Sure I’d like to see more posts, so I post a lot, and that drives up engagement. I’ve nurtured a few little communities that have grown steadily since I started them, but you don’t just get that from being upset that there’s not enough content. If you want more communities/posts around topics, then here you need to be the one post the stuff about it. So why so resistant to posting?
It’s honestly easy, it was a mental block for me at first but it’s just if you see an article/story about a topic you like, just post it to a community that applies. I started posting youtube vids that I thought were interesting. If there’s not a community for your topic work with your admins to create one.
You’re absolutely right that we’re tiny, we don’t have a critical mass - which is why I tell anyone who complains that there isn’t enough content that we don’t have the luxury of lurking here. If you want to be a part of building this platform then do your part. If you don’t want to help build it, then at least for god’s sake don’t just complain here that there’s not enough content to admins who run their servers for free when you can’t even be bothered to post. So I guess that’s probably what you’re picking up on.
So it’s not fragility - it’s frustration. Frustration that we have devs who built these platforms (for mostly free), and admins who pay out of pocket to run them, and in result we get users who are upset they might need to just occasionally post to help keep engagment up. I mean, what more do you want from us? I pay monthly to keep my servers up, fedia I’m sure pays hundreds a month, Lemmy.World here probably into the thousands, and people want to complain that they just want to lurk and that we don’t provide enough content. Well, then start posting!
Thanks for proving my point with this triggered entitled ranting text wall.
You doing what you do does not mean I owe you anything, not in form of feeling obligated to submit things, and I even less so have to take stupid insults from you about getting upset for you not working hard enough for me. If that's the type of shit you make up in your head about the users within the fediverse then please, stop contributing. You're like all those power tripping mod abusers who feel so entitled about it that they expect a "thank you" for ignoring disinformation and ruling over comments in a hypocritical manner. We've had this type of shit on Reddit already, we sure as hell don't need it here.
There, that's how I react when I'm actually upset. You're welcome.
Dude, okay I’m done. I didn’t even insult you, in fact I rewrote that “wall of text” multiple times to try to explain my opinion as neutrally as I could. I’ve tried in honest faith to try to explain my point of view to you multiple times, and I don’t know how else to explain it.
Huh? There are a looot of communities. Of course, a good number of them are dead. To get a good idea of which smaller communities are active, I’d recommend following the !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl posts. @Blaze@feddit.org did “active communities” overview threads a while ago at !newcommunities@lemmy.world too.
A lot of the small communities are not dead, they simply have a low post rate. If you actually post something of interest to them, they get engagement.
Social media suffers from the curse of the Pareto principle: The overwhelming majority of users do not generate content. They also suffer from the network effect: Most people will be where the content is, and most content creators will stay where the audience is. What we have on Lemmy is a group of people that skews more heavily toward consumption or commenting than posting new content, and the ever present thief of joy.
All I’m getting lately in my feed are cats!
Not a bug! That's a feature.
No, of course not. Cats are mammals, not insects.
Would you rather have cats or beans?
<img alt="" src="https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/006/759/Why_Don't_We_Have_Both_meme_banner.jpg">
Cats have beans, duh.
Beans have cats, duh.
Honestly, that was what early reddit was like too. Lots and lots of cat pics.
200 instances and nothing but cats
As somebody mentioned below, subscribe to communities you find to be of interest and then set your default mode to subscribed so that you only see those that you’ve actually subscribed to and that goes away a lot. Only browse all if you absolutely run out of content and are still looking to read.
A lot of focus is put onto posting, but I like to encourage commenters. I’ll post and respond all day, but if nobody is interacting, it’s going to stay quiet. Put the quiet to your advantage by doing things like:
If you like an image, say what you like about it. Lately, I’ve been having people talk about how they really have been enjoying dawn/dusk pictures, so I’ve been collecting more of that so I can post what people are in the mood for. It gives me good feedback, it gives people a chance to agree or disagree with you, and you got to participate.
Do you ask anyone any question? Take advantage of the relative quiet. With not having a million comments on every post, I have plenty of time to give you really detailed answers. I got asked how to differentiate between 2 animals yesterday, and I had time to make a nice visual guide, highlighting key differences and giving multiple visual examples of potential variations while still simplifying the process of identification. If there’s a million people talking like on Reddit, it’s hard to give people that much attention, but here it’s easy. I pretty much take time to respond to every comment.
Don’t be afraid to go off topic. Rules seem to be looser in many communities because of the low post count. This week, I posted something from a country with a different language, and I ended up having 3 days of conversation with a native speaker who filled me in on tons of subtleties of the language pertaining to our niche topic. I got to learn so much, and they got to learn a few things about English.
I feel you have to do something to have a good time here, but it needn’t be to post multiple things every day, but it’s more than just up or downvoting something like you can get away with on Reddit. We’re too small for you to have a free ride. But make someone laugh. Let them know that you liked their post with a short comment. If you don’t like it, say hey, do you have any content on such and such instead. Make a post saying, hey, what’s your thoughts on this? It doesn’t need to be something groundbreaking or insightful, you just need to give a sign of life so we know you’re here, and one of us will probably talk back to you.
Interact enough like that, and you may find what you enjoy doing, if that turns out to be posting, or you become the resident expert on a topic even if you’re not an expert, being a serial commenter, or whatever it may be. It’s a great opportunity if you make it one because it is so easy to get attention here if you try.
I’m not typically a social person, but being here has let me talk about what I want, when I want, and somebody will listen to it, and I can ask about things I want to know and get answers. There’s much less shouting into the void like at Reddit. Play Lemmy to its strengths and you will find enjoyment. And if you don’t like it, go to where you’re happy. Nobody’s going to hate you if you split time between here and Reddit.
Well I just wanted to respond because I’m also trying to comment as much as I can and even post every now and again. But the issue I’ve seen is Lemmy draws a certain kind of person, which means a lot of like minded people in the comments. I see your response here, read it, like it and then think: “Yes I agree, nothing to add”. So I don’t respond, which makes it feel pretty quiet.
Another thing I’ve seen is not a lot of people even bother opening posts, they just scroll through the feed, get their dopamine and that’s it.
On the one hand, upvotes are there. On the other, they’re not really the right took for the job, Lemmy (and the Fediverse in general) needs some sort of “same” / “mood” / “this tbh” tag.
For me, the upvotes are ok. I use them more to gauge overall traffic. I have an idea the typical number of votes things will get, and I can see what deviates to see what is a hit, what’s typical, and what isn’t resonating. But without comments, there’s no “why” anything is good or bad. I’m not really any better off than before to give you what you want. I can take a guess, but you could have also taken a moment to tell me. It doesn’t tell me everyone’s opinion, but it gives another things for the people that do vote to either add upvotes to that comment or ignore it.
