To be fair Lemmy feels like a brand new mall of stores with empty shelves.
A lot of empty stores, and then the big anchor stores are full of depressing doomer news articles
Don’t forget the hexbears:
“You’re all warmongering fascists except Putin!!!”
It’s always sad when you go to a community for something you like, something that’s widely popular, and see the newest post is 2 days old.
Especially when you’re the only one posting. At some point, it feels a little like you’re spamming the sub, even if you are the only one keeping it active.
Pretty sure reddit was full of laments about Digg when that mass exodus happened. Stuff takes a while to build momentum.
Hard truth? Reddit conditioned me to NOT participate.
Nearly time I wanted to discuss something or ask something important to me, my posts were deleted by mods. The few times posts would stay was because they were meme shitposts of easily digestible image content: scroll and move along. Any actual discussion was verboten.
/r/mk mods were particularly awful. Fuck those guys.
The thing you must understand about /r/mk is that it was largely sheperded by a man who was driven from the other major mechanical keyboard forums for being too much of a self-promoter. It’s possible the entire organization still has residual brittle-ego.
If you want proper keyboard discussion, do check Deskthority; the content is a lot richer than “here’s a photo of my board which is just a Taco Bell permutation of the current popular PCB/case/caps/switches”
The userbase is significantly bigger than some fairly decent forums that I use or used to visit. The problem is rather the behaviour of the users (reddit started to favour more Instagram-like behaviour of scrolling and “liking” rather than normal forum-like dialogue, especially when you look at r/all, and I think we’re yet to grow out of it fully), and their relatively narrow range of interests (tech + political news) that leaves the other areas empty.
True, I just wish there was more content on some of the smaller niche communities but I guess that it takes time for it to grow and that doesn’t happen overnight.
It relies on people like you to spark discussion and content. Ask questions and interact with your favourite topics! Crosspost and shamelessly plug your favourite community (Shoutout to !boardgames@feddit.de)
So get out there and make Lemmy the lively place you want it to be.
Well said. At this point there’s so much pre-existing content on Reddit that I rarely feel the desire to post or comment anymore. These days an upvote or downvote is usually the extent of my interactions over there.
Being part of this early, and relatively small, userbase on Lemmy means the content has to (gets to?) come from us. Instead of just scrolling through content we get to share interesting things and help build communities, and I find that rather exciting!
Oh and thanks for the link to the boardgame community!
And all the customers do nothing but scream about politics in every section.
The “mall” analogy works for Reddit because the point of it existing is to buy things there. Lemmy instances and communities only exist because people want to make space for conversation. If spaces are empty, I see that as a sign that someone, somewhere cares so much that they will happy build the space and wait for others to arrive.
This is two months old and a report about the exodus that’s already happened.
Reddit didn’t die, it probably won’t anytime soon.
Facebook never “died”, but no one goes there anymore either. Reddit will be the same.
What is Facebook these days? My grandma spends all day on it, she hardly speaks…just swiping…when I sneak a peek, it’s just chain-mail-like bullshit one after the other with a few disguised ads for things she can’t afford in between…ugh :vomit:
I remember describing to my mom what Facebook was becoming back in like 2013/14 and she goes “Huh, sounds like what happened with email.”
The service went from useful communication to social media style chain forwarding nonsense pretty quickly, and they went the same way with FB.
Isn’t Digg still around? It will exist forever probably, but it is definitely a husk of its former self.
And then you can’t even do that because Zuck filled the feed with 99% ads and “recommended” groups. Sure, there’s a friend’s feed now, but it doesn’t load 95% of the time. Facebook isn’t dead because people didn’t like the site, Facebook is dead because Zuckerfuck drove a spike through its heart and then lit the corpse on fire after dousing it with gasoline.
Malls are still around in some places too, but nothing in there is worth going to. Maybe Mall of America if you want to chance getting stabbed or shot, other than that they’re either glorified office space or entirely abandoned. But, like reddit, they’re still technically there.
Exactly. From the article:
As far as Reddit’s fate is concerned I predict that what will happen to it is the same thing that is happening to Twitter and has already happened to Facebook and frankly, actual shopping malls. The business side of things will churn along divorced from the content which will become ever more generic and culturally irrelevant. The users who stay on Reddit will be of the unadventurous variety, not inclined to make waves or analyze their habits.
That’s just a horrible analogy. Yes malls are basically dead but still technically there. Reddit is just as popular and active as it has ever been. Sure some people, like us, left. The vast majority stayed.
The ‘mass exodus’ never happened. The entirety of lemmy put together is the size of a small niche sub barely anyone actually knows about.
Yeah it is not a good analogy because when it came to malls something more convenient and easier for everyone to use became a better option with the rise in internet shopping. It’s not like malls made people angry and people left it for something that wasn’t as convenient to use.
People who moved to the fediverse aren’t representative of the average user who just wants a community in a niche area of interest to use, and never cared that strongly enough to abandon it. Most do not want to go through the growing pains of trying to grow a new community on a new platform and less content.
My city has malls. They are just big buildings for housing an aunties anne’s pretzels, a filthy play area for kids, and any other sucker who is still renting a retail space.
The mall pictured in the article, Rolling Acres Mall in Akron OH, was the largest of three indoor shopping malls in the greater Akron area. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Akron, but we didn’t need three goddamn indoor shopping malls. We’re down to just one now, which seems appropriate.
It’s really unattractive to be so obsessed with your ex months after getting into a new relationship with Lemmy. Can we move on please?
I started a new job a few months ago and was on my first business trip with four colleagues recently. To make conversation I asked if anyone used Reddit.
• Two dudes had heard of it but never used it.
• One dude said he uses it infrequently because it’s turned to shit.
• One dude said fuck Reddit and it’s API bullshit.
• I said fuck Reddit and it’s API bullshit.
Thats my anecdote. 100% of the people in that car didn’t use Reddit or now hated it. Probably 3 months ago that same car ride would have had three people loving Reddit and advocating it to the other two.
Despite your experience it’s alive and well. If reddit is a dying mall what is Lemmy? To scale it’s like an unmaintained Porta potty.
I hate reddit, but let’s not be ridiculous. It’s more than fine. Google has really gone to shit. When people search for things they put in site=reddit as a more reliable way to find real information.
Malls didn’t die overnight, you know. It’s a downward spiral that takes many years when it starts.
Is there a downward spiral, though? Or did they just get rid of a bunch of (from their perpective) whiny, entitled, free riding, old-timers?
The article is 2 months old…
