Ask Lemmy

Community is too small

I think most of the things I find annoying about the fediverse (echo-chamber, lack of interactions overall, no real place for discussing extremely niche interests) stem from the fact that it is not big enough so...

I don't think it is a terrible thing per-se though, small communities have lots of upsides too

People who post Ask Lemmy threads then delete them (or their whole account) a day later.

1. Like another person said, Too much US defaultism!
2. Too many feminists and feminism (not saying I think women are lower than men in any way though, I just don't support "feminism" because most modern feminists support pornography which I think is definitely not something feminists should support)
3. Too many transgenders and people who support LGBTQ+ community (I don't support these at all but I don't misbehave with them either)
4. The anime community and that it's so small here

So many people here are on a constant hunt for a reason to attack, dunk on, or insult someone. They don't bother reading what's actually being said or giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. Instead they jump straight to conclusions about who you are based on one thing you said, and any disagreement immediately turns into a mud-slinging contest where nobody's even trying to change anyone's mind.

Your options end up being: speak up anyway and take endless grief for it, or start self-censoring and tweaking your views to fit the majority opinion on the platform - which basically means joining the crowd sniffing each other's farts and pretending they have something in common besides shared hatred of the outgroup.

It's a small echo chamber.

I find it frustrating that so many communities are just for news articles. Look, I'm terminally politics-brained, but you'll never get anywhere if you're always just reacting to the current thing. There's not really a place for higher level discussion or for people to share thoughtful, original ideas. The result is thousands of the same arguments on the same three topics screaming the same talking points at each other over and over. And it seems like that's all people want.

Really more of a frustration with people in general. Wish people were more curious about the world.

The people.

The fact that it's mainly just a FOSS and Politics forum.

I love what the technology is trying to do but the thing is, the platform's main selling point being the liberatory potential of it's technology, is that it's mainly used by people who are interested in politics and technology.

The seemingly constant multiple posting and duplicates. There are people on here who find a link and post it individually to multiple communities without comment and without cross posting. Three or four times is bad enough, but I blocked someone a while back who posted the same link to about 15 separate communities one after the other. Other people then posted the exact same link to some of the same communities.

People who post links without any sort of comment too. Lemmy is a link aggregator and discussion forum, but most people ignore the second part. It's especially annoying when it's got a vague title and links to a shitty site with a paywall so that you can't even find out what it's about.

No matter where I sign up, the server eventually shuts down and I have to migrate all my subscriptions and lose any posts I’ve contributed.

Look out, lemmy.world. I’m on this one now.

There could be more activity in the arts and crafts communities. I want all of you to pick up a nice creative hobby like knitting or stitching right fucking now! And then post all of it!

Way too much US-defaultism.

Not nearly enough cats.

There's also a vocal minority of just really pessimistic people on here. Politics I don't mind as long as it's a discourse about not only what is bad but what can be reasonably done about it.

I've been in several discussions where I add "look at community, we are strong together" and it's immediately beaten down with "the world won't change things are shit and always will be, be mad and angry about it, I'm mad and angry at you".

It's the internet, I'm not surprised. But I've definitely had to disconnect myself for a bit some days after severe reactions from people just to remember it's just strangers on the internet.

It's not all the time, but for some discussions that promote inclusion and understanding to be met with the hard "I don't agree so you are human garbage" can be an awful whiplash sometimes.

Probably the federated nature of it... i know the whole point of it is decentralisation but with the likes of reddit or discord at least you could attempt to have all your content salted or deleted (whether it actually is is another story) from a single server. Knowing anything and everything you post on here will stick around forever no matter what you do, by design, makes me uneasy.

I would like there to be more activity in a greater variety of communities, which I think will happen in time as the Fediverse grows. The main thing preventing me from posting my own interests and creations is a (probably excessive) caution about sharing personal/identifying things online, so I’m not going to criticize others for choosing the same. More users also tends to bring with it lower quality content, which leads to the next point:

As others like @tal@lemmy.today (who makes a lot of great comments in general) pointed out, there are a lot of political posts which seem more interested in venting their own frustrations and parroting popular opinions than having a constructive discussion and being receptive to different opinions. There is a lack of nuance. It’s possible to criticize the systems and people you do support without it meaning that you support the opposition, and it’s also possible you admit when someone you dislike makes a valid point without siding with them. You could even see a question like “how do I resolve this specific issue with Windows?” and one of the top responses will inevitably be something like “ew, you should be using Linux instead” and while I may not disagree, it does nothing to answer the question.

I’m not bothered by the gender ratios since it’s not a factor in how I interact with others, and users here are pretty quick to shut down rare instances of hostility towards a specific gender.

I do kinda miss having a total karma count. Not that it ever really meant anything, but number go up is fun

In the fediverse, the lack of interoperability really bothers me. Sure I can follow Pixelfed users on Mastodon but I can only see the first 4 pictures if they post multiple. I can also follow Mastodon users on Pixelfed but I will only see their posts containing images.

