I hate big tech controlling social media. I desperately want social media to be federated.

I really love community-driven social media like Reddit. Lemmy feels… too small. I really loved that Reddit let me jump into any niche hobby, and instantly I had a community. Lemmy, you’ll be lucky if that community even exists, and if it does, chances are nobody has posted in ages.

On the other hand, Lemmy is full of political content lately. I’ve basically been doom scrolling everything US election-related, and it’s really starting to take a toll on my mental health.

I know I can filter content. I know I can post and be the change I seek. Yet, it feels like an uphill battle.

Not sure what the point of this is, or if it’s even the right community to vent about this. I just really want to replace Reddit, but I find myself going back more and more (e.g. r/homekit is very active compared to Lemmy version).

  • thawed_caveman@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Enjoy being the only one posting.

    Mass adoption is fundamental to make any social media viable; the fewer users it has, the less useful it is. Reddit has more users than Lemmy. It’s that simple. People won’t start switching until everybody else switches.

    Bluesky is only barely starting to compete with Twitter, and that’s after Twitter drastically worsened. Lemmy is a long, long way from competing with Reddit.

    To me, it’s a matter of time. The structural advantages of the fediverse mean that it’s more stable on the long run; what i mean by that is, for-profit Reddit will get worse while Lemmy remains good, leading users to migrate here, so Lemmy will eventually outlive Reddit. And then along the way there will be a few big moments where Reddit really fucks up and a wave of people washes up on Lemmy. This is already happening, i’m pretty sure all of us here made our accounts after the Reddit API changes.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      Enjoy being the only one posting.

      Pack it in now then. This platform isn’t going to see huge influxes. Normies are too stupid to pick a server. I don’t really mind it being somewhat of a niche space, maybe the advertisers will continue to mostly ignore us.

    • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      Mass adoption is fundamental to make any social media viable;

      Forums used to be lively and self-sustaining with memberships in the low hundreds. You only need “mass adoption” if you want and unending stream of novelty bullshit that you don’t actially want to engage with to entertain yourself with while on the toilet.

    • Blazingtransfem98@discuss.online
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      1 month ago

      Yeah and Lemmy and Mastodon at the moment but more so Lemmy seem to be working against that goal by opting for onboarding methods that are unintuitive and frustrating to normies. Opting to make people apply like this is a fucking club, and deny people if they are too boring.

      Great job guys, you’re really gonna get lots of engagement that way. You don’t want engagement? What are you even doing wasting money on an almost empty site barely anyone is joining?

        • Blazingtransfem98@discuss.online
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          30 days ago

          I mean those efforts are great but if the flow of people onto the platform is bottlenecked it doesn’t do as much good as it could. And since a majority of all Lemmy servers are pushing for applications effectively turning all the current instances into clubs that will ultimately effect how many people will be here to have an interest in communities in the first place.

            • Blazingtransfem98@discuss.online
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              28 days ago

              Because they are lazy and overconfident in their ability to determine truth from lies, AI from real human. They could set up a script or automod to stop spam, but they don’t. They make excuses like this one.

              It’s worse than not ideal, it hurts the ability to use Lemmy as a social media, as an alternative for Reddit. Turning it into a private club hurts this place because without people, especially the normies who make jokes and upvote posts this place is dead.