The problem is that the average user on Reddit doesn't give a fuck about the ways the platform is shooting itself in the foot, because it's still functional, has a critical mass of users, and is still the de facto online global discussion forum.
Lemmy doesn't serve the function well enough because there are not enough of a variety of users driving niche topics. It's the same dozen topics I see every day. Star Trek memes, Linux discourse, data breach reports, stupid bullshit about Musk, incredibly biased political content and straight up propaganda; it gets extremely tiring to see the same stuff over and over knowing that's just what the current userbase enjoys discussing. It also doesn't help that the development team tacitly endorses the extremist propaganda spreading behavior on their server. You can go check mod and vote logs and see the development team actively encouraging all of this destructive behavior across the fediverse.
Star Trek memes, Linux discourse, data breach reports, stupid bullshit about Musk, incredibly biased political content and straight up propaganda; it gets extremely tiring to see the same stuff over and over
Agreed, it's tiring, that's why I recommend blocking all of these.
Okay but the thing is, I like most of the Star Trek memes, Linux discourse, and data breach reports, as well as tech and environmental news.
Unfortunately, all of that stuff is literally inherently political, so you end up with massive biases depending on who is posting. We can't just divorce the concept of data breaches being carried out by state actors. We can't divorce Musk from the tech world (or the world in general) no matter how much we want to. We can't divorce the intersect between the trade and manufacturing conditions of China with the impact it has on the transition to renewable resources and electric vehicles.
If I start blocking everybody with a political bias I will have blocked literally all the major contributors on the platform. Everybody posting en masse has some kind of agenda, and that's usually fine. I enjoy seeing most of schizoidman's posts, but I know his bias is clearly towards the Chinese, as the majority of his posts clearly frame them in a positive light, with some of the content literally just being propaganda. If I block him, I block a considerable amount of EV news coming into the site, biased or not.
It's just not feasible to avoid politics here, unless you basically don't want to use the platform.
A lot of users being centralized on Lemmy.ml doesn't help, lot of toxicity comes from there and you can't just block the instance unless you also want to lose a lot of content in your feed
The constant spam of murica politics, linux evangelists and the lack of niche communities have almost made me stop using lemmy. Almost because there just isn't any alternatives.
Worth keeping in mind for the future though when you might be able to move or consolidate communities.
The most important thing though is getting some active Mods involved. The most active communities will then be able to thrive and they others can be quietly forgotten about.
There could definitely be some consolidation. I mod !harrypotter, the community hasn't been that active recently, mostly I think because the Lemmy demographic may have moved on from that universe.
The diagonlemmy seem to have gotten some traction with their memes, that's nice to see
Ah, I hadn't seen that post. Should we consider the instance as abandoned/fragile? Or just biding its time until Sublinks is ready? (not necessarily a bad thing, given that Sublinks should still federate)
Instead of having 1 post per month on 3 communities, you would have 3 posts on 1 community
you can subscribe to as many channels as you want.
New joiners just want to subscribe to one community per topic. New posters want to post to the one active community.
But separate but equal instance moderation is a key feature of Lemmy, imo. The more the better.
There is probably a balance to find between decentralization and activity. Having 50 users of one topic spread across 50 communities is maximum decentralization, but probably the worst for activity
The post rate per unit time would be unchanged, and you can subscribe to as many channels as you want.
Not everyone does subscribe to every duplicate community on all instances though, and this affects the number of comments each post gets.
Unless some way to federate comments between multi-communities is implemented, having multiple communities on the same topic on different instances contributes to Lemmy seeming more dead than it is.
This is a good idea I theory so that these small communities gain more activity by being merged into a larger one. But the question is how to actually do it in practice. Many of these small communities are essentially abandoned, with mods that havent posted in months (or never posted at all). The only option is then to have admins of each community instance help with the migration.
Yeah, if we do this, we'll probably have to contact the admins, as I haven't heard from most of the moderators. In some cases (like diagonlemmy.social), the admin seems to be AWOL as well...
I've been a bit concerned as well. I had gotten to know a fair number of regular commenters, but I haven't seen probably half of them recently.
New subs are still joining the community, but it's still low participation. The big communities still seem to be growing steadily, but it's not necessarily bringing the positive attitude that initially won me over to Lemmy.
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