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?
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.