Also, as someone providing the content, it’s nice to have an interaction, even if it’s minimal. Creating posts can eat up a lot of time, and I’m doing it to talk to you all. If nobody stops by to even say, yo, nice work, or whatever, even if I have a lot of upvotes, it still feels like I’m not talking to anyone. It feels like a chore. But if I get one person that says, hey, seeing this really made my morning, now I feel awesome and I want to post more.
Strong truth. But then again, the UX for this is relatively as reduced as the standard usecases allow; if the user can’t bother to click on “reply”, post even a “good.” then click send… come on man, we’re asking for literally two clicks and five keystrokes… if people can’t even do that yet they interact for hours on end on TikTok, then perhaps the problem is not lemmy.
Oh for sure. It’s going to be what ultimately makes or breaks this as a platform. You can’t force a userbase to interact, but as OP states, like many before them, for some people there’s not going to be much going on here. For people that want to at least be mildly active participants though, I haven’t had this much fun since forums were the big thing. I just imagine since that was a decent while ago now that either those of us old enough to have enjoyed them are rusty at it, and the yoots are too young to have seen how it used to work.
A significant number of the not-Lemmy-or-Mastodon servers support emoji and custom emoticon tags, not just ‘up’, ‘down’, or ‘star’. I wish that was more widely adopted.
That would be great, but does not seem on Lemmy devs priority list. Maybe Piefed
I wonder how much fuss would have to be put up in order to get nodeBB supporting it.
I’d like to see us really embrace the improv mantra of “yes, and”. Agreement is great, but add something before you go. Upvote and comment.
I’m a bit inclined to agree with this. I try to do the equivalent of the XKCD hover text, where you have to click through to get some of the good stuff. If you aren’t clicking through to the comments, you’re going to miss a lot of good stuff. Photo sets, photography tips, stories, fun facts. I try not to have the pic and title be the whole thing. But I’ll have 100 upvotes on the post pic, and maybe 10 on any bonus pics inside.
With some news posts, they feel like a RSS feed. Just a link to an article and nothing else. I may read it or I may not. There’s no initial comment or question to interact with. I don’t even know if it’s a bot posting or not that way. If all you offer is a Reuters link, I could have just gone to Reuters and gotten the headline myself. I feel these posts have little value until they start collecting comments.
This is a common response I get when I try to get people to comment more. There can still be value to add to something like this though. Why do you agree? Did you agree before you read the post/comment? Do you have any caveats to your agreement? If you haven’t always agreed, what changed your mind? What part of what they said, or the chart/pic/stat they shared really stood out or was unexpected? You may agree, but you’re still a different person with a different background and different adjacent ideas.
Example from today: Pic of flying owl. Comment was basically I like all these recent pics of flying owls. On the surface, not the deepest comment ever. Buuuuuut, someone took the time to respond to a post, so I know they liked it enough to make effort. Makes me feel good knowing I motivated someone enough to respond, keeps me motivated to post again. I also learned that a specific type of content really got them interested. I know to look for more of it. Then I took the time to respond in kind, because their effort deserves recognition. I said I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I also said that even though I see hundreds of owl pics every week, that I was still surprised by something I saw in one of the recent photos, so that gives them or anyone else reading the response something to go back and look at. They might not have noticed the unique thing about the photo the first time.
Example going the other way: Maori rights in New Zealand. You can’t get much further from NZ than where I am. I know basically nothing about it. This topic really caught my attention though. I read the article to see what was going on, and I thought I understood the basics of it. I commented and said, hey, I read this, and this is my understanding. Am I correct in my understanding or am I missing some significant parts of the story not in this article? If so, can someone explain it or point me in the direction of some more reading? So I know nothing, but I showed them the story was making me interested in something they shared. Anyone familiar with NZ can chime in to talk to me. I hopefully get more things to talk about from that, and we have some conversation. I don’t have to know anything, I just show interest in the topic, and in interacting with someone.
Not every interaction is going to result in more upvotes, comments, or conversation, but if nobody is going to be willing to make the first move, it’s gonna be boring. We’re not big enough for the 1% rule (1% creators, 9% commenters, 90% lurkers) to carry us. It kills the creators having to force the momentum all the time, and if you disagree/agree too much with the small pool of comments, you’re going to say this place is boring. We need to participate, we need to show our individual personalities, and we need to interact. That’s the “social” part of social media. Have fun with it!
I agree with you. It’s disheartening when you see something you want to talk about and the comments are empty.
Or when you comment and no one else ever chimes in.
Yup, my questions in the Maori article have been up for 24 hours now, so time for people in that part of the world with direct knowledge had time to see it. My comments and questions got 7 upvotes, so other people seem interested in some more elaboration, but the thread is probably dead.
Someone’s leaving an audience that wants more hanging, and nobody even gave a yes or no saying if my understanding of the article was right. 😮💨
Unfollow communities with political content, and all that goes away.
I think a surprising number of people use the ‘All’ feed, both here, and on Reddit.
I use the all feed here but not Reddit. Without the all feed its… too quiet. It’s also possible I have a social media addition. Maybe I should embrace quiet.
I wouldn’t touch Reddit’s all with someone else’s ten foot pole. But there’s hardly any posts in my subbed feed (niche interest ghost towns for the most part), so Lemmy’s all is where the content is.
All feed rocks, but people should still block the stuff they dont want to see so their feed stays how they want.
People are worried about the lack of content on lemmy, but you just have to accept lemmy doesn’t move as fast as reddit.
Don’t check it a couple times a day, check it a couple times a week. I am on most days because I find something elsewhere and want to share it here. I don’t make 90% of what I share. Our memes comrades.
Unpopular opinion: it's okay to like Reddit, if that's how you feel. I don't - it's far too toxic overall, and that was affecting me to the point where I made the decision to leave it, regardless of the outcome of the protests (based in large measure on having read this article that further developed the thoughts that I was already starting to think: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb ). And I don't like where it's going in the future - you may use it for awhile then be surprised when yet another horrendous decision by Huffman or the people behind him sends content creators fleeing to other platforms, *again*.
But if you have found a particular niche group there, and they are not willing to leave Reddit, then you go to where they are, right? Perhaps you can also help make moving here more welcoming by starting a similar community of your own here, even if you are the only one posting there for awhile. That said, we simply don't have the userbase here to handle e.g. most individual games (some fairly major exceptions such as Minecraft aside:-) or sports teams or some such, and you may want to enjoy interacting with more generalized content, possibly in addition to rather than fully replacing Reddit.
