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.
Anecdotally I’ll say I feel like I used to be in the habit of typing out responses to posts daily when I first started using the internet. It feels like that was slowly trained out of me as the content and the responses got worse and worse (especially with the advent of LLMs). Trying to change that on Lemmy.
The answer is Lemmy culture.
I had seen people posting long form content on Reddit even after it’s enshittification.
The reason why a lot of people here don’t post their thoughts here is that there is a good chance they will get downvoted to oblivion with no comments.
I personally never suffered from this, but I had seen it in multiple places here on Lemmy and I personally think that as more users join Lemmy there will be a naturalization of this culture which will make most users think that they are accepted here and that will make them comfortable enough to write long form thoughts here.
I see a fair number of posts that are diatribes or questions. I upvote all questions to help raise visibility to help get more answers. There are fewer people here, for sure.
Of course that depends where you read and post on Lemmy. I don’t really agree with the premise of your question, so I can’t give you a good answer except to say look around. Depending on the topic, you can find people who are going into great detail about their own thoughts and presenting arguments and facts and whatnot, all as might be appropriate to the topic at hand. I’m not really sure what you’re looking for. It sounds like maybe you want to start a blog, and if you want to start a blog, go start one. You can even post the links here, for an extra touch of irony.
Start a blog is a little like “If you don’t like the huge corporation, you have to start your own huge corporation to crush them”. Make a blog, never be seen again.
As for people giving their thoughts, it seems held back until you free it with a link or a question.
I feel like blogs are small and relatively stand alone, and nothing like large corporations or Lemmy. Visibility is a question, but that just raises more questions. How many viewers do you want each month? What if you only have a few but they really care what you say? How many views do you get here? Do people hear even care what you say? What if you started a blog but cross posted links to it here? Maybe that would take advantage of both worlds, or maybe it wouldn’t, and all of that depends on your goals and whether you have anything to communicate and whether you do a good job of communicating it.
What’s being held back, and what’s being freed? Certainly my thoughts aren’t being held back or freed.
