I don't know who said it first.
"When I packed up and moved to the frontier to get away from people, I didn't realize that the people I was trying to leave would have the same idea.'
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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NZ Off topic
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This community is for NZ discussion about random non-NZ things, or whatever you want! Shitposts, circlejerks, memes, something you found funny, anything goes!*
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If you want to have a serious political discussion, take it to !politics@lemmy.nz.
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Nah, it’s kind of been like that. I think at this point, all of the people who got swept up “sticking it” to Reddit have gone back onto Reddit, so all we have left are the tech-savvy people and the doomers/gloomers in the news- and politics-related communities.
If this has taught me anything, I found that the best communities are still small forums - like the old school kind, not like here and Reddit. And sadly, those will probably go away with time, and then we’d have just shitty social media sites or the digital frontiers like the Fediverse.
I'm personally a Reddit deserter and I really don't think others like me have all gone back to Reddit. The primary issue most left over is still very much an issue. I haven't used it once since the day RiF stopped working.
I've run through everything on kbin and tried to return to reddit a couple of times, and I can't do it, or just don't have the tolerance anymore. The ads are more obvious, the false product reviews, fake relationship advice posts, reposts for karma, fake "best of" chains written by one person with commenters saying they know its fake, but "hey, I was entertained." It feels like shopping Black Friday with a bunch of strangers, knowing some of them are actors there to convince you the prices are actually great, when you know they were lower last week and Black Friday is bullshit. It feels, in a word, Lame.
You can get a whole lot more content on kbin if you start interacting with the "microblogs" sections which are full of mastodon etc.
I am one as well. I have zero interest in going back. Yes there are things that I miss about that sight, but I can't patronize a business that has such a vile attitude towards their customers and their product.
I'm still around too, though, for me, it was less about "sticking it" to Reddit and more about Reddit not feeling fun anymore. I've noticed the same thing as OP and was hoping to find some insight from longer-term Lemmy users about whether this is a result of the influx of new users being more negative, or just a return to form for Lemmy. From other comments around here it sounds like it may be the latter, alas.
There's no perfect social media. You either get a bubble room where nothing is interesting or has any weight to it and all people post is Tumblr level material, or you get a Nazi hellscape where half the words on the entire site are just the N word. Lemmy is currently dead center in the middle of all that and that's probably the best you can hope for.
I don't feel like I left to "stick it to Reddit" so much as they made it miserable to use. If RiF worked I'd use it.
Same for me. The day RIF made its first announcement, I shredded my complete post/comment history that overwrote them with random BS. When RIF shut down, I deleted my account. Been here ever since. It's really not too bad, if you just resolutely block the most notorious crossposters, and always block any community/user you don't want to read content from.
I don't disagree. There are definitely a lot of negative posts and attitudes, though in the early days there was lots of negativity towards reddit. But perhaps more optimism about Lemmy. Recent ... events ... may have hurt that optimism.
I do still come across nice spots pretty regularly, though. Perhaps look at some Beehaw communities, which is an instance focused on people being friendly to each other. It's actually how I got started on Lemmy. (Not quite true, I started on lemmy.ml a couple of years ago, but it wasn't for me. Then earlier this year joined beehaw and it inspired me to start my own instance).
Also still mainly see technical posts, lots of Windows/MS bashing. I’d like to see more communities about non technical things. Perhaps I haven’t discovered them.
What kinds of things are you interested in? I'm keen for some good non-technical/non-news communities too but I don't know where to start 😆. Maybe we can pick something and make an effort to make the community more active?
Thanks! Will have a look around Beehaw.
Some non technical topics I'm interested in are ice cream making and fitness. Also I like to read uplifting news, there is a community, but the comments are predominantly negative so I've unsubscribed.
I'm not much of a fitness person, but in the past have done ice cream making. Is there a community for that somewhere? Though, it doesn't seem like something that two people could contribute a lot to. I'm not sure how much there is to say about ice cream making, if you don't have people coming looking for help. In fact, the !food@beehaw.org might be a suitable place to start discussions about ice cream making?
