Ask Lemmy

I want to see more micro-communities. I want to read about how passionate people are about niche hobbies or interests that appeal them.

I'm tired of the staple stuff like, we always have to have politics, memes, news, games .etc We already have an abundance of those.

I just came from Reddit, so I am still in my honeymoon period. Feels like a breathe of fresh air to me.

I think it's in a great position and only needs more instances that respect freedom of speech.

Probably my biggest complaint is users saying there should be more censorship. You have the block button, use it.

Tech communities make sense. That's where a lot of it started on other sites (Slashdot, Digg, Reddit) and the first user-base I'd expect to move. The rest will likely stay where they're "comfortable" until the water gets too hot

It's like Reddit a long, long time ago before it started going to absolute shit.

So I'm liking it.

Personally, I'm experiencing the opposite as far as activity. I joined about 1.5 years ago and there's definitely been a noticable increase in activity in that time. I'm seeing more upvotes and comments than when I joined.

First of all, no, does not feel dead to me at all.

Secondly, be the change you want to see. You've been here 2 years and 8 months and according to your stats you do not even make a comment a day. The more people like this, the more dead the place feels.

That's not how I experience it. A few key blocks and I'm not seeing a bunch of assholery. Content isn't endless, but there's almost always something to talk about.

I suspect it depends a great deal on subs, interests, and sort order.

My two main issues are that I don’t want to keep seeing the same post repeated again and again as I scroll, and I want to be able to find a topic and not have to wrestle with all the different communities around the same thing. I just search for a simple topic and often there’s 20 with the same name and I have to find the one that everyone’s using.

There are too many unhinged nut jobs who are only here to cause drama and stir controversy, and way too much emphasis on their pet issues. They suck and if you get in their cross hairs they will harass you for days due to their intensive sense of personal victimhood and moral righteousness.

I want more reasonable laid back people with interesting things to say who are decent to each other. But it doesn't seem like the numbers of those folks are growing, more just a consistent number who probably have massive block lists or have de-federated from the problematic/extremist instances.

There is also a new influx of really really dumb people who spam stupid content, who on the surface seem to be teenagers? I don't know what is up with that. I have blocked a bunch of accounts that are doing this, who ask this community and others like it, really dumb stuff like 'why doesn't my poop smell?' 6x a day.

It's not bad! But it requires a learning curve to actually find stuff vs having the algorithm find stuff for you.

But without active community posts and stuff, it does feel more slower paced. But the price of no corporations and ad free experience is hard to beat.

I'm surprised there aren't more links to substacks. I don't expect lemmy to be a news aggregator but to be more like a source of opinions instead.

Cant expect a reddit alternative without corporate interests involved.

It's fine. There's enough activity to keep me in content (as much as I need content), and I don't see the hate as much as you report.

The only thing wrong with it from my perspective is that Trump and American politics is poisoning it, but they're poisoning the entire world so...

Sounds like you should adjust your subscriptions?

This place feels dead. It’s usually quite, but lately it really feels like a ghost town.

The place has a much smaller population, of which an even tinier amount is active. So there is much less content published. One solution is to participate more but too few people seem willing to do it. An other solution would be to make the space more attractive to more users but, like you noticed...

The amount of genuinely hateful content has gone up.

I've been saying it since I first joined the Fediverse: default experience is... trash, unless you're looking for some echo chamber for your pre-existing biases that is. Some may enjoy that experience, I certainly did not, and most people won't either.

1. New/default experience should be an empty feed, with a few limited broad suggestions allowing them to slowly get in whatever they're interested and willing to read (even trash content if that's their thing).
2. Learning to use the filtering tools is key and should be encouraged.
   Personally, I have had a real nice and pleasant experience browsing Piefed because I learned to use those tools: 1) limiting my home page to 'Subscribed' only (filtering out all political/memes/low effort content, because 2) I carefully select the communities I'm subscribed to, 3) Piefed making it so simple to filter out keywords and annoying users alike, I never hesitate to use that and, no, I don't care to block them even if we're already short on users: my time is too precious to waste it with serial haters and complainers, or self-proclaimed white knights for such or such 'noble cause'.

Outside of the tech communities, there’s no information hygiene anywhere in sight.

I've never seen much of any kind of (an information) hygiene, anywhere online. Certainly not on Reddit... save on very few selected subs... exactly like I can see here.

But once again, one can easily filter the worst offenders in a matter of seconds. Then, it's up to anyone to stick to it: once I blocked them, I certainly don't 'check from time to time' to see if they're getting any better. I let them play in their shit pool to their heart's content, throwing more of it at one another: it doesn't concern me anymore. And for that I must say I quite like the filtering tools piefed gives us.

the community felt more down to earth, kind, and friendly,

It depends where you look at. When I joined (two or three years ago? I was on Lemmy, before switching to Piefed) the amount of sheer hate that was expressed and that I witnessed was... disturbing, to say the least. I don't think it has become worse but I could not tell since I learned to filter the sources out.

I wish for the devs to more seriously consider the out of the box experience for a new user and, maybe, consider that not all new users will share their political/personal/philosophical values or biases. I certainly don't agree with many of the ideas I can see expressed around here, but I'm also old enough to be fine with people having different opinions, and patient enough to see if I can make the tool work more like I want it to and reduce what I consider noise.

edit: typos.

I see this thread has many people saying that they don't see a problem and it must be because of the local and personal blocklists.

I see comments saying it's because they are using Lemmy or Piefed.

I've blocked nothing. I scroll through /c/all every day and I don't feel like there is a hate or dodgy content problem.

