[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation

Matured? Really? I guess you haven't had a taste of the defederation drama. Users are great, but discussion between admins feel like the constant bickering of small children. And I say this as an admin myself, who at times does take part in those discussions. I think we still have a long way to go, when it comes to being matured.

I have noticed that many users are highly technical. I am not technical at all yet I am here because my technical friend showed me how to sign up and which app to use. I think people from marketing background should create guides / poster on how to use Lemmy for people like me who dont have a technical friends.

For non political content, not bad, of course a lot smaller than reddit, but it's a good start.

But the left wing populism echochamber is a bit annoying. It's ok to have an opinion, but all the silly so easy to refute things that get repeated here over & over again because it sounds nice & fits the agenda is just annoying... "Why do billionaires need more money?" because they're addicted to ego & power, it's not about the money. "The right wing are so violent, we are the good guys", every other thread: eat the rich, prepare the guillotines. -insert a not so common incident that supports an agenda- 'see, this happens all the time, we should do -insert short sighted measure that will just cause different problems-. etc...

I'd love all those topics to be actually seriously discussed here, but so far it feels like it's just edgy teens shouting whatever fits the popular narratatives...

There's a lot of IT/software engineer here. I'm fine with it, especially since I'm a software engineer myself, but it would be better if there's more variants of people here.

Even more US centric. This means that all the political posts are too US-centric, I'm fine with political discussion, but damn, I don't care about that country too much.

What is kind of putting me off Lemmy is the amount of tankies. I understand they are actually far left from Reddit who migrated, but they're just damn idiots and are simping for Putin (yes, I'm aware that some of them could be St Petersburg-based Russian trolls larping as tankies).

I found a lot of people who are willing to put effort in posting and commenting.

Compared to Reddit, it's pretty empty still. On Reddit I literally never saw a post twice on my subscribed feed.

Now I'm subscribed to roughly the same number of communities and it takes 2-3 days for my feed to completely renew... Many of the subreddits I used to frequent still don't even exist on Lemmy, despite them being pretty popular over on Reddit.

Like a lot of people, I came here around the API protests at Reddit. Back then Lemmy was filled with "fuck reddit" circlejerking which was made worse by the relative lack of other content. But I have watched this place grow and mature into something I would consider a suitable replacement for the most part. That said, the amount of content here still pales in comparison to Reddit back when I was actually there. As for all the complaints about the culture here, you get what you dont filter and I filter the trash out of my feed.

Feels like an echo chamber filled with angry political activists that seem more interested in hating and breaking things rather than discussing solutions. Can't say I like it here but for some reason I keep coming back. I probably block on average 3 to 7 people a day but doesn't seem to make much of a difference. Makes me further lose my hope in humanity if I'm completely honest.

I'm only here because of an unjust reddit ban, and I'm very sad to say that I still would prefer reddit to this. The shear scale of reddit means there was always something interesting me through the far more varied and active communities available there. Lemmy is great and all, but I feel way less engaged with anything going on

I was active, and even a recognized name on some subs where I was particularly active, but here, those same communities are either woefully underpopulated and inactive, or just straight up don't exist. When I need to ask questions or get a wide variety of opinions, or even share a story, I knew reddit had enough activity for me to get at least some traffic. Here, I haven't even made a post

Sorry, Lemmy, but we're only together because reddit left. You're my rebound

Personally, I find the people here very elitist and unwelcoming, and I have found myself spending less and less time here because of it.

I really like how when I post a comment on a thread it doesn’t get immediately buried.

I never had a reddit account so I used it's implosion as a push off to set me free from 4chan but also not going to that overly policed place.

I think Lemmy is a nice middle ground.

Technically speaking Lemmy's improved a fair amount since before it blew up in popularity (compared to pre-Reddit API shenanigans), but it's still lacking in a variety of other areas, e.g. moderation tools & lack of any sort of modmail to avoid having to coordinate off-site, user tools/settings related to privacy and federation such as hiding profile elements or the opposite like enabling a microblog-esque mode for federating with Mastodon/Misskey/etc., and some other odds and ends (like not being able to mute/disable notifications for posts/comments, sorry OP!).

Culturally speaking Lemmy has similar problems as other federated platforms in that to this day no one seems to have worked out a way to better communicate them so that they're more widely adopted and grow significantly beyond the early adopter Linux/techie crowds (Mastodon's very gradually been getting there though). Some people also much prefer that, which is part of why and how these platforms have remained that way, but they seem to forget that small communities can exist within larger communities, and with well-developed federated platforms, ideally one could better curate their spaces more than they ever could in more popular corporate platforms.

Also regarding content, it's in a weird spot. There's a decent amount of it, but part of the problem is that it's neither all that varied nor original. There's a glut of news, political/technology mainly, memes/shitposts, many of which being older and thus reposted, and some mix of technology posts in general, then there's kind of everything else. If we were to throw together BS percentages, I'd maybe guess at like 32/32/32 of news/memes/tech, with the remaining 4% being everything else.

The issue then is, much of that content you can easily find on more popular platforms with greater variety and also originality, with potentially timelier posting, so outside of principles, what's the draw of any of the Lemmy instances? I think there's greater potential with more topic-focused instances (e.g. programming.dev/ani.social/etc.) and original content. That is, compared to the corporate models of attempting to be everything for everyone but really no one, and in turn also opaquely barring/removing/demonetizing creative content due to some ambiguous advertiser/copyright compliance measures.

Unfortunately you hit a causal conundrum where there aren't enough people yet for others to justify contributing original material, and there's not enough original material to draw enough people here to justify creating it and on and on. Classic network effect situation, in other words, which in turn also affects variety and timeliness of posts, and leaves everything in an awkward limbo state until several somethings start to change.

I miss the hyper niche communities and fandoms but other than that I enjoy it just as much if not more

I really enjoy that in small communities I can come across usernames I recognize and develope an idea of what kind of people they may be or be able to continue a bit that I'd started in another thread.