I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
…I am drifting away from Lemmy myself.
Political communities are echo chambers like Reddit, in a different color. Discussing tech or helping others is better, but still feels like talking in circles.
Wholesome subs like /c/SuperBowl are sublime, but I mostly lurk there.
Information hygiene is awful. Big subs upvote tabloids and Tweets to the sky, as long as they align with their beliefs. I just saw a discussion on a not-obviously AI generated photo with the community sentiment of “misinformation? Who cares. It’s a pro-lefty meme, so spread it.”
Anyway, all this scrolling and impulse commenting eats time. I get the same feeling of shouting into a black hole that I get on corporate social media.
Much of this is my fault, though.
I have several niches I intend to make original posts for, but never do.
It’s somewhere in the giant pile of my IRL executive dysfunction :’(
why beat yourself up. you know good content won’t be rewarded or seen.
only the ragebait. the internet is not information driven anymore, it’s dopmine driven.
it’s the super highway of rage and hate.
I have some posts/interests that I think would get some visibility. In my case, it really is executive dysfunction, heh.
Not that you’re wrong. And, unfortunately, its a ludicrously profitable highway outside of the Fediverse.
i’ve seen a huge uptick in the rage/hate activity on lemmy… and it drives tons of upvotes and comments.
smart thoughtful interesting stuff… gets maybe 1/10 the activity.
The info hygiene here is really bad. I thought people here would be better about finding well sourced informative articles to talk about but its the same news slop that dominates other platforms. This is a discussion forum so posts should have something worth discussing. Spamming the same trump action over and over doesnt create any discussion.
Scrolling through the news community is so depressing there is no comments because everyone is thinking “what do you want me to say its bad its awful”
On the contrary, I’ve made a few (not a ton) of what I thought were interesting news posts, but they don’t seem to gain traction.
I think the deeper issue is ragebait works, very well. The community seems to be content with that, and Lemmy/Piefed devs aren’t structuring the site the counter it.
the only way to not have an echo chamber where people vote with their emotions is to have an enlightened gnosticism user-base which is obviously very difficult to get and nurture but i’m trying :)
the best way to do this is to cultivate an atmosphere of discussion and in-depth thought regularly, which you can do by engaging with these discussions and seeking enlightenment yourself.
I don’t like how broad Lemmy assumes default interests are, though then again showing everyone the average interests may statistically be the best initialization point.
Every time I’m shown a community I’m totally uninterested I make sure to go in and block it from my feed. Likewise with aggressive or otherwise pathological users. It gets better.
Lemmy doesn’t assume anything. Sorting is done by votes or activity from all communities; the intent is for the user to subscribe to communities to curate their feed. But blocking works too.
I don’t know precisely how Reddit works now, but it used to be like that as well. There was no interest algorithm, no suggestions, other than a bit of vote count nonlinearity. It just had the quirk of defaulting to a few select subs in “hot,” instead of “all” like most Lemmy/Piefed instances do.
Yeah I’m turned off from interacting. I got banned (I’m guessing since I can’t even reply to people) from world news when Maduro was kidnapped and I mentioned that my Venezuelan friends were hopeful. As this was scary but good news. And my god how I got flamed. Theres no room for conversation I got tagged, replied to, people made fun of me and that’s it. I wasn’t even allowed to interact anymore so it looks like I just said something and ran away.
I’m not even close to center, yet it’s all or nothing with politics here. It’s seriously become reddit 2.0. Pathetic.
Yeah. The .world news community mods don’t seem to care about clickbait, misinformation, calls for violence or doxxing or rape, as long as they’re the “correct” politics. Calling for Ivanka Trump to get shot? Serious deepfake meme? Perfectly acceptable, apparently, in spite of the admins’ pushback.
But make a comment like yours, and the moderation is… that.
I haven’t even blocked the tankie communities or anything, but I had to block /c/politics, as they’re so active they pollute my feed.
I’m fine with leaving that part of Lemmy permanently blocked though.
This is it. People are leaving because there are problems and not enough resources to fix them. Because that’s dEcEnTtAlZaTioN.
Yeah. We have monkey brains, and overcoming intertia is hard.
I think the site could be better structured to address this, specifically by organizing communities into a “taxonomy,” so posts from niche interest automatically filter up into bigger subs. Thus, participation would feel easier/more enaging, and folks would have more focused and active niches to participate in.
Making that suggestion on the Lemmy/Piefed repos is also on my massive todo list.