Conversations here tend to be better than there. Deeper, richer, and fuller. But to each their own - if Reddit meets your needs while Lemmy does not, then it sounds like you have your answer. But perhaps read my link above and think about what it means: Reddit is predatory, and you'd be willfully walking back into that, hoping against hope that the leopard would not eat *your* face off (spoiler alert: it will:-D).
Thank you! I would say I like the people in certain niche groups on Reddit, but I hate Reddit as a company. I wish I could snap my finger and move those communities to Lemmy.
Many people lead busy lives and don't use Arch btw (you know that funny saying here on Lemmy? well if not, you'll learn it soon - in fact you're hearing it now!:-P). They use what works best for them. We could improve our tools to entice them to want to come here, but we can hardly blame them (imho) if they don't want to yet, if Lemmy (or Mbin, PieFed, etc.) does not meet there needs (yet).
We are growing though. e.g. check out !loops@midwest.social, which I would guess probably has no counterpart on Reddit atm? (their internal video player sucked, and presumably still does since they seem so focused on profits rather than usability)
Ew you use arch? Real smart people use templeOS.
I am fortunate enough that my workplace offers me a Mac OSX:-). Which I promptly use to ssh into a Linux ofc, but that one I do not have privileges on. And I don't do much rooting or OS replacing on my Android at home lately.
My point is that they all are "under God" (from templeOS perspective?). Except Windows ofc, which is under Satan:-P.
Lol, I agree that Windows is the only true villain, lol. I’m actually a macOS user. I have recently come around to Vim (technically Neovim), and I’m trying to get better at basic terminal utilities like grep. These mostly work the same on macOS, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out at all by not using Linux. I tried daily driving Linux, but Mac really satisfies all my needs. But I am very grateful for Linux and all its open-source contributions.
Mac is awesome!:-) Sorta. Apple has become "The Man" that it used to despise but... the product, I mean the *desktop* product, is still good. For now.
The GNU utilities are some of the most highly optimized on planet Earth. Actually they probably are *the* most highly optimized!:-D
Also, Mac OSX is POSIX compliant, making it more fully "Unix" than even Linux itself is - or at least, some flavors of Linux are allowed to not be POSIX compliant. templeOS is not POSIX compliant, and some parts of Arch (e.g. fish shell) are not either, reportedly.
Whenever I say that I enjoy using Mac OSX, the only pushback I tend to receive is that it typically runs on expensive hardware. However, it is unix with a pretty candy shell - e.g. that Preview program if f-ing amazing! and the Anti-aliasing everywhere, and the Spotlight search, and... it has much wow factor overall!:-P - and I think a good fraction of people who like Linux would enjoy using it, if it were free (which technically it is, the OS I mean, and that doesn't even get into Darwin...). The major caveat being Arch users, who want to customize every tiny thing to their heart's content. Which is fine - we don't all have to enjoy the same things:-).
I really like your take! I agree Apple has amazing products, but I do fear that will degrade as they become more of a monopoly. I never thought of it as pretty Unix, but that makes a lot of sense. Admittedly, I don’t know the history that well, but I’m assuming Steve Wozniak was a big Unix guy, and Steve Jobs is responsible for it being pretty. So it makes sense.
I spend most of my time in Vim and the browser, and those are both extremely customizable. So Mac has never felt too limiting for me.
Though Apple is expensive, I bet you could pick up even an old M1 Mac and still have fantastic performance. I know people argue Apple sabotages their old phones, but I think their hardware actually holds up really well, except for a few exceptions over the years.
I use Vim everywhere I go - Linux, Mac, even Windows:-). It's just beautiful. And also a command-line window, and like you said, a browser.
Also MS Office bc unlike their OS, that one is fairly solid, and works well especially when collaborating with others, unlike open source offerings for so many years (I dunno the history either but apparently it's sordid, with "drama" and various forks being developed and abandoned, so sad).
PCs get expensive as well - especially if you use them for gaming. I don't, but if you do, then a $1-2k (USD) Mac is nothing in comparison to a $3-5k gaming machine, and the former offers a fantastic experience in return for that value, whereas before Linux improved (and probably more relevantly Steam did - again I am not fully aware of the history but I think that's what I've heard), a Windows machine was something that you mostly had to spend hours and hours trying to disable as much of the built-in OS as you could manage. No wonder people prefer Linux these days - if you are going to have to delve into such details regardless! But with Macs, all of that is entirely optional bc it's a great experience right out of the box.
I've given up on their phones though, bc iOS is really difficult. Then again these days so too are Android phones, and I don't know what to do about it all. An iPhone on a network with something like a Pie hole (I've never set one up before) could be a nice experience, maybe? But I just enjoy the experience of Android too much - except I won't pay the price for an expensive Pixel (I barely even use my camera!). I was thinking for my next phone to just buy any cheapie, or perhaps a Fairphone. I'm done chasing "good" phones though.
Tmux is also super cool. I just dipped into tmux plugins for the first time the other day. Resurrect is sick.
iOS is where I disagree. Overall, I think Apple has done a fantastic job. The hardware and software both feel top-notch as a consumer. But I honestly don’t know why developers keep coming back to Apple. Apple’s relationship with developers is hostile. I hope the antitrust lawsuits shake things up for them.
I kinda hate Google and, by extension, Android. Maybe my hate of Android is irrational, but I really think Google is doing a wonderful job enshitifying search right now. And I just assume anything Google touches is spyware. I know it’s kinda impossible to stop, but if I can at least opt out of the entire OS spying on me.
Google and Microsoft are not the only evil software corporations - Apple has become that as well. Fortunately desktops seem to have been made immune, while the iOS app continuous to lock everything down inside of its walled-garden philosophy. Apple makes it super difficult to send files to the device - e.g. if you wanted to transfer a file (like a PDF) from one machine to another using your device as a USB drive - and other things so that while yes, if every single thing that you want to do lies within this walled garden then you are fine, however if you want to set even one foot outside of it, you will quickly find the limitations unbearable. e.g. the experience using an Apple email account is amazing - you can start typing a message on your phone, then continue on your desktop, then continue again on your phone, back and forth as much as you like. But even just sending and receiving emails at all, or like working with calendar invitations, using a non-Apple email account provider, such as Google's Gmail or Microsoft's Outlook, it's absolutely abysmal. Every professional workplace I've ever been has given me a Microsoft email that is mandatory for me to check, so I don't have the option of simply not using Microsoft, and instead I find myself not using iPhones, as they do not meet my needs.