For the Beehaw communities, you can see their community list here. If you have the Instance Assistant browser addon, it makes it easy to open the community on lemmy.nz for subscribing.
Thanks for considering starting a community. Yes, think it's better to start discussion in existing communities.
Oh I mainly browse on mobile, on the liftoff app.
Only difference I've really noticed is that the attempts to create non tech communities died off, and the tech oriented ones are the ones that are left and remain active.
Well it's lemmy. A majority of us are nerds so of course the tech related ones remain active.
I guess I'm a nerd, but I'm mostly interested in non-nerd subjects. I get enough nerdism at work. I prefer hobbies outside of work. Does that mean I'm not actually a nerd?
I'm certainly missing the more niche subreddits I was subscribed to (a couple of really active permaculture ones, favourite bands, hobbies etc) but for the most part I find the general NZ news useful and relevant, and some good conversation around it. Other communities are definitely tech-focused but that may change with time. But as with any group of people, you always get the negative ones - and Baader-Meinhof had a thing or two to say about noticing things!
It's not just you. It seems like there's a lot of young, antisocial people on this platform who think it's the coolest thing in the world to dislike things. Any given subject has a thousand comments talking about how it's actually the worst thing in the world. That combined with an overall disdain for actually working to better your life makes a lot of the users insufferable.
Yes, exactly what I feel. Even at the uplifting community every positive news item received a lot of negative comments how it's not going to help, how bad things are, etc etc.
Guess I'll just have to block / unsubscribe communities. Also will post more on Beehaw. Posted about ice cream there and already some cool replies.
I started using Sync for Lemmy, even though I don't like their privacy policy, just so I can block entire instances. I'm also really liberal with the block community options. I've got most of the political communities blocked, but it's surprising how many there are, so I still come across them. I literally just blocked a leopards ate my face community right before reading your response, since the entire premise of the community is political schadenfreude. I've also blocked a bunch of communities that are overall negative. I'm a hair away from blocking the technology community since it's almost all privacy invasion reports, which really gets my blood boiling. I'm not even sure if all that blocking has helped to be honest with you. I subscribed to like 60 different communities for subjects that interest me and the only one that is active is a Star Trek Memes one, so I spend a lot of time in the Everything community and it's still pretty negative despite my efforts. I'm at a crossroads right now where I'm thinking about just leaving, or changing the way I interact with the site, because I think it is making me overall less happy.
Thanks for sharing!
I’m at a crossroads right now where I’m thinking about just leaving, or changing the way I interact with the site, because I think it is making me overall less happy.
That was my feeling yesterday as well. But, today, I posted on food@beehaw and had some nice discussions. Think you just have to be mindful of which posts you are participating in. I'm avoiding going to /all, and if I find a community I'm subscribed to too negative, I just unsubscribe.
But it's annoying if that means, like for you, that your subscribed feed is not active. Well, gives you time for other things :) Personally, I wouldn't leave Lemmy yet. I've learned some very cool things here, and had some very good discussions.
A lot of the for lemmy apps allow instance blocking, like summit for lemmy. No ads either and a lot of them are open sourced.
Thanks!
The general sentiment I get when discussing work and work related issues/politics is not about not wanting to work but wanting to work for fair wages with fair conditions.
I haven’t noticed too much negativity, but I don’t visit too many communities. I have to say smaller hobby communities seem to be struggling with engagement. There’s either very few active posters or posts get moderately upvoted but there are little to no comments.
Yeah I'm running a Japanese Metal community on my other account, and out of all the posts, less than a handful are not by me. I already gave up on creating content, only posting there when I discover a cool new band or song, or when my favorites bring out new songs. Small hobby communities are having a rough time on Lemmy/Kbin.
Yeah I noticed that. People getting arsey with each other for no reason.
I've got multiple fediverse accounts so my solution has been to spend more time browsing local in lemmy.nz and beehaw.
Also, I started to block all the big news and politics coms (that's where most of the arguing happens) so that when I browse by new I'm more likely to find cool communities.
Thanks, guess will block more communities.
Discovering new communities is still hard, right? The All feed here on Lemmy.nz only shows communities where at least one person has subscribed?