This cross follow functionality should simply not exist unless it’s good (like between lemmy, mbin and Piefed) as it will frustrate users and cause them to leave the platforms.

The clashing ideologies makes it hard to gain traction for the fediverse. Since no one ever agrees on things, it ironically turns into the politics people complain about with the republicans vs democrats always being at a stalemate.

The AI hate is almost like medieval witch hunting. Someone says, “It is AI” (which translates to “witchcraft and the work of Satan”), and the rest seem to run and grab their pitchforks and torches, ready to burn the author at the stake.

Definitely the amount of politics, it gets brought up in far too many places where it is unnecessary, I avoid political communities and stuff like that, yet I keep getting it in communities with 0 relation.

What I miss most are the (physically) local communities. On reddit, there was a subreddit for my general locality, and the nearby big city, and several subreddits on different aspects of life (the music scene, the food scene, etc). I miss that - randomly finding an event or something interesting simply because I came across a random post.

I know it's a function of the fact that it's still (comparatively) early days, but I do miss it.

Tankies and neutral voters

This is like an echo champer of tech people, hard to find non-tech aware people here.

Relative to Reddit, probably the number of users. More users means more posts, more comments, more expertise on various areas, and more niche communities that become viable.

Somewhere down the list:

• Extremely determined negativity. There are a lot of...I don't know how to describe it. People who actively try to take the absolute, most utterly-pessimistic read on anything possible, to the point of having to make crazy assumptions to keep some kind of negative perspective on the thing. I don't know if it's people suffering from depression

which I understand can produce that effect

or doomerism or what, but it's exasperating. I haven't run into that sort of phenomenon, certainly not to anything like that degree, on other social media environments that I've used.

• The low-effort "capitalism bad" venting comments. I'm not really into far-left views, but that's not what irks me. I've seen people on here who you can at least talk to about left-wing positions. Like, some random user who is interested in, I don't know, adopting universal basic income and wants to talk about different proposals. But about 99% of the comments I see that contain the word "capitalism" don't amount to that. They're just venting. They aren't constructive. They don't reference any material. They aren't proposing any improvement or ideas or anything. All they want to do is to vent. I mean, it's like someone wanting to complain about their ex or how their sports team lost or something like that. And not only that, but a substantial percentage of those comments are complaining about something that has little to do with capitalism. Instead, it's virtually anything to do with the political or economic world that they don't like relative to some sort of idealized paradigm that they hold. You could use that "everything I don't like is woke" meme about the right, swap "woke" and "capitalism", and I swear, it'd apply to a lot of the comments. And I get that, yeah, one purpose of talking to people is to vent, and so you'd expect that occasionally when people talk to each other, sometimes they're gonna vent. That's human nature. But holy cow, as low-effort venting goes, the "capitalism bad" comments show up as a high proportion here.

  Occasionally I do talk about things, write larger comments about communal ownership. Like...okay, I know that on at least a couple of occasions, I've talked about the fact you've had communal ownership work at small scale, like families, say, or that there have been smaller organizations that have practiced communal ownership of property, and that maybe it'd be interesting to try working up in scale from smaller organizations to try and identify where any issues might crop up. And I have never had anyone actually respond with discussion when I do write something like that. No engagement. Like, it's not as if people have some raging unmet desire to talk about any of that. They just want to complain.

  I don't even see people who are writing "capitalism bad" comments engage in discussion with each other. Like, this isn't Marx and a bunch of activists in a London cafe throwing around ideas with each other. It's just one-off complaints, leaf comments in the thread.

My main frustration is that the majority of instances are hosted in privacy-hostile jurisdictions.

Mostly just the ratio of news/politics to fun/hobby posts. It's stuff I could already find on any other news platform or social media, and there's seldom discourse about the topics. It's often just negativity or some type of leftist gatekeeping. I'd rather just go to the AP news page and read it there.

I like seeing everyone's art, woodworking, 3D prints, origami, nature photos, and all that other good stuff way more. I like learning about you guys and your interests and I think having a small platform allows that, but many of us either forgot how to share things online or are too you to have ever been a part of mailing lists or IRC and the like.

That Lemmys's not too different from Reddit.

Clickbait/ragebait gets upvoted to the top if it makes people feel good; hardly anyone even checks the source. Getting called out in the comments hardly affects it.

Niche content gets absolutely smothered by this, too, and the niche posters eventually give up.

These are structural problems Lemmy/Piefed software can improve, but that doesn't seem to be the development priority :/.

I'd argue this is a larger issue of the Fediverse, too. Devs are unintentionally copying structural issues, prioritizing other things when unhealthy attention patterns could kill the whole system. Like it has for previous social media alternatives. Lemmy feels more and more like Voat to me, which has got me really worried.

Group think: I rarely comment here because of that..