Android is *not* Google. Android is open source, and there are many implementations of it - Samsung is very popular, OnePlus used to be, and yes Google Pixels are just one example of Android but they are by far not the only ones. They are the most "pure Android" versions of the software though, without added vendor-specific stuff like both Samsung and OnePlus have entirely separate stores to purchase apps from in addition to the Play Store. It gets a bit more complicated when Google has used the "embrace and extend" philosophy to somewhat destroy Android from within by poisoning its development from the inside to make it work the way that they want to - but importantly, anyone at any time could create a fork and continue its development along different lines (which routinely happens! these are the "custom ROMs", like Lineage OS), so it still lies within the realm of open source software, as opposed to Apple's walled garden that is entirely closed, both in source and in terms of you not being allowed to do with your Apple hardware what you wish.
You might also like a Fairphone then. Or we may both end up hating it - I don't know enough about it to be able to guess, it's just that other than iPhone or a major Android provider like Samsung or Google or OnePlus, what else even is there, especially an option that is more purely open source?
Those are good points! The EU did force Apple to switch to USB-C, and the US government is coming after tech monopolies. I’m optimistic they will nudge Apple in the right direction. We did just get the most repairable iPhone ever, according to iFixit.
As far as Android, it may be open source, but hasn’t Google used their influence and money in a lot of shady deals to ensure they remain at the top? That’s what the recent case against them was about, both in the context of Android and Google search. Again, I think the government will nudge Google in the right direction.
I’m a bit of an Apple fanboy. I love their hardware and I love that macOS is Unix-based. I work in the terminal a lot for my job, and it gives me everything I would want from Linux but in premium hardware and tight integration with my iPhone. I also like that they are more privacy-focused than Google, though I also don’t trust that they really care about my privacy. At the end of the day, big tech sucks, but they have built some cool things. I’m hoping the government stops them before they get more greedy.
We should not be so confident about anything involving the USA moving forwards - after the recent election, EVERYTHING can now be different. Maybe. Possibly, but while I don't know what will happen, I also do not know what will *not* happen either, hence this is a time of great uncertainty.
I have thought about trying another iPhone, though if I did, I would want it not to be my only portable device. I simply cannot afford to be sent e.g. an email message or calendar invitation or some such and have it not come through or be displayed incorrectly purely b/c it came through via a Microsoft (or more rarely Google) account. So then on top of the >$1k price tag, I would need a laptop or Android that is still yet another ~$1k or at least hundreds more? (or depending on someone's workflow environment - e.g. if your work offers you a laptop, and you need that for a trip - then at least carry around a USB drive with you as well, to have available to use at a moment's notice). At that point though why not just get the Android and bypass the iPhone entirely, especially if that one device would meet all of your needs? iPhones are very pretty, with amazing glass touch & feel, and have nice functionality - again, so long as you remain *entirely* within their walled garden, though depending on my future job prospects, I may not be able to always function within those constraints.
And yes Google is ruining Android, according to many people from what I hear, though I am not fully up-to-date with it. I suppose my point there is that a downwards trend to go from an open-source environment moving towards a more closed one is still not comparable to iOS that is fully closed already. If Google is bad b/c it is making Android more like iOS, then how bad is Apple for having made iOS that way right from the start? Although I thought the actual case against Google was about its search engine, not Android, or there have been some other investigations along the lines of its Play Store, again not entirely about the actual "OS" (when such things as F-Droid can bypass their monopolistic store).
Most Apple fanboys, such as myself, tend to love Apple until it betrays/disappoints them and then abandon it in a huff of rage-quitting:-). I have taken a middling approach though and remained with Mac OSX b/c it is a fantastic product, but iOS is a different story imho. Either way their hardware and the software integration with that is top-notch, I agree with you there. It also is significantly more expensive for a similarly-specced Android device, especially for offering much less functionality - I suppose it is a more "premium" device, for those willing to and capable of working entirely within its tight limitations. I suppose my biggest beef is that I would no longer feel outright "proud" to own such a device (necessary for me to justify a higher price) as I would have in the past, and yet I cannot really say that about any modern mobile device anymore, unfortunately, with enshittification having touched every manufacturer so hard.
So I will vote with my wallet and find something that meets my needs when the time comes to replace my current one - possibly a non-flagship cheapie, or maybe a Fairphone if that would be good enough.
Ok, the Fairphone does look really cool. I don’t plan on switching phones for a few years, but I hope they succeed.
I hope so too.:-)
OnePlus phones also used to be nearly as pure and lightweight as older Google phones, I mean from before Google started the enshittification. But they screwed up so hard, running off one of their co-founders (the tech guy, being ran off by the business/money guy), that most enthusiasts abandoned them. Also they switched from their OxygenOS to the crappy ColorOS used in cheap Huawei phones.
Afaik, nothing else has risen to fill the gap, and looking at the state of technology in the world today where every company chases after *purely* short-term profits to the exclusion of all else, I don't know that there ever will be.
At which point it boils down to iPhone, if it works for someone to use that, Samsung if people like that (I don't), or something small.
Maybe that’s what I see in Apple. It seems like they don’t make all decisions based on the short term. At least compared to other tech companies. But maybe I’m naive for thinking that.
Please note: you only ever had something like that with Reddit when it had already several years of operation. Even today, you can’t jump instantly and find there a community for any niche hobby.
As with all these things: be the change you want to see. Add content, or else it won’t be there when you or someone else comes in.
(There’s also a feel that Lemmy is “small” becaue it’s not only one place and all that)
The internet has been mostly enshittified. The corporations are guaranteed to continue sucking in predictable ways. It’ll never get better or good enough.
The fediverse is something new. It is, at the very least, immune to being reddited and twittered. If the internet has a future, it’s on the fediverse, or on something like it that doesn’t exist yet. Going back to shitty corporate stuff just delays the future.
Your real issue is that spez, musk, etc all suck. That’s what you hate. This is the place where we are free of them, and it can only get better.
The problem is I hate Musk, etc., but I do love a lot of the people on those platforms (mainly Reddit for me). When you have that many people, it’s easier to have very active communities even if they are pretty niche. If there was some sort of way I could incentivize people to come to Lemmy, I would. Open to suggestions.
You can chime in on /r/RedditAlternatives
That’s pretty much the last space where we can talk about Lemmy on Reddit. Posts asking where to go show up from time to time.
Thanks for pointing this out. I’ve been holding fast to zero posting activity over there, but I think I’ll keep an eye out in that subreddit and see if I can’t grab any new recruits.
Block lemmy.world politics and news subs, those people are deranged idiots larping too much DNC koolaid.
It will clear your feed for other less active subs that really need more posting and commenting.
I wasn’t saying I disagree with the political content. Only that hyper-fixating on the declining state of my country (US) stops being healthy very quickly. People need to feel empowered to create change, but doom scrolling makes us despair.
But let me be clear, fuck Trump.
Discussion is not constructive, it does not matter if you agree or disagree... they are shilling doom. They did it before election too and they are still doing it.
