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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 cats
The voids whence the content shall come!
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.
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.
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.
I know I can post and be the change I seek.
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.
All I’m getting lately in my feed are cats!
Not a bug! That’s a feature.
Honestly, that was what early reddit was like too. Lots and lots of cat pics.
Would you rather have cats or beans?
Cats have beans, duh.
Beans have cats, duh.
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.
Straight to jail. Right away.
Everything Whedon has ever done was mid, and I’m going to be banned for saying that, probably.
Yeah, I think it makes waaay more sense to complain about US politics infecting all of social media.
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”
reddit was once smaller than it is now too
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
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 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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
