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).
On the other hand, Lemmy is full of political content lately.
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.
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.
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.
Joining an existing community is usually easier than starting a new one.
!newcommunities@lemmy.world can be a place to find an existing community?
Joining an existing community is usually easier than starting a new one.
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.
Enjoy being the only one posting.
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.
Mass adoption is fundamental to make any social media viable;
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
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.
I know I can post and be the change I seek.
Imo, this is your answer. I’m not sure exactly 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.
deleted by creator
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 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.
Why not create a thread on a genre community like !jrpg@lemmy.zip or !fgc@lemmy.world ?
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
I like to cook vegan food and post about it 😊
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.
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.
Lately I tend to prefer lemmy over Reddit and mastodon too. It’s all about content I agree.
Is there a way to ‘view all images’ like RES has a button for?
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.
Block FlyingSquid, it improves the community a huge amount.
Block FlyingSquid
You mean the user that moderates some Star Trek stuff and Out of Context Comics? What’s the problem..?
Do it before they drag you into an argument, lose, then ban you.
You’d be blocking half of Lemmy.