Seeing all the cats made me realize that we need to all participate to make the community what we want it to be. It’s clear to me there are a lot of lurkers based on the influx of cat pictures. The more we start posting in ANY instance the more visibility there will be for active users.
The voids whence the content shall come!
I only used Reddit for two years, but I’m now really happy I made the jump to Lemmy.
Sadly, I can only agree that some niche content is difficult to find.
But I can’t complain because I’m not creating any of that content and moderating some community.
It may not be for everyone. Lemmys growth has stalled out and barring musk buying reddit and turning it to shit i don’t see another influx coming. So we’re kinda stuck with the community that exists now. Its a pretty good and sustainable community which can provide a lot of general interest posts like news, memes and cats lately. But for other more specific topics if if it’s not already a large community here it probably won’t be. It’s not even just niche interests, professional sports for example has very little presence on here as a whole much less individual sports or teams, and I don’t see, for example, a baseball community taking off here no matter how much effort you put in since the current lemmy community isn’t much interested in it and your average baseball fan probably won’t be coming to lemmy to discuss things.
My recommendation would be to use lemmy for some of those general interest topics, and maybe some of the more popular niche communities if your into them, And go to other places, preferably independent forums or rss feeds, for other things. We don’t need one unified scrolling app, it may be a bit more convenient, but the internet is better off if you spread your traffic around.
Just wanted to comment and say Lemmy baseball fan here! There are dozens of us, dozens! Also not in IT and I don’t use Linux but here I am. I feel like an imposter on Lemmy.
This is why I’ve made the argument so many times that Lemmy needs ways to categorize stuff.
Let me present you with a situation that happened. I made a post in a patientgamers community. But since I know that community is niche, I cross post to both retro games and the general games community. This made some people upset because they had to see my post three times (understandable).
But if I don’t do this, the only slightly active sub community will benefit or see engagement. As evidenced by my last post that got somewhat less engagement.
What really should be the case is that cross posts don’t show up multiple times and by default the apps need to redirect to the actual cross posted post and not the comments on the cross post itself. They copied the awful cross posting behavior from Reddit and it sucks honestly. Until we are larger, we need better ways to post across multiple communities to keep them all active and boost collective interest.
Let me introduce you the Piefed topics: piefed.social/topic/gaming That’s an improvement from the reader perspective
Cross-posts themselves are only displayed once on the Web UI as long as they use the same URLs.
Cool feature and pretty much exactly what I was referencing, thanks for making me aware it exists.
Post the content and you’ll get some engagement. I’ve posted in niche subs here like Begleris, lockpicking, Balisongs and got engagement. So I don’t know what to tell you but to post whatever.
Lately I tend to prefer lemmy over Reddit and mastodon too. It’s all about content I agree.
Post the kind of content you’d like to see.
This comment makes me want to both up and downvote it, because while it may be true, I don’t think I have the skill to post.
Posting just takes time. Usually you can just take content from Reddit or elsewhere and post it to Lemmy.
I hate reddit as a platform but I still have to use it every once in a while because people won’t move to Lemmy/mbin/piefed.
I honestly don’t understand it. People complain that they don’t use the fediverse because it’s small but somehow they don’t realize if they just migrate over then it won’t be.
It’s aggravating how dumb people can be but hey, that’s the world we’re living in. I’ll continue to use Lemmy and visit reddit if I have to.
Network effect in full blast
Yeah. It’s the same with Mastodon. “There are a bunch of toxic people making me feel unwelcome” can be met with “so I left” or “so we flooded the place and took over, because there were only lile 800 people there”
I see this all the time like some kind of catch-all for complaints about how effectively dead this platform is.
Not everyone is cutout to pioneer any kind of community, let’s just assume that OP takes this advice to heart, if their interest/hobby is niche enough, what’s even the likelihood of someone else tumbling upon it? Let alone contributing. Maybe this hypothetical other person wants to contribute but they see that it’s only one other person posting anything and they figure, “what’s the point?” Maybe they don’t agree with OP’s opinions and would rather find another “community” where their opinions won’t be contested even if it doesn’t exist. There are a myriad of reasons why, this is going to happen with every channel, fandom, interest group, etc. it’s a natural part of the process. The problem lies in the simple fact that there’s fucking no one here, there are enough bodies to come and stay and go and continue the cycle until a community is established.
Yes, there are plenty of channels or w/e they’re called here, but most of them are effectively islands in a sea of shit you don’t care about (or bots.) They’re not managed, and there’s nothing going on in them. Why is it up to you the user to stop what you’re doing and make something out of nothing? When there are already communities that do exist on other platforms, even if said platforms are trash like Reddit or Xitter are. The majority of users in large communities are lurkers, they might not actively contribute, but they do share content with their own friends or interest groups and that is what’s more likely to bring people in, those people might be people that do end up contributing, or they might be more lurkers. But it feeds into the growth of the community either way.
Most of Lemmy doesn’t have any of that though, because there’s no one here.
The general advice is to go to more and more generic communities until you meet enough people to discuss the topics.
Originally, Reddit had no subreddits, there was only one single space where everybody would post.
Reducing the number of communities and merge some of them would definitely be useful. For people interested on that topic, there is !fedigrow@lemm.ee
Community building involves more than just posting. It’s “If you post it, post about it everywhere else, and talk about it with everybody who will listen”. And then dealing with months if silence while you keep posting things that inspire others to join in.
The Fediverse is virgin territory. The trails aren’t blazed for you here; it’s your job as an early adopter to make it the way you want it to be. You want a community? Start it and participate in it.
Joining an existing community is usually easier than starting a new one.
!newcommunities@lemmy.world can be a place to find an existing community?
There’s also the problem of management. Lots of Lemmy comms are abandoned and, while there are some I would like to exist, I just do not visit regularly enough to be responsible for moderating more and more and more communities across the fedi. So I don’t create new comms.
Definitely
Enjoy being the only one posting.
Mass adoption is fundamental to make any social media viable; the fewer users it has, the less useful it is. Reddit has more users than Lemmy. It’s that simple. People won’t start switching until everybody else switches.
Bluesky is only barely starting to compete with Twitter, and that’s after Twitter drastically worsened. Lemmy is a long, long way from competing with Reddit.
To me, it’s a matter of time. The structural advantages of the fediverse mean that it’s more stable on the long run; what i mean by that is, for-profit Reddit will get worse while Lemmy remains good, leading users to migrate here, so Lemmy will eventually outlive Reddit. And then along the way there will be a few big moments where Reddit really fucks up and a wave of people washes up on Lemmy. This is already happening, i’m pretty sure all of us here made our accounts after the Reddit API changes.
