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).
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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.