On reddit I was a lurker that posted like once or twice a year, but ever since joining lemmy I’ve started posting multiple times a day.
Yeah, but I’m still doing it on purpose to help the community grow. Somebody’s gotta fill this place with content, and at the end of the day that’s our job.
Normally I’m more of a commenter exclusively unless I need the services of a specific community. (video game question usually) But the Lemmy project has sent me digging for all the best youtube stuff I’ve seen in basically the past decade and then finding the community to shove it in.
Oh yeah, same here. The community is just so much nicer here. :)
Still a lurker tbh, aside from this comment
I am but I’m very quickly finding out I have nothing to contribute.
Agreed. It’s a smaller community and easier to feel seen. I’ve probably already posted more here than I ever have on Reddit.
I used to be an avid participant on reddit, but haven’t been for a long time. Now on Lemmy, I feel like participating again.
I think it’s because it’s on us to make this a great place now. Like, we can’t just migrate and be silent. Or migrate and be assholes. We come here, we gotta participate positively, so I’m just doing my part.
Right? When the community has to work towards a goal together, everyone does a little better.
I feel that… I just wish I had something interesting to post or say lol.
Oddly enough, I found “being interesting” to be a skill you sort of have to try to learn and pick up. It’s not like…something you’re born with. You kind of actively learn how to “do the thing”. I’ve been a wallflower most of my life, but slowly started to pick up tricks as I got older.
I found that asking other people about themselves usually kickstarts a conversation. People love to talk about themselves. Then once they reply, you see if you can find a thread or something in what they said to tug on to further the convo.
Being really into some topic or another as a hobby or profession also can give you something interesting, if you take something you know about that subject and put it in front of other people who are unfamiliar with the hobby.
Example from one of my random niche interests:
Did you guys know that honey bees aren’t male/female based on having XX or XY genes? Bees that are male come from unfertilized eggs, and have only half the chromosomes the female bees have. Their chromosomes are unpaired, whereas in other animals they’re paired. Basically, male bees have no father, they only have a mother.
Love it! That’s actually my main party trick, it’s either asking a whole ton of questions and if that doesn’t work I try to steer the conversation into the approximately 30 minutes of material I have on birds. I used to be a crazy nightmare in uber pools, I think
I find this insight into your feelings interesting!
<3
This is exactly how I feel, on Reddit it does not matter if I comment or engage at all, Reddit is what it is at this point. Here at Lemmy I feel way more compelled to post simply if only to keep the platform active. I hope others feel the same and can add more value to lemmy than I can.
I just like that I can post an honest comment and not worry about being Well-Ackshually’d to death. Sometimes I’d be knee-deep in Wikipedia fact-checking and suddenly realize, “This reddit reply is not worth the personal effort I am putting into it.”
Always felt unwelcome posting anything on reddit. Lemmy is new enough and filled with people who are nice enough to make feel like I wont get yelled at for commenting or posting.
Me and my people are powered by spite. I am going to try and be more active to help everything along so that reddit may die.
I, too, am fueled by anger and spite
So there are three of us.
Make it four. I just want there to be enough content soon enough to be a real pull away from Reddit.
It’s my favorite style of architecture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spite_fence
Same here, every post feels like I’m making a small contribution to a platform which I really want to succeed.
Exactly this.
Posting is essential to get this community up and running so thanks!
I think that as a result of the size of reddit, it was unlikely to have engagement when you commented, and it was common to get unkind engagement if it did happen. It’s nice to have a fresh start, but since there’s less of us, it is also a much more intimate experience.
You’re absolutely right. Often times it also didn’t feel like a conversation; rather, it was just a bunch of one liners. I’m also suspicious that there are a lot of bots commenting as well. It just didn’t feel organic. In any case, I have wondered about your point regarding the current size of the community and how it lends itself to a more intimate experience. I’m hoping that with growth we can keep that going. Do you think it’s possible?
I used BBS systems before Usenet. They were a labor of love. It is absolutely possible to maintain civility and constructive collaboration online, in fact it’s the natural order. I wish there were a better word than ‘enshittification’ to describe the corrosiveness and malice that corporate-controlled social media wrought, but seeing it go from what it once was to Twitter and Facebook was dismaying - shitty, even.
Lemmy is a really big deal. Not only is the threading format and aggregating similar to reddit, BBS and Usenet days, but it also captures the spirit of self-moderation, innovation and user-autonomy that allowed reddit to flourish. Reddit was built and held together by a great deal more than software and hardware. Lemmy has that and it’s non-commercial and scalable. It’s the best thing to happen to social media in a long time.
It’s the best thing to happen to social media in a long time.
No doubt, it really is. It feels so much better than what I have encountered elsewhere in terms of social media.
It’s really cool to hear your perspective on this topic as you have a lot more experience historically coming from the proto versions of online communities. I really believe what you say is true in respects to civility and constructive collaboration being the natural order. Something I keep pondering is how communities like this will respond to the software and hardware of antagonizing forces. For context, my 9-5 is bot analysis and mitigation. As I watch all manner of bot technology mature, I can’t help but wonder if our communities, and humans as a whole, are prepared to solve these problems.
Feel free to tell me to take my tinfoil hat off. ;)
Yes, I completely agree that we are vulnerable to bots. The APIs are wide open by design. It will be interesting to see how it evolves but ActivityPub is supposedly designed with this stuff in mind. Yes it’s easy to act maliciously and create accounts. There are a million ways to attack. It’s a fact of life, sadly. Also probably the natural order - we’ve been chucking rocks at one another for millennia.
It happened on Usenet. It wasn’t a paradise, it was full of spam and trolls and bots. However the fragmentation and self policing of the Usenet groups somehow kept the experience tolerable. Maybe we just expected less. Lemmy reminds me a lot of early BBS days. Not even any spam so far. It’s remarkable - but probably temporary. I’m liking it though.
Mastodon is built on ActivityPub and seems to be thriving. I don’t see spam or problems there so far. It seems quite civil. It’s more like Twitter in format than Lemmy is, but the big instances have dealt with DOS and malicious actors and seem to be coping ok.
Your work sounds very cool. The development over the past few years in data analytics and machine learning is indeed startling when the ability for deception and manipulation is so easily scalable, but I think we will find ways to isolate or mitigate these issues gradually. It might take years and a lot of suffering, but innovation to solve problems is also our natural inclination.
I think we’ve got enough time with the community like this that we can enjoy it while it lasts, and the newfound wisdom to appreciate it before it’s gone. :)
Just dropping in here to tell you that we all love you. That is all 💕
community also feels more welcome
I am a lurker for life, probably, but I will try to be better for Lemmy, to help the site grow.
What I like about Lemmy is, that you don’t need to be one of the first comments to interact with people. On Reddit you would easily be buried somewhere at the bottom but most Lemmy posts I see have a really nice comment section. People are more likely to see your comment because the posts don’t have hundreds of comments but there are still enough comments to start a conversation. I also love that I can have conversations stretched over days. I don’t browse Lemmy often. I don’t need to feel bad when I answer something a day later.
this is me returning to form, as algorithms put me into a hole engagement on my posts went to crap, i stopped posting at this level over 10 years ago now.
having a proper forum again, Im posting like I used to, my google fu is once again being shared with the community.
whats interesting is reddits algo would lead you to believe what you are saying or posting has no value. i come here, and started just posting as normal, expecting nothing, surprised but also reminded of how algos work when i found normal levels of engagement again.