Forums used to be lively and self-sustaining with memberships in the low hundreds. You only need “mass adoption” if you want and unending stream of novelty bullshit that you don’t actially want to engage with to entertain yourself with while on the toilet.
Yeah and Lemmy and Mastodon at the moment but more so Lemmy seem to be working against that goal by opting for onboarding methods that are unintuitive and frustrating to normies. Opting to make people apply like this is a fucking club, and deny people if they are too boring.
Great job guys, you’re really gonna get lots of engagement that way. You don’t want engagement? What are you even doing wasting money on an almost empty site barely anyone is joining?
You seem overtly negative over the whole platform.
People are trying to keep communities active, as shown on !fedigrow@lemm.ee and !newcommunities@lemmy.world
I mean those efforts are great but if the flow of people onto the platform is bottlenecked it doesn’t do as much good as it could. And since a majority of all Lemmy servers are pushing for applications effectively turning all the current instances into clubs that will ultimately effect how many people will be here to have an interest in communities in the first place.
Applications are mostly there to prevent spam. Not ideal, but admins seem to find this the best system
Because they are lazy and overconfident in their ability to determine truth from lies, AI from real human. They could set up a script or automod to stop spam, but they don’t. They make excuses like this one.
It’s worse than not ideal, it hurts the ability to use Lemmy as a social media, as an alternative for Reddit. Turning it into a private club hurts this place because without people, especially the normies who make jokes and upvote posts this place is dead.
Pack it in now then. This platform isn’t going to see huge influxes. Normies are too stupid to pick a server. I don’t really mind it being somewhat of a niche space, maybe the advertisers will continue to mostly ignore us.
I just realized, it’s no wonder much of Lemmy’s current base is in their 30s (and older.) The social aspects of the internet we grew up with was more forum-based. The slower pace we currently have here isn’t a deal breaker, because we knew a time where this was normal. We participated in and built communities because if we didn’t, they wouldn’t exist. There was no pre-made social media behemoth for us to get lost in.
But people who’ve grown up with modern social media didn’t have that experience. They’re accustomed to riding fast-paced rapids, where things quickly change, and where algorithms control their feed and direct the whole experience. That’s their normal. By contrast, Millenials and older came online to gentle, quiet streams. We had to learn to row the oars manually (creating novel communities and content.) That gave us greater control over where we’d go and what we’d see.
Lemmy is a gentle stream right now. People who come here expecting white water rafting are going to feel like something’s missing. People who grew up with pre-made online communities probably never took the steps to build one up before.
I’d love to see younger people taking up the mantle of building a new corner of the internet. Especially in an era where personal control is increasingly limited by powerful monied interests, learning how to create and run communities can be very empowering.
I get it. I basically have to browse on the everything tab to get enough content, and just block the politics communities because I get enough of that from everywhere else in life. I’ve been using the lack of content to just ween myself off social media though, rather than go back to Reddit. This is the only “social media app” I have installed on my phone unless you count Discord and YouTube
It’s not the size that matters. Just play with it for a while, maybe you’ll learn to like it.
Give it some time, it’ll get bigger I promise.
Politics is the one thing we all have in common.
The good old days where everyone watched the same five TV shows and discussed them are over.
firefly was mid, there I said it.
Everything Whedon has ever done was mid, and I’m going to be banned for saying that, probably.
Straight to jail. Right away.
Do you come from a country with no politics?
No, but how interested are you in HK politics?
Honestly, enough where I would read an article if it was posted but not interested enough to seek out articles that don’t appear on Reuters or the AP’s front page. It is depressing to watch my country fall to authoritarianism and it would be interesting to see how a formally democratic society is dealing with authoritarianism being imposed on it. An article on a new cat cafe or a dog parade would also be nice.
Actually, yes. I’m curious how it compares to western politics
The point is, Lemmy, Reddit, and other related platform are overwhelmingly American.
People often just assume things with American mindset. Especially for hard topic like religious harmony, ethnic discrimination, immigration, etc.
Ironic as no large instance is managed by US citizens
feddit.org/post/4529920?scrollToComments=true
Yes Americans participate, but the person who posted 'politics," is something we all have in common I believe was saying it as in all humans need air, prefer to not drown, appreciate love and have politics in there life. Whether they choose to ignore the politics or not.
We Aussies doesn’t care less about who is out prime minister. As long as they can make more houses for us to live in without becoming bankrupt honestly
So politics. Like when I see people arguing about whether to keep the king around
Yeah, I think it makes waaay more sense to complain about US politics infecting all of social media.
I would suggest blocking the communities that post all the content you don’t like. After I did that, it’s been smooth sailing, and I read the All feed. There’s not that many large news and politics communities that you would need to block to get rid of that stuff on your timeline.
Whatever the social media ability to “create” your own algorithm is important. One way being a subscription and sticking to it.
Second being keyword filtering. I use Connect for Android which let’s me filter out posts and communities containing keywords.
Same thing I do on reddit with reddit enhancement suite.
It’s just the nature social media where anone can sign up.
Is there a way to ‘view all images’ like RES has a button for?
Try this, it improves lemmy’s web frontend
alexandrite.app
Yes, PieFed has a tiled view that iirc is default for some communities - see e.g. https://piefed.social/c/memes@lemmy.world?layout=masonry&sort=.
For Lemmy, no, unless an app does it.
The thing I like about Lemmy is that they’re not banning you over stupid shit.
Oh they’re still doing that just easier to make a new space after that happens
Depends on your instance honestly
Jokes on you the political content here is from the redditors who pretended to quit their award fueled addiction by also joining lemmy.
Seriously though, compare c/Politics to c/Worldnews or c/News. There is a very large dissonance between the comments shared despite both communities posting the same news info…
Imo, this is your answer. I’m not sure exactly what other solution you want. Content will not appear on Lemmy without someone first posting it. Advertising the platform to help draw people in is also important.
You have fallen for the ultimate trick: wanting a “big” community.
You only get that from big, centralized social networks that want to maximize the amount of content you are fed, because it maximizes your ad views, and their profits.
Embrace the smallness. Lemmy still has room to grow, and having lot of different options for communication that aren’t all owned by billionaires is a good thing. The fact that it isn’t constantly trying to earn your attention is a feature, not a bug.
I don't think it's that we want "big" communities, necessarily, as much as we want active communities. For instance, if there's a niche game I want to talk about, it's currently a roll of the dice whether or not there's a Lemmy community for it, and then if it does exist already then it's pretty much guaranteed to see 2, maybe 3 posts per week, tops.
That's really the only thing I miss about Reddit, being able to pretty much always have a discussion on any topic you'd want, at any given time.
For niche things, you kinds have to go to reddit.
