So I’ve switched to lemmy since the reddit meltdown started, experienced quite some withdrawal symptoms, occasionally turned back to reddit, more often logged out than logged in. Now I am merely using Lemmy occasionally and by far not as often as I used reddit before. No more doom scrolling.

So far so good.

Today I went on reddit for the first time in like 3 weeks straight (I couldn’t do that for the last years… yeah, I was very addicted in hindsight). I just… I don’t know what it is.

Reddit just isn’t fun anymore.

I turned away after maybe 5 minutes. There were maybe 2-3 repost-worthy pics, one interesting video and a few small niche discussions that all went straight tits up within a few replies.

If I ask a question on lemmy, it usually is a straightforward, honest discussion. Almost no blaming of the posters or answerers misunderstandings or senseless answers. It goes a bit back and forth usually and people tend to thank each other for corrections. I can’t remember when that happened on a reddit discussion. Maybe years back? Anyway, I’m not going back there anymore, not because I hate the CEO, but because reddit is not fun anymore. Lost all interest in it.

Did anyone of you have a similar experience?

117 points

Idk I don’t exactly find Lemmy a bastion of my interests. It’s very clear the community is far smaller. The niche communities of topics im interested are mostly nonexistent and it’s largely a sea of memes and references I don’t remotely understand or care to. Something about communists or some shit? What? Pass.

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7 points

If you’re looking for a community that doesn’t exist, you gotta create it. People will come.

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30 points

Not OP but the issue isn’t creating the space, but creating content in that space. Growing a community is a lot of work. Unless you already have some strong engagement and or a few people creating content it’s really just up to you to keep making post until the community gets more traction. Most people like the idea of starting the new community but not the work it requires as it often just feels like yelling into the void.

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13 points

Community building is more about moderation and evangelism than it is about clicking a button. Its a ton of work. People think a lot of the time you just kinda declare a forum and then it happens. I moderated a community of like 5 people for a while and even just THAT was exhausting and time consuming

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5 points

I mean the organic growth of my book and writing focused instance has been pretty solid. It’s not giant, but the people are there. When community discovery is better in lemmy it’ll improve as well.

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26 points

What interests do you have that aren’t found here? Some tiny niche interest communities are being built, you sometimes just gotta find em

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3 points

I miss my American Dad! community

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26 points
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They’re typically so small there is a post a week and few if any comments.

Also I find it’s difficult to find communities in the first place.

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7 points

What interests do you have that aren’t found here?

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15 points

Speaking as someone actively building niche focused communities (literature.cafe for books and writing & lemmyloves.art for art) this kind of defeatist attitude saddens me. Community’s don’t explode over night. I fully get that community discovery is hard as hell right now though with lemmy, and attempts are being made to fix it. But with the communities that do exist, it’s a matter of participating and starting conversations if you don’t see one you want to participate in. On a new and emerging platform like this, you really can’t be a lurker. Posting, commenting, engagement, and likes is the only currency here.

The thing with lemmy is that it does feel like screaming into the void sometimes, but you also have the benefit of a smaller community to have more focused discussions. Quality over quantity is the focus here rather than the mess that reddit had. Reddit has tons of content but a large portion of that is just noise and spam, it is much more preferable to have a high quality post once a day with an engaging and thoughtful discussion than a community filled with low quality spam most of the time and only one high quality post a day that’s nearly impossible to find.

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8 points
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Yeah, lots of niche communities are dead compared to their subreddit counterparts. Examples: OnePiece, AvatarTLA, VentureBros, Plex, and the subreddit for my town. I’m hoping this changes over time, but I still find myself going back to Reddit periodically.

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1 point

!futurama@lemmy.world has been quite active following the release of the new seasons.

I guess that completed franchises can only have so much activity

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16 points
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  • there’s half a dozen sewing communities, but no one posts in them
  • fashion communities are also barren
  • pretty sure I’m the only person posting in !DCComics@lemmy.ml out of 200 subscribers. I’m not a mod there (the og mod is an empty account with no comments/posts) and it’s not a community I want to recreate on my instance.
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3 points

You should ask an admin to be a mod.

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1 point

What fashion communities exist? Just curious, that’s a topic I’m really not familiar with

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6 points

same with food, apparently there’s no foodies here, as there is a serious lack of burgers/pizza/ramen/pho communities, people shared their photos, recipes etc on reddit

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6 points

Fitness, /r/fitness is in the top 20 or so.

