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?
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.
What interests do you have that aren’t found here? Some tiny niche interest communities are being built, you sometimes just gotta find em
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.
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.
- 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.
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
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.
!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
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.
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.
If you’re looking for a community that doesn’t exist, you gotta create it. People will come.
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.
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
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.
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.
Did you ever get into a huge fight with a partner, then patched things up, except your feelings had changed as a result of the fight?
That’s how I feel about Reddit. It’s the same place, but the magic is gone for me.
I don’t think Lemmy fills that void entirely, but it does a good enough job. I miss some communities, but I like that the big communities are small enough here that I can reply to any one I choose and get meaningful discussions out of it. It’s tiring to always come too late into interesting topics on Reddit and just throw my comments into the void.
Still plenty of space for Lemmy to grow, but I’m already content with what’s here. I don’t really go back to Reddit unless I want to discuss a niche topic in a sub that hasn’t migrated to the Fediverse.
Completely agree. I used to scroll reddit for hours a day, for the last 10-15 years. I had many accounts and thousands of comments. I deleted everything in July but continued to use libreddit and teddit daily for a few weeks, until both of those were also killed.
Reddit is dead for me now. I still check in to old every few days, but as it’s shit on mobile I only view the front page for 10 mins and go back to hacker news or here. The 3rd party clients were really the only reason I got hooked and used it for so long. When spez kills old my usage will stop completely… I suspect that’ll happen before the years end.
I’ve noticed Reddit is full of people who just don’t understand how Reddit is supposed to work. Comments stopped being fun and it just feels like Facebook now
Nope. Their app and their CEO are both garbage, I’m not supporting either
Reddit isn’t fun anymore, I agree with that. I checked /r/all for this first time today in months. I haven’t logged in or browsed since the blackout, but there are a few communities I miss and was thinking about going back over for those, so I checked r/all out of curiosity to see how things have been. The content was just so much trash, and I don’t even think it’s that much worse. It’s just that I’ve been away for so long that I’m looking at it now like “how did I spend my days scrolling through this garbage for hours?” It’s just boring, it’s like just interesting enough to keep you scrolling hoping to find something actually interesting.
Here on lemmy there is far fewer users and far less content. But I’m starting to see that as a good thing. I pop by and scroll, but I don’t spend hours here like I did on reddit. The discussions are smaller, but more engaging and thoughtful. I remember before I left there were certain threads I’d see and just skip because I already knew exactly what all the comments would be. Also, I’m actively engaging more here, so there is actually some “social” in my social media use, instead of just passively consuming like I mostly did on reddit.
Overall I think ithe switch to Lemmy has been good, for me at least. It’s like I’ve broken the reddit addiction, and looking at it now I can’t understand why I got so caught up with it in the first place. To me, reddit just isn’t fun anymore.
