Lack of discussion on beehaw (and lemmy)

metaltoilet@beehaw.org to Beehaw Support@beehaw.org – 1 points –

First off, I want to say that I love what the people here are doing but I do have a problem. There is never any conversation about posts. There are tons and tons of links shared but most of the time they're just articles that someone found interesting. I never see any true, meaningful discussion the way I do on reddit. Does anyone else have a problem with this or am I just shouting at the clouds? Is there anything we can do about it?

2

Since i was there i can attest that what you're seeing is pretty much the early days of Reddit itself. At the beginning it didn't even had comments, the purpose of the site was sharing interesting links. Then comments were added and people commented on said links. Of course, in nearly 20 years the site has evolved.

So, assuming and hoping that Lemmy lasts and grows, just give it time.

I'm going to take the opposite approach and say Lemmy is surprisingly active.

I wanted to check an idea of Reddit proportion of lurkers; didn't find actual data and am definitely not emotionally invested enough to make my own, but it took me to the 1% rule, which states that on an online community, roughly 1% of people create content, 9% edit/update/upvote/comment, and 90% are passive consumers of content.

It's very true that Lemmy isn't very active (although it's definitely been better recently!), but given this, I honestly believe it's purely a matter of gaining a critical mass of users. So I see two main approaches:

  • Comment as much as possible! Sometimes you'll be shouting at the clouds, sometimes you'll lead by example and people will join the conversation;
  • As a community, let's get more people using Lemmy so that even with the same ratio, the absolute number of posters & commenters will grow.

I've seen the issue on Mastodon when I joined a few years ago, and my friends and I make a point of not using "favs" too much, just boosting (which puts it in your followers' timeline) and commenting/replying. It's a small thing but it's good etiquette and encourages others to do the same.