To be fair Lemmy feels like a brand new mall of stores with empty shelves.
A lot of empty stores, and then the big anchor stores are full of depressing doomer news articles
Don’t forget the hexbears:
“You’re all warmongering fascists except Putin!!!”
It’s always sad when you go to a community for something you like, something that’s widely popular, and see the newest post is 2 days old.
Especially when you’re the only one posting. At some point, it feels a little like you’re spamming the sub, even if you are the only one keeping it active.
Pretty sure reddit was full of laments about Digg when that mass exodus happened. Stuff takes a while to build momentum.
Hard truth? Reddit conditioned me to NOT participate.
Nearly time I wanted to discuss something or ask something important to me, my posts were deleted by mods. The few times posts would stay was because they were meme shitposts of easily digestible image content: scroll and move along. Any actual discussion was verboten.
/r/mk mods were particularly awful. Fuck those guys.
The thing you must understand about /r/mk is that it was largely sheperded by a man who was driven from the other major mechanical keyboard forums for being too much of a self-promoter. It’s possible the entire organization still has residual brittle-ego.
If you want proper keyboard discussion, do check Deskthority; the content is a lot richer than “here’s a photo of my board which is just a Taco Bell permutation of the current popular PCB/case/caps/switches”
The userbase is significantly bigger than some fairly decent forums that I use or used to visit. The problem is rather the behaviour of the users (reddit started to favour more Instagram-like behaviour of scrolling and “liking” rather than normal forum-like dialogue, especially when you look at r/all, and I think we’re yet to grow out of it fully), and their relatively narrow range of interests (tech + political news) that leaves the other areas empty.
True, I just wish there was more content on some of the smaller niche communities but I guess that it takes time for it to grow and that doesn’t happen overnight.
It relies on people like you to spark discussion and content. Ask questions and interact with your favourite topics! Crosspost and shamelessly plug your favourite community (Shoutout to !boardgames@feddit.de)
So get out there and make Lemmy the lively place you want it to be.
Well said. At this point there’s so much pre-existing content on Reddit that I rarely feel the desire to post or comment anymore. These days an upvote or downvote is usually the extent of my interactions over there.
Being part of this early, and relatively small, userbase on Lemmy means the content has to (gets to?) come from us. Instead of just scrolling through content we get to share interesting things and help build communities, and I find that rather exciting!
Oh and thanks for the link to the boardgame community!
And all the customers do nothing but scream about politics in every section.
The “mall” analogy works for Reddit because the point of it existing is to buy things there. Lemmy instances and communities only exist because people want to make space for conversation. If spaces are empty, I see that as a sign that someone, somewhere cares so much that they will happy build the space and wait for others to arrive.
