There was a lot of engagement in the communities I participate up until a couple of years ago. People were interested and actively discussing a lot of topics. There were a lot of newbies asking questions and people proposing different ways for tasks.
Is it just me or did it reduce a lot? LLMs? Company forums? Other forums I did not move to (e.g. discord)? Reduced interest? Or is it just subjective?
We’re all jobless and don’t want to talk about it.
As the kind of noob type to ask dumb questions, I talk out a lot of issues with larger LLM’s now. What I can not, I ask here.
I feel like the forums logins thing is too antiquated. I wish they would all be on the fediverse and compatible with Lemmy. I would love the depth and scope of many forums as niche communities with their own trees of subjects and discussions.
Even this is forum-like though. It’s a forum of people talking about a topic that interests them. It just happens to be distributed.
Yeah, but it lacks the tree that tends to support more specialization. I still get on the EEVBlog forum from time to time but that kind of concentration of specialization is just not the default.
To replicate that kind of ecosystem I think the platform would need a similar complex branching hierarchy and far more effective utility for searching. The element of time is too prioritized on a link aggregator like Lemmy. Community depth of specialization remains shallow because more intellectual engagement is slower and the mechanics of most recent comment engagement are not effective/implemented. Places like the EEVBlog often have the most engagement on very old threads that also concentrate a ton of history and useful information within the single thread. These threads are the primary anchor for the whole community. I think it would take some novel innovation to bridge a link aggregator’s ADHD with a forum’s depth and utility.
It’s no reddit in terms of quantity but honesty I’ve had higher quality topics and discussions here than there. Lemmy/kbin might not have taken off in the mainstream to offer a variety of subjects but when it comes to tech and software I think it’s covered well enough and people are generally nicer about it. The main problem is lack of (remotely) good seach function, I dont think the threads are getting indexed by google and the on-site search is atrocious.
I don’t know of any discord programming communities, I wish forums were still a thing but the only live one I know of is the jellyfin one after they moved from reddit. Other than that it’s here or the various subreddits
Tangentially, there’s a whole bunch of issues going on with the programming.dev server for one. See at !meta@programming.dev. Lemmy’s upcoming upgrade to 0.19.6 should help - see https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623 and https://feddit.org/post/3524876 discussing it.
Sorry for the confusion. I wasn’t talking about programming.dev. i thought that’s obvious because p.dev isn’t that old
Your account info says you joined Lemmy a couple of years ago. Could that have something to do with it? Could be that there are simply fewer of us here than wherever you were before.
Also, if Reddit is one of your haunts, keep in mind that a lot of communities there partially dispersed a little over a year ago, and not everyone has reappeared in the same place (or at all).
