1mo ago

I really want to like Lemmy

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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267 comments

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?
  
  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
  
  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.
- 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.

267 comments