Yeah, I think so. There are some newcommunities and findacommunity type coms out there, plus I just randomly click on cool people's post histories to see where they are going.
Or visiting at an original instance (instead of through here) you can browse theirs without having to be logged in there
Sometimes you find instances that have a lot of theme stuff, eg mander.xyz has tons of science ones.
I've got accounts on a few different instances for this reason, they're all federated with different people.
Hexbear are out there leaving their stench throughout the fediverse, for example.
Every online community will eventually resemble the society at large. People are people.
I've found that the quality of your Fediverse experience relies on your participation to a much larger extent than other social media. Lemmy instances tend to be tech focused and I've found it's difficult to discover new content via accounts there - you don't have the capacity to follow new users, only subscribe to communities.
On the other hand, Kbin, because it reads both Lemmy style and Mastodon style instances, has proven to be exceptionally vibrant when it comes to discovering new content, as it allows you to both subscribe to communities and to users. I've found that once I subscribed to about 100 communities and followed a like number of users, my content feed far exceeds what I get on Reddit - because as the users I follow post to new communities, they appear as posts on my feed.
I think when it comes to non-tech communities, a lot of them suffer from the fragmentation effect of having multiple communities of the same type across instances - because most Fediverse participants are in tech, tech is the theme that unifies the audience. To really match the quantity of content on /r/music, for instance, you'll want to be subscribed to at least 10 communities in the Fediverse. It's also harder to run a community in the Fediverse (although vastly more rewarding), and most mods often end up being the primary posters due to a lack of audience participation.
All that being said, shameless plug for @13thFloor if you're looking for a non-tech community. It's a pirate clearing house of sci-fi, music, fantasy, literature, movies, articles, and all other sorts of weird ass shit designed to engage your imagination.
Yeah, it does feel that way a bit. Too much focus on US politics and too many doomers. Climate change is another topic that people spend too much time worrying about.
I've also noticed on Lemmy.nz that the most argumentative posters tend to be from other instances.
The fediverse is mostly a great way to get extra politics in case you're too happy with the state of the world. Blare tons of mostly negative shit at people, even if wrapped in a "super funny" "meme", and the site is going to get negative. Outside of the politics and moronic drama, this place is still more chill - geeky, which colors discourse for better and worse, but at least less rabid than Reddit. When did Reddit have it's biggest increase in toxicity? 2015-2016, coincidentally right when the yanks jumped the shark.
My major issue is there's no escape from politics apart from leaving the platform, which... people then do. And that is really fucking stupid for a place allegedly trying to grow and gain users: people could just keep it in their pants (i.e. post in appropriate communities, same as everyone else), but actively refuse to. Apparently "everything is political" so that makes spam nice and considerate - basically doing us all a favor, really.
Sure, you can spend time pruning the overtly/covertly political communities and likely bad faith or just hilariously singleminded actors. After someone makes four new instances and 12 new political communities - each - on them, to fit all the users we don't have, you get to do it again! I'd love to be able to do the subbed-only thing, but finding communities is somehow even more awkward than blocking it out.
I can't tell if people failed to understand the whole federation thing, if I'm misunderstanding the finer details, or if they're literally trying to sabotage the whole thing (... again), but the trend kind of sucks.
The world was so much more fun before politics oozed its diseased tendrils into literally everything.
I'm simultaneously not interested in a safe space as much as I'm not interested in Nazis openly discussing being Nazis in broad daylight. Lemmy is a weird mix of both of those things, somehow. It's okay.
Where are you getting exposure to that? I have seen zero Nazis on this platform.
It lost the magic but I still enjoy the day to day. I come on read a few things make a few comments and that's it. I try to share things I find cool but ultimately I just don't waste a lot of time scrolling like I did on reddit.
Because there isn't much content on lemmy I find myself always reading the post where as reddit I was guilty of commenting based on headline alone.
I've, anecdotally, noticed more shills or sycophants, more trolls.
Though, employing Hanlon's razor, I'll respond genuinely to find out if they're malicious or just stupid.
Either I've helped someone learn something or I've found an account to block.
