It seems like any platform that features link aggregation is soon overrun by bots and self-promoters trying to drive traffic, and pages and pages of link posts versus pages and pages of people talking.
Are there any lemmy instances or other defederated networks that focus on Q&A, niche communities, and people conversing, instead?
Mastodon is much more this way than Lemmy, in my experience. I honestly don’t know too many Lemmy communities that are that way, but kbin / mbin will let you interact with Mastodon users on a chat basis in addition to Lemmy communities.
I always thought there was no big difference between link aggregators and forums, and that the first is more an extension of the other, at least it felt like it in my experience. What would you say really sets them apart?
This thread is a great example of the big downside of being on a smaller instance: OP was seemingly unaware and unable to subscribe to many cool communities and was stuck with the “defaults”.
Perhaps admins and mods of smaller instances could be doing more to educate their users about how to find stuff in the wider Threadiverse?
When we had the big migration last year everyone quickly learned how to search for a community, how you had to do it twice for it to show up etc. But now it’s no longer a common topic of conversation so newer users don’t realise, and to make matters worse every single mobile app seems to handle search differently.
Is there some kind of “so, you’re on a small instance, here’s what that means” type of resource already hanging around somewhere?
(OP, get yourself on lemmyverse.net/communities)
Many instances have a chat community. Some examples: !chat@beehaw.org !chat@lemmy.one !chat@iusearchlinux.fyi !chat@midwest.social !general@lemmy.today !chat@lemmy.world
I dont mean a chat/conversation-specific community, I mean a collection of communities that are more people interacting than links being posted.
Especially for hobby, parenting, philosophy, politics, technical discussions, etc.
I noticed that beehaw.org on average has more “normal posts” (not links) than other instances. I found communities there for the topics you are interested in like technology, politics and parenting. It’s not completely link-free, but I’d say there are fewer links than elsewhere. That’s the best I could find on the Fediverse. Maybe someone else has better suggestions.
For hobbies, depends, but there is the general pinned post in !knitting@lemmy.world which list a lot of crafting communities: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/842186
For parenting: !parenting@lemmy.world
Politics, you should be able to find a lot by searching that word into https://lemmyverse.net/
Finance? !finance@lemmy.ml
The thing is that people tend to post links as you can’t really force people to post if they don’t want to (or if they critical mass isn’t there). I’m guilty of that in the !parenting@lemmy.world for instance, as I don’t have kids yet, I can only but post articles.
Maybe the instance I’m on is wonky, because I can’t even find those communities - I just get the “top”/”default” type communities ala reddit: technology, news, etc, which are all linked mass media articles.
Usenet still exists, and there are tons of old fashioned forums online, some of them good. Lemmy has its attractions but it is trying to be Reddit and maybe succeeding a little too well.
I have thought for a while that the next “reddit” should be usenet with a client having advanced filtering, local scoring, etc. Maybe where the client reports to/reads from a shared spam database.
Depends what topics you are looking for. They tend to focus on particular niches. Example: home-barista.com, for coffee nerds. I’m not a regular but have posted there a few times.
