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.
It's wild that art and books are niche in your words. Niche for me would be like a specific author or artist, but books and art I think of as incredibly vast topics, far from niche.
I have specific art medium focuses and book series communities within it that I’m building as well
The issue is mostly having !books@lemmy.ml , !books@lemmy.world , and then every saga/genre opening their new community, while there are probably a dozen posters interested in books.
I usually try to stick to !fiction@literature.cafe and !nonfiction@literature.cafe
Active communities for specific video games that I play. There are general gaming communities that are active, but I'd rather be able to discuss specific games without having to start my own thread every time.
Tech communities that aren't just "Windows bad, Linux good". I get Lemmy is more likely to attract technical-minded, FOSS fans, and that's fine, but the amount of Linux zealotry is annoying. I've dual booted for 20 years now, but people here act like Windows is actively murdering your pets while Linux "just works" and it's.... Just not true.
Communities for my area. I could make them, but I have exactly zero interest in running a community, let alone one for people I could know irl. I don't have the time to manage or grow a community, and completely lack the desire even if I had the time. My city, county, state, job, and school all have active communities on Reddit.
Acting like Lemmy has it all when it's total active user base is a fraction of some major subreddits active subscriber count is... Delusional at best. I want Lemmy to work and be a replacement for reddit. I miss early, smaller reddit even. But Lemmy just isn't it yet.
The "windows bad linux good" is a great frame for most communities ive found here. Like often wrapped in some delusional joke-meme that it's an extremely small parody of itself.
I would give my eye teeth for a Persona 5 community on lemmy.
A good one, ideally, which certainly would be a step up from reddit.
You could probably post to PlayStation communities and see if other people would be interested in creating that community with you.
!baldurs_gate_3@lemmy.world seems to be doing okay.
I guess games being released now (such as Starfield) might get more traction than established titles.
Fitness! /r/fitness is in the top 20 or so and has millions of subscribers, but no active lemmy community seems to exist.
And also food and icecream. Haven't found active communities about those topics.
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
Did you have a look at !foodporn@lemmy.world ? I see it popping in my feed every day
yeah, i'm subscribed, but it's a minor fraction of what it was on reddit, people discussed there their pizza/burgers recipes/techniques, fought over burger/pizza/ramen/pho definitions etc
Indeed, Lemmy is a minor fraction of Reddit population wise, there's not much that can be done around it unfortunately
You should ask an admin to be a mod.
What fashion communities exist? Just curious, that's a topic I'm really not familiar with
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.
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.
I miss my American Dad! community
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 don't think you will need much evangelism unless you are a christian based sub. Agree with all the other points though it's not a if you build it they will come situation.
Evangelism wasn't necessary the right word, but its not a strictly religious word. I wrote it as "recruitment" at first but I hated that more since it made the process of letting people know about your community more mechanical and less personal. I wanted to emphasize letting people know about the community in a relationship building way, and couldnt think of a better word
Just an fyi Webster definition of evangelism: the winning or reawakening of personal commitments to Jesus. The google definition: the spreading of the Christian gospel by public preaching or personal witness.
You might not have meant it like that, but I assume most people will take it at face value of those definitions.
Huh. When I asked for a definition online I got "fervent advocacy of a cause"
Don't worry, Linux evangelism has been a thing for a while, and htere's no gospel there
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.
How are you not going to give a shout out to your community?!
Dunno if you're being serious or sarcastic but I have in this thread already, it's literature.cafe for books and writing and lemmyloves.art for more art focused stuff. Both communities have a "411" community that lists communities to federate into other instances. Honestly I am hopeful such a list will become redundant as community navigation improves. We thankfully have a leg on lemmy compared to mastodon as you only need to federate in communities, not users.
I was being serious! I was only responding to messages in the inbox and made the original post before yours so I didn't see it. Sorry to make you repeat yourself.
Oh no it's all good! :) I also have an art focused community that's newer, its lemmyloves.art The growth is steady in each community, but it's definitely there.
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.