I mean the worst of reddit is on mainstream topics like politics anyways. You’re less likely to see toxicity in like a gaming subreddit. (Less likely than politics anyways)
Or to the category community. You might not find an active group dedicated to Dodge Ram transmissions, but there’s at least one group for Cars, or maybe even Trucks!
Why not create a thread on a genre community like !jrpg@lemmy.zip or !fgc@lemmy.world ?
People wanting more activity than the small exclusive private club Fediverse has become isn’t a trick or capitalist fallacy, they just want other people to see their fucking posts. Is that so strange and wrong? Why post things if no one is going to see them? You’re seriously missing the point of a social media, if you really think having small nearly dead spaces is a good thing.
A while back there was some issue with the Lemmy code and people kept being served posts that were over 6 months old. Peple started replying and the original posters were often “wow, you found my post!” It was kind of awesome.
I believe in Lemmy and the fediverse. But the subreddits with content I like aren’t here yet. So I still have to go back for that stuff.
But I always check here first.
Don’t let your desire for something you want right now ruin something you can have in the future. At one point r/homekit didn’t exist, didn’t stop you from not caring.
I like it as a platform but the userbase just isn’t there.
They said, in a thread that has literally tens of thousands of words in replies.
Compared to Reddit the userbase here is miniscule.
Block FlyingSquid, it improves the community a huge amount.
You’d be blocking half of Lemmy.
Do it before they drag you into an argument, lose, then ban you.
You mean the user that moderates some Star Trek stuff and Out of Context Comics? What’s the problem..?
If the BlueSky migration keeps up the pace, I think it will be a good bet that Reddit to Lemmy will be the next big user migration. There’s signs it’s already started, within the last year I’ve been here I’ve seen the community and sub-communities grow significantly and there’s been an increase of self-proclaimed converts over the last several months.
I don’t see the connection between Lemmy and Bluesky/reasoning, can you elaborate?
Dreams.
Probably the hope, not completely unfounded, that the migration from one “legacy” (from the 00s) platform to a more recent alternative service - twitter to Bluesky - will help inspire people in other legacy platforms to also realize that alternatives do exist now, they are part of a broader conversation that they weren’t a part of even two years ago.
Even a year and a half ago, this place felt like it hadn’t yet installed the drywall, the wiring and tubing was incomplete. Now it feels more seamless, ready for a spurt of growth.
“Hey… Bluesky isn’t all that bad, I’m glad to be out of the clutches of a billionaire asshole, and not feel utterly lost here”, now cue what OP believes a number of people will also think: “Hmm… maybe I’ll check out Lemmy, too. See what the alternative to reddit is like.”
Some of them could have tried it, didn’t like it, might come back and be like: “Hey, Lemmy’s not too bad since last I last looked a year ago”, and here’s a clincher that definitely wasn’t here a year and a half ago: “The app works pretty good”, and there are a lot of new apps, having a choice gives a sense and weight of legitimacy.
I still remember the DDoS attacks
It doesn’t look like you mentioned subscriptions, which gets you out of the ‘all’ / ‘filtering’ side of things entirely. But just as with Reddit, you’ll need to spend time building your personal feed over time and tweaking it.
The good news is that there’s no limit to your subscriptions (unlike Reddit’s cap of 50 displayed at any one time), but that you’ll need to use the right tools to search the Fediverse to find those communities you want to subscribe to.
The main tool I typically use seems to have a bug right now (based on the recent software upgrade?) but I suspect will be back up in a few days. You might take a look at this, tho, plus other resources.
.
I don’t want another app. I use lemmy exclusively in the browser, and that feature is missing :(
Yeah, I withheld using an app until very recently for that exact feature. I miss the browser for other features though, not sure what to do. I’m using connect, maybe I’ll try a couple others or some other solution.
You should check out something like Tesserect, it’s a 3rd party front end for Lemmy that includes a lot of quality of life features, including word filtering. The demo is here: tesseract.dubvee.org
If you like it, you could petition lemmy.world to offer it as an option directly.
gamechanger. Thank you very much.
Try using one of the PWA’s, like Voyager. Just go to vger.app in your browser. It’s still a browser-based front end, but it has more features than the default interface
.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way around it. Fediverse is small, and while we should always encourage people’s migration, it will probably remain small for the time being.
And freedom to express everything combined with people learning their behavior on algorithmic content will be an issue until a strong Fediverse culture is established. The times of pioneers are over, the times of “truly a place for everyone” are not yet there, and in between, we have a very weird mixture, sometimes bringing out the worst of many people.
I hope Fediverse will survive through this phase, and if yes, bright times will be ahead. But it will take a lot of work. Many non-political communities have already started blocking political content, and for the time being, I believe that’s for the better. People need a place to chill and have a corner of their own, not face what they ran away from in the first place.
Yeah I want to get off Reddit but this place is small and is very political. It’s a tiny echo chamber. A very very small one.
Imagine taking the technical and stubborn creme of the crop redditors and that’s who’s mostly on lemmy. It used to be those who wanted an open source community, but it got it’s user bumps during the reddit exodus. I would have never heard of lemmy if it wasn’t for the fact I used reddit exclusively through the redditsync app. And when that shut down I came here naturally on the backbone of the developer going here.
I’ve been here since. The community isn’t bad. I still get responses on niche things like gardening and fish tank related issues I had. It’s just 3 comments vs 30. But somehow it’s better. Because on reddit I can’t even get a post posted half the time, and the other half I find out I’m banned from that sub because of a comment I made years ago on a completely unrelated post on a sub I don’t even know.
It’s still a tiny echo chamber like it was a couple months ago when I cut back on Lemmy use. It can get pretty repetitive and boring to read. I came back to Reddit because the user base was larger and there were more perspectives I could hear from.
I am still using both. I have never been a big poster, but I like to think I can engage in discussion on just about anything,except Linux, and I really try (but fail) to avoid political shit, and so I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.
But I’ll keep coming back, I’ll hopefully contribute in some mental way to the growth, and perhaps niche subs can grow in popularity. One of my personal favorite subs on Reddit is homeimprovement, and it’s simply a matter of quantity as far as getting it just as good here.
Reading the comments here made me realize something.
It’s nice to have good content for niche communities that you enjoy but that’s always been a tall order. As in, a lot of things have to go right to get that organic community feeling and I’ve honestly always thought of it as a privilege and not a right.
I’ve seen plenty of communities die for various reasons or just been in a position where I didn’t have passion to go and talk about my niche interests.
So what’s my point? Niche communities are the icing on the cake of a good platform. When we mostly have for profit platforms and little main stream interest in standardized alternatives, you got to be more realistic.
Cath 22 ? If you cant be ass’d moving why would others, you’re just enabling the enshitifcation to continue
Community is what you make it.