I've actually been having a pretty good time lately. I like that the communities are smaller and more personal (especially compared to coming from reddit where some of the communities I was in were massive).

Depends where you're looking. It's not as active as Reddit for sure, but it also has far fewer non-humans too which seems to be the majority of Reddit these days - either repost bots or even comment bots so the activity isnt real, it's a mere simulation. I don't fear that here. PugJesus is real. 😃

I'd say it's sort of the opposite. When I first looked into the Fediverse, Lemmy.ml was the juggernaut sub. They were and sort of still are filled with tankies (literally stands for Marxist Leninist). Now there is more variety of instances, Piefed has better moderating tools and combines cross post comments which is why I used that, and user base is slowly growing over time as Reddit and everyone else continue to fuck up. Sure there is still a lot less content, but that's infinitely more preferable to liking a comment and then someone pointing out the comment was stolen from an 11 year old post by a bot.

The hate is definitely spreading, and nuance is going out the window.
Threads about some subjects legit scare me, with the rabid hate and demand for ideological purity that oozes out of the comment section.

I feel like the voting culture of Lemmy is not conductive to good conversation or anything more than blind agreement. It's certainly helped by the fact that Lemmy's algorithm is more willing to show newer posts and comments (as opposed to merely popular ones), but people on Lemmy seem to be very willing to downvote content that they don't agree with, or downvote news that they don't like (regardless of the informative quality of said news), or just downvote anything that may contradict their pre-existing notions of how stuff works. It's more hostile than Reddit, and it seems like everyone, especially in the political communities, is wanting to start an argument here, sometimes over the dumbest things. Look in your average Reddit comment thread, and you see pages of jokes, memes, people sharing stories, and just generally having a good time. Look in your average Lemmy comment thread, and you see two people arguing over a dumb political point.

This place feels dead.

I've been here every day for the last few years and it doesn't really feel that way.

The amount of genuinely hateful content has gone up

I haven't really encountered any "hateful" content. There is however a lot of far left teenage dweebs who can be just relentless. Over time I've become more trigger-happy with the block button.

no information hygiene

I suspect you may have encountered this on posts from some of the instances I have blocked. They're very well known and many instances have defederated from them. the news communities on lemmy.world don't seem terrible ?

All of that said ...

I don't particularly like the fediverse myself. I find I spend an equal amount of time on a redlib (reddit) instance. There's more content, it's more engaging, and news seems to drop there first.

As a tangentially related aside... switch over to piefed. The lemmy devs are supporting all three problems you've mentioned IMO.

Personally, I haven't noticed a decrease in content, but I have noticed a significant dropoff in quality of content, and in it's place, has mostly grown toxicity. None of the racism, or anything that extreme (although, from what I've seen, my instance moderators have been doing a good job,) but so much of the content is insults, unhelpful snark, doomerism, elitism, and just general bad-faith arguments. It feels like all those who wantted to be helpful or supportive have given up or left, meaning no high-quality content and no meaningful discourse.

That said, it also feels like a wider cultural shift thats happened in the last year or so. Online culture as a whole feels more toxic, with fewer places to go for positivity or constructivity, and far more hate and abuse.

I feel like your comment of (2) contradicts (3) to some degree. I agree the wider culture of lemmy is progressive/left, but that at least indirectly contradicts the prominence of racist content that you claim exists.

1. So how often do you post and make the change you want to see?

2. Hmm.

3. Can you give an example of this "weak source or false claims" in the news here? I see the usual suspects when I look: Reuters, guardian, AP, BBC, Al Jazeera, etc.

I never browse all though, I only go to the 50 or so groups I belong to, and remember to sort by scaled once in a while.

I do believe there are more bots or at least propaganda accounts, or maybe people causing friction. Don't know if its state sponsored or just a sign of the times.

It feels like activity has dropped off a bit since the last Reddit exodus. And I worry that this platform is never going to see the kind of critical mass I'd want out of it, to be big enough that I can use it to discuss more niche topics and fandoms than what's currently on offer here. I see communities get made and die off on the regular from people who want to use this platform they way they used Reddit but quickly realize they can't.

I'm still here because I believe in the ideals of a federated platform, but I just don't know what the future holds at this rate.

I think this place starts to feel dead when atrocities are committed, then we get zillions of the same posts, rightfully so because these things should not be ignored, but then it seems like nothing else is really happening here.
I agree with you on the shitty sources. The ones that spread misinfo will spam a wall of text with links to 'sources' and trying to call them out becomes an overwhelming chore. Then the extremely toxic 'did you read the article??!?' when the source is just some shitty opinion blog. It's exhausting, which is why they do it.

I don't really see the widespread racism you claim exists here, with Lemmy being one of the least racist Western online spaces I've ever been in...

And idk what you mean by dead. Compared to what? I feel like I see the same usernames pop up often, because we have a community of regulars. I don't think I need it to be more "active", and it certainly beats the more bot-infested "larger" online communities.

Also, if you really dislike the "leftist" population/takes on Lemmy, why don't you just go back to Reddit? Like, in earnest, they have a lot of uhh "right wing" stances and all big subreddits support the American empire and silence anyone who disagrees. Just make a new account and resettle there, it'll be more to your liking!

From the communities ive interacted with, defs feels dead compared to other places. Does suck when scrolling through the news feed and getting caught up way too quickly.

But there seems to be a fair chunk of aussies on here thats kept me on here

Building critical mass is difficult because people created communities that have barely any activity.

The way you build a platform is to encourage less categorization until a specific topic needs to be split off.