[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation

It’s mostly Linux and Politics, and most of my niche hobbies (and even most of the non-niche ones) are barely represented here, if at all.

It’s really disappointing. I have always been one to consume content, not create it, and it feels like if you’re not creating content there’s very little of interest. I want to like the app, but I find myself spending more time browsing Reddit in a web browser on my phone rather than using Lemmy.

Most of the time is great, but there's hive mind here too. If you're against running closed captions on your TV for example. That was the most recent I got bombed for, but there have been other times.

Most of the time it's more adult, but sometimes it's just like Reddit.

It feels like 20 year olds.

It's a great place to wildly spout crazy nonsense and general gibberish with an underlying theme of overthrowing the system.

I have ended up in a "view all and block" mode rather than a "subscribe to a curated list" mode because of the smaller community. That means I need to block a lot more communities I am not interested in and users that are just... Outside my window of civility or politics that I can handle. Raging tankies, for example.

Less content but the quality/shit ratio is higher here.

I've started when lemmy.ml was the only instance, and stopped when !all was populated mostly by posts from lemmygrad.ml. I rejoined once Reddit cut off their API, and it certainly feels like the usual crowd has joined. So far, it has been a pretty effective Reddit replacement for the largest subreddits that migrated (!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone), but it's still missing a lot of active smaller communities.

My main complaint is that the default sort type (Active) needs to be tweaked.

Sort of like reddit. There's less content, but also less comments just replying "lol, so true" to a political meme. That said, there's also, for some reason, more rape apologism than on reddit. Maybe it's because lemmy is even more male dominated than reddit was or is.

If I could just make a dumbass joke comment without someone trying to debate me on it (poorly) I would be sooooo happy.

Comfortable, but a little meh.

There's a handful of users I see posting and commenting. I read the Everything feed, but most of the posts are US politics, technology (with a FOSS/greybeard bent), or centre-left political takes.

There was a burst of activity during the Reddit exodus, but everything seems to be slowing down. I feel like I see fewer Canadian posts than the summer/early fall.

I appreciate

• the handful of conservatives who are trying to build a community here. We aren't very forgiving to folks outside our Overton window, but it's nice to see other perspectives.

• the Star Trek communities. I don't know if they're posting OC, but it's new to me.

• PugJesus, the Picard Maneuver, and girlfreddy for their posts. Lemmy would be a quiet place without their content.

I really like how when I post a comment on a thread it doesn’t get immediately buried.

I enjoy it a lot. It feels very non toxic, and it has its own sense of humour.

It’s a bit like you read a news story about something that happened in Australia, and all the comments are about second amendment rights and the Supreme Court. So pretty much normal Internet.

Pros: Smaller, older, more reasonable userbase means participation is (for me at least) less intimidating and more meaningful. The atmosphere is very different and more pleasant. People are generally polite here. Comment fields have more interesting replies and less one-word comments and shit posts and memes and whatnot.

Cons: less content, not really feasible to endlessly scroll as an infinite distraction faucet. The userbase has clearly defined interests and certain fields such as sports don't have particularly good representation here, compared to tech fields for example. Comment fields are emptier.

I like it better than Reddit. I don't feel as over-monitored and as censored if I say something in support of progressive ideals. That's what got me kicked off Reddit in the first place - having the audacity to say that I feel like the younger generation is more liberal and open minded. After posting that i got a permanent ban from Reddit. (And yes that literally is all that I posted, word for word).

I still encounter a lot of people on Lemmy calling me an idiot for daring to have an opinion that's new to them or different from their own. I think that's just base human behavior at its worst. When I disagree with someone, I try to simply say, "I disagree and here's why." But inevitably they come back with name calling.

So I just try to remember that often times I'm dealing with immature people on here. And they don't have a lot of worldly experience in some cases. But for the most part it's been a nice change and a much better platform that Reddit in almost every way.

Overall it's ok. The quality of the comments on articles is way better.

The worst part for me as I've detailed in similar threads is that the goldrush to claim all the popular subreddit names makes all those places feel hollow. Most have very little in common with their namesakes and are "anything goes!" communities which leads to homogeny. This is made worse by the internet's apparent need to copy every post from reddit

The other "issue" I have is that with federation comes cross posts and that means seeing the same thing 5 times in a row while browsing All. I don't blame the posters here but it feels like a missed opportunity to properly implement crossposting (like....one post, multiple comment sections)

I'm still put off by the sheer lack of comments on some communities like the main videos community on lemmy.world, where videos that'll have tens of thousands of comments on Reddit will have 100 votes, but 1-2 comments.

I miss a lot of niche subreddits like /r/HajimeNoIppo, /r/BJJ, and /r/IBS, but I can live without. What would be great is if the big communities had more engagement.

There also seems to be a lot of duplication of communities across instances. While I get the whole decentralised thing, it's pretty pointless to not have a mechanism to merge/join communities across instances that have the same topic. Why should lemmy.world and kbin have two competing pro-wrestling communities when neither gets a lot of posts/comments?

Same. A bit more mature user base (but not too mature. Poop!, teehee....). Plus I like that it's generally smaller, and therefore avoids a lot of the negative effects of huge communities.

I wish there was a hide comment function. Other than that, it's fine.

The best thing for me: I cut me sm consumption to a fifth of what it used to be. A few minutes Lemmy, a few minutes mastodon and I'm done. There is just enough stuff on here to scratch my itch for some content.