You’re right in one sense; the community is small and can have an echo chamber effect like any “small village.” But you can also try other instances, or other Fediverse things or start your own. It goes like this; Reddit had success because they served you interesting things on a silver platter, using extensive venture capital to make it as slick and addictive and popular as possible. Lemmy is not built on capital, at least not on the same scale as Reddit; it is built on labor. You gotta decide what your ideal is.
Well Lemmy is a possible replacement for Reddit but, putting aside my strong biais for Lemmy, it doesn’t have to be a Reddit replacement for everyone and it is still building itself up. Here is a few tips to improve your time in hope you’ll find on the fediverse the space you look for :
Cheers!
Thank you for taking the time to write a thorough and actionable response! Great tips!
You’re welcome
It’s all I have for proper threading. I won’t forgive Reddit for how they treated me and my communities. But, if you are willing to use Reddit, I’m sure it’s going the have user advantage (and because of that niche interest advantage) for quite a while. I hope it serves your needs and brings you joy.
You might try building a community here, but that is the “slow boring of hard wood” and it can be difficult to find joy in, especially at first.
The timing of it all just didn’t add up. Reddit started small, too. By the time Reddit failed, Fediverse was still in its infancy, and the communities either stayed in corporate hell or found somewhere else.
i would also like to like lemmy.
Unfortunately it’s userbase seems to have a fairly significant infection of stupidity. (also the lemmy platform is just, underbaked, in general)
But i’m starting to think my standards of not being completely uneducated and spouting literal bullshit on things, is too high for most of the population…
I think i just have a problem with all of humanity, to be honest.
Well you should come hang out with us at Out of Context Comics! Not a lot of politics but a lot of gay innuendo. A lot.
lemmy.world/c/outofcontextcomics
Love it! Subscribing
Welcome aboard!
I like lemmy because I can’t doomscroll
Lurk on Reddit. Post on Lemmy.
hell yeah
From small seeds… I had noticed a huge improvement regarding lemmy posts and threads, before the US election, and then it all kind of went backwards.
But if you have any questions about anything - niche or otherwise, you should post them on lemmy, helping it to grow faster. Even if the answers can already be found in other community forums.
You should get specific replies to your question anyway, but also anyone coming behind you won’t have to go to reddit or any other place for the answer. It requires everyone to help, but questions are the fastest way to grow in most cases. Not including the likes of subs that can post original content, A TON of reposts on them too, but some OC. But mainly asking for help with anything should get people with knowledge on the subject replying. With the idea that eventually many answers can be found here without having to go elsewhere. Start ‘spamming’ your genuine questions now…
We have to be the thing we want to see out in the world. If we want open source communities and an internet free of corporate influence then we have to do the work required to build them. It’s not going to happen by magic.
Here’s something I learned, don’t be afraid to block. Political sub you don’t want? blocked. Person shouting about China in a cat sub? blocked.
Also add blacklisted keywords, it cuts down on politics a ton
Here is a list of keywords that I filter out. I also block all political content communities.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/c7001df5-dc9e-4a92-908b-20a2ed2e46f9.png">
i think that your experience is the most common experience that moonlighting & ex-redditors have with lemmy and is the biggest “sore spot” that most lemmings have.
like you, i hate how big tech enshitifies social media and that’s been making me move from one social media platform to the next since the 1990’s (since before it was called social media). i’m convinced that the enshitification is pushed by big tech’s investors in an effort to squeeze out as much profits from the platform as possible; resulting in the types of enshitification that you see on reddit, or facebook, or bluesky or etc. i think that this fact gives lemmy the best chance out of NOT enshitifying, or at least not as fast as reddit or bluesky did.
i used to be on reddit too, but lemmy works better for me and i think it’s because of what it was designed to do; it’s as if all the left leaning political subreddits (eg r/communism, r/socialism, r/anarchy, r/politics, etc.) got together to create their own social media safe space on the fediverse away from reddit’s toxicity. so they did in lemmy and; when the investors pushed u/spez to enshitify reddit; a whole bunch of people left reddit and filled the ranks of lemmy.
when that happened this tankie safe space did the same thing that its real-world counterpart safe-spaces-for-the-ostracized spaces do. like gay neighborhoods, they got gentrified by a MUCH LARGER group of people with better finances and social connections and, during the transition, there’s lots of things that the gentrifiers don’t like, like late night loud music; or lack of schools; or the “politics” (in this specific situation).
the gentrifiers usually succeed eventually and those pesky life-altering politics will be pushed aside like the high rents & $10 coffee shops push away the artists and agitators that originally made the neighborhood an attractive place to inhabit and they’ll go do it all over again in some other neighborhood somewhere else once they’re successfully pushed out where the cycle of humanity repeats itself all over again.
I agree with the politics. I just think drinking from a political fire hose is terrible for your mental health. Especially with all the doom and gloom after the election. What we need is for people to feel empowered against the incoming administration. I don’t think consuming an unhealthy amount of doomsday political content makes people feel free and empowered.
I think it’s less specific to Lemmy and more specific to the current US political situation. Before the election, there was a lot more hope, and I think I could have consumed much more political content without it negatively impacting me.
To be clear, I don’t want to switch off. We need to stay informed, and we need to know there are other people that want change. I guess what I’m trying to say is we need to take care of our own mental health so we can show up for the next battle.
So it’s less about “gentrification” of Lemmy and more about fostering a rich community that discusses more than just politics. Politics can be part of it, but not all of it.
It’s only seems like doomsday if you don’t learn from the people who had encountered it before and wrote down their experiences.
Empowerment is a side affect of knowledge; yet most Americans will never bother to avail themselves to the knowledge from people like marx or MLK Jr and that only leads us to those needful mental health breaks over and over again without ever fixing the root cause.
I like to cook vegan food and post about it 😊
Niches really need a way to advertise themselves and then congregate in one place. It’s a bit sad to see two communities for the same thing in different instances and neither get the critical mass of posters needed to survive.
In a way, it is. It’s also much further uphill if you consider it a solo task. These are absolutely valid things to vent about, even if they are solvable.
(I felt a lot more like this before the reddit API exodus)
Lemmy isn't just full of political content, but it's also full of assholes too that take advantage of the small sized community of Lemmy and other instances. So this gives the impression that it's simply a clique that runs around 'running things' and by that, just kissing ass to mods and making you out to be the problem when it was started by them.
With politically charged content and just random pricks mixed in, it's going to be a hard sell for anybody to stick around here on Lemmy. Moreso, the lack of niche communities, will not give anyone a sense of belonging.
That's what Reddit will always have in spades against Lemmy. Lemmy just seems to be populated with political people, nerds into programming, jackasses and aimless wanderers.
For context : feddit.org/post/5147326