Food and icecream.

It seems mainly tech talk here, and anti Windows everywhere.

But based on my posts, someone decided to replace his petrol car with a Leaf. Someone else got into Home Assistant because of me. So it has its goods sides as well.

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6 points

Boats, fibre arts in general - sailing, sewing in particular. Also small city communities. Reddit had town subs, lemmy has nothing under the provincial level for me.

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2 points

The reason is because people aren’t creating those communities on here. If you want a community, the best step is to do it yourself, unfortunately.

You can try to talk to subreddit admin or mod team about it, but I think it’s just that Lemmy needs more people to “do” than “want” if you understand what I’m saying.

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9 points

I love Lemmy, but I really struggle with the content here. Of course things are a little bare, but I have been able to find some really good stuff. My engagement is a lot higher here than on Reddit. However I find the litany of anti-work and political/left/right posts insufferable. They’re everywhere here. At least on Reddit I felt like I could insulate myself reasonably well from political stuff. c/mildlyinfuriating is an example of this. At least half of the posts I come across are blatantly political or are anti-work. I get it, work sucks and you don’t want to work and rich people/landlords bad. R/mildlyinfurating is a much better sub than ours is a community, imo. But I can’t surround myself with this kind of Lemmy content every day because it just angers me and I didn’t go to reddit to be angry every day. I have found myself drifting back to reddit for 60% of my usage. I hope this changes. I’ve tried to sub to different communities as well to limit how much I have to read about the latest communists and nazis and racists/fascists and tankies and all that Lemmy bullshit. Clearly I need to do a better job.

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10 points
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I’m back to Reddit, I kinda gave up here, but I’ll look a couple of times a week.

Too much politics. Linux. Privacy. Bidet talk. ADHD. Bad memes. Techbabble. Snore

No matter the filters I just can’t get an interesting feed, I just blocked about 6 political subs just today - it’s kinda shitty content imo (for me anyway)

I’m happy this exists but the rage honeymoons over for me. Old habits die hard I guess ……now………back to arguing with bots!!

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Do you consider anything that mentions politics boring? Do you have no interest in international relations? I understand if you’re not from the US, but there’s a lot of good information in those posts.

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8 points

Yep! I don’t care about trump, elon musk and what lame alternative to discord there is. Slowly blocking stuff will be the way I guess

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Fair enough. Then I imagine c/Everything would be a drag.

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4 points

Is that really so strange? Personally I don’t care about any level of politics or news outside of a couple of fields in general, certainly don’t care for it being on social media. Generally it seems that if it is actually important I will find out about it one way or another anyway.

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3 points

Pretty much. I really struggle here to limit how much I have to read about politics, “tankies,” fascists/communists, nazis, defederation, etc. It’s everywhere. For fuck’s sake at least I felt insulated from political shit on Reddit for the most part. Yes, I know everyone thinks the USA sucks, landlords are bad, the rich should be shaken down, etc. Maybe that’s true! But I can’t listen to this shit anymore and it’s pushing me away from this site.

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1 point

I share a bit of the same feeling. Too much memes, tech, politics, news.

What other interests do you have?

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1 point

Me too is not that interested in most communities here. All you have to change is the default setting in your profile to “subscribed” instead of “local”. That’s the same mechanism as reddit had.

But yes, the amount of discussion here is limited. But not in a bad way. More like, concentrated rather than spread out. If you want to give it a try, go here:

https://browse.feddit.de/

Just look up the most active community for your specific interest and hope for the best. Worked for my few interests.

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3 points

I only go back sometimes because I find more cute anime content there than here.

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1 point

I really hope that major parts of the anime community switch to lemmy. Of course so that I can enjoy the view, but also because I feel the missing Karma feature discourages bot content and the fediverse nature makes it hard for bad players to actually achieve anything. Commercialisation is also hard, as anyone can just switch instance if they like.

Anyway, we need more Waifus here.

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5 points

Same here. Hell even Lemmy doesn’t quite scratch that itch, all the niche communities are gone and all thats left are communists, old memes, basic porn, and generally low quality posts.

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0 points

I downloaded infinity for reddit. Scrolled few post and deleted the app. Back to lemmy.

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2 points

BTW: Infinity for Lemmy exists!

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0 points

Yeap,already downloaded. Its new name is eternity.

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