Does it have something to do with the rise of smartphones and no one typing on real keyboards? (Maybe why blogs died.)
Is it a consequence of voting, which blogs didn’t have?
What happens to your thoughts? Do you turn them all in the form of a question? Do you tear them down into a Mastodon one-liner and hope a popular person notices it?
If Lemmy had more of ourselves in this way, maybe it would be a healthier place.
Being idle until the media put out an article on something for us to talk about gives them too much power over us.
There’s an actual_discussion community, which isn’t exactly lively. There’s a casualconversation community, and even that’s all in the form of a question.
Be the change you want to see.
I expect it would be too much for me alone. And do I put them all in one poorly-named general community that I make that ends up a grab-bag, or do I make lots of communities that I only touch once in six months when I happen to have a thought or experience in some topic and I also happen to remember that I even have that community to write in?
Hello’s right.
Mastodon, Lemmy, and the Fediverse in general are what you make of it. I want there to be more content, so most days I post an article or two.
If you want more discussion, do the same, engage with people.
One large reason I haven’t rushed to start communities is that there are some personality types that live to be a moderator, and some that totally don’t. But I guess you do it and if it reaches the point where you have to moderate and you hate it, someone else must be around who can take it on.
You want a deep conversations, you never ask on what. Why pontificate on the reason Baja blast gelato is the color it is and not the fact it’s only available through the app and capitalism in general. Where are you subscribed to what are you seeing and what in general are you truly looking for?
Edit: Is this the kind of depth but in text for what you’re looking for?
I’m not thinking specifically of deep thoughts or shallow thoughts, but when I happen to think of anything, it could be nice to communicate it to other people where it might spur thoughts for them or conversation or even just put it down in writing even if no one cares. If it’s casual enough, there is casualconversation, but if it doesn’t fit in the box well, it doesn’t fit in the box well. Or not even thoughts exactly as I might want to talk about what I did today or saw today.
It sounds like you are describing a blog. If you want to stay in the fediverse, there is WriteFreely. I have an account on paper.wf, but I haven’t used it yet tbh.
I tried to have blogs back in the day. People were not terribly interested, and the prospect of having to cultivate being-known so that anyone will see the thing I found unpleasant. It’s strange to think how many people are very driven to promote themselves. Self-promotion feels dirty, and writing for no one feels foolish.
Perhaps a new community is called for; something which encourages earnest thinking and open discussion but is not hardcore technical philosophy. I think it should be called ‘interestingthoughts’ or ‘thatsinteresting’ or maybe even just ‘thoughtful’. There is already ‘showerthoughts’ but that seems to be a bit more humour-based than what you’re talking about.
I would enjoy reading and replying to posts on it and posting to it myself too. I haven’t started a community on Lemmy before and I’ve got quite a bit on my plate at the moment, so I don’t think I could take it on as a mod alone but if you want we could try doing it together. Let me know what you think :)
Lemmy has both thoughts+observations, and links+questions+memes. It’s just a lot more of the later than the former.
There are a thousand potential reasons for that. I believe that a few of the ones that you mentioned have some impact, but there are two that you didn’t mention that might be extra relevant:
- Lemmy starting out as a federated replica of a link aggregator, also mostly about links, questions, and memes; this is bound to replicate a certain culture.
- The Zeitgeist of the internet of the 20s is considerably less kind to people who form their own thoughts.
On how to solve this: perhaps the first step could/should be to co-ordinate with other people who have the same desire, and nurture communities with that goal.
The Zeitgeist of the internet of the 20s is considerably less kind to people who form their own thoughts.
This rings true and it may come from the wider world. Seems to me that we have entered an era of fear and pessimism. Partly as a result of that, today’s younger generation had protected childhoods and now, given the state of the world, they themselves are afraid for their futures (with some justification). All this is creating an atmosphere of hypersensitivity, aversion to causing offense, a general lack of openness to new ideas and contradiction.
Nothing I say there is particularly original and I can’t offer data to support it. But my anecdotal experience on this forum and elsewhere backs up the hypothesis completely. Something has changed.
I used to use Reddit some, although I would never manage to stick with it well and become an accepted regular anywhere, but it was big enough that I never realized it was a link aggregator before all else, since people were just talking about whatever in communities. I actually had to look up some fediverse site yesterday when checking what’s out there for blogging and whatnot for it to label reddit and lemmy explicitly as link aggregators, for me to really get it.
Forming their own thoughts, is it the voting, is it the culture wars? I know I have the chilling effect of thinking that my response to some article will just get tons of downvotes so why bother. And I don’t think upvotes mean the same thing to me that they mean to the average person.
Coordinating with other people, I’ve had zero success with and must just not have any clue how to go about it.
Yup - Reddit is still mostly memes, questions, and links; this gets evident when you look at the top 5 subs: memes (r/funny), links (r/gaming, r/worldnews), questions (r/askreddit), “fluff” (r/aww). And yet Reddit is large enough that you can ignore those and find people sharing their minds in smaller comms.
That won’t last long though. The place is collapsing, and the first ones to kick the bucket will be the smaller subs, that’ll become ghost towns.
Forming their own thoughts […]
I think that it’s deeper: it’s the impact of social media in our societies, plus phones (that you mentioned in the OP), plus the voting system (that you mentioned now). Together they shape a culture that encourages short, shallow, uncontested, polarised worldviews.
And when people are exposing their thoughts on a matter, there’s a high chance that they actually thought about something that is longer, deeper, controversial, full of counterpoints. As they share it they get replies like:
- “WAAAAH TL;DR!!!”
- “U say dat 50 is not 100? than u think dat 50 is 0? dats dumb lol lmao”
- “If you’re saying that you like apples then you hate bananas! Fuck off banana hater! Why so hateful?”
- “I dun unrurrstand, why you think that [distorts what the other person said]? I’m so confused…”
Eventually you get weathered by that. Too much attrition to bother; you stop exposing your thoughts.
Coordinating with other people, I’ve had zero success with and must just not have any clue how to go about it.
Frankly? Ditto. But this is the sort of issue that we can’t solve individually, we need numbers for that.
It must be a great skill online to know how to write in a way that can’t turn into something else in someone’s head and trigger disproportionate reactions.
Since I remember Before Phones, I’m worried that people who grow up with phones don’t know how completely crappy a way that is to interact with the internet. It makes good consumers. I remember the shift in laptop display dimensions around 2010 so they would become Movie Watching devices. And phones take phone-shaped pictures.
I suppose I’ll have to start tracking what I wish to talk about to find out what communities could be needed. Today the only ones in my head are one of no importance at all that would fit in the existing casualconversation just fine and another that made me laugh but is nothing deep and I might feed it to asklemmy at some point.
I might have to ask asklemmy where questions that are a little more factual are supposed to go. Their sidebar says they want open-ended, although probably no one pays attention.
Lemmy’s format just kind of sucks for discussions and visibility. If you comment on a post from a year ago, you can expect that to not been seen by anyone ever.
Lemmy is primarily a link aggregator, just like Reddit. It also happens to somewhat work for Q&A and help forums, but fundamentally Lemmy is more oriented towards new content.
The more classic forum format is better for discussions because replies bump the thread up to bring new attention to it.
Also a lot of people just don’t give a shit about random people’s random thoughts, that’s why I’m not on Mastodon and never really used Twitter either. I don’t know why people feel the need to dump all their thoughts on the Internet, like I care that a celebrity is on a plane or enjoying a nice meal.
Lemmy is about topics, not people, that’s what I like about it. I don’t care about people.
Lemmy’s format just kind of sucks for discussions and visibility. If you comment on a post from a year ago, you can expect that to not been seen by anyone ever.
Yes, that is very irritating.
The more classic forum format is better for discussions because replies bump the thread up to bring new attention to it.
Too bad they’re not very active, to the best of my knowledge.
Also a lot of people just don’t give a shit about random people’s random thoughts
Yeah, it’s true. I remember the stereotype of Livejournal, which might be before your time, of being teenage girls telling you what they had for lunch. They could be accused of tending toward narcissism. Me, when I want to communicate, sometimes it’s that I want to point something out, but sometimes it’s driven by a wish to socialize.
There are a few active forums, but they’re very niche. There’s a forum called Thumper Talk for people who ride single cylinder dual sports, and a forum for Doberman Pinschers that are both pretty active. But people are lazy. Most people don’t want to create an account to talk about one subject. They want one account to talk about everything. That’s why Facebook and Google login are popular, despite the fact that you’re sharing waaaaay too much information with some random website and with Facebook or Google by using that option. It’s also unfortunate that a lot of active forums have never taken the time to make their sites mobile responsive, since most people online are on their phones these days.
Also a lot of people just don’t give a shit about random people’s random thoughts, that’s why I’m not on Mastodon and never really used Twitter either.
I never saw the value in that format because you can’t say anything meaningful about anything in 180 characters or less unless you’re Earnest Hemingway. Why do billions of people want to engage with a character limit?
I very much didn’t expect tight character limits to be accepted and take over as opposed to just when you’re on your feature phone but you have something to say.
We didn’t expect the phone to become the default device online either. But the vast majority of people on the internet are on mobile devices now. Even I only ever visit sites in my free time from my phone. I’m on a computer at my desk in my home office for 8-10 hours per day for work. The last thing I want to do after work is to spend more time at that desk.
the fediverse is young, and still incorporating itself into something awesome… something more structured. in the meantime, ive found myself falling backwards into some amazing conversations with clearly very intelligent people.
im not sure why your experience is different, but im having a blast
