What do you want to see more of on Lemmy?

merrick@normalcity.life to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 128 points –

Any specific types of content you want to see more of here

137

More original content, less crap reposted via bots.

I just block all the bots so that I only see original content.

....and how do you do this?

By going to their profiles manually. After blocking a few of the prominent ones you usually don’t see bot posts.

I don't mind the bot posts, because they do bring a theater for discussion. But without an algorithm to float them they end up just being everything. Maybe if bots identified themselves as bots, and they could be sorted in after original content?

There’s an option to do that when you create an account

But do we do anything with it?

True

Damn I was kind of hopeful for a minute. Still the fact that the flag exists, I wonder if it's something we even surface that a client could deprioritize?

Just original content you don’t see anywhere else first.

Stroganoff unironically the best thing to happen to Lemmy yet

Can you explain the Stroganoff thing? I think I'm OOTL

I honestly don’t know. Shit just started everywhere out of nothing and that’s what’s great about it

Mfer you think we understood "all ur base are belong to us" and "o rly owl?" no but we embraced it

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I agree. Too much of Lemmy is just links to other content instead of people having thoughts of their own and then starting a discussion about it. There isn't a real reason to use Lemmy if there is nothing here that is not anywhere else.

There are a lot memes here so maybe those are often original.

Content aggregation is what reddit and lemmy are designed for.

Partially, but not exclusively. We will get enough of it regardless of anything so I'd wish people focused on also doing other forms of content.

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More hobbies, less doomerism. I don’t need yet another site telling me that the world is fucked by capitalism but it’s be nice to have another site to tell me how to beat those boomerang guys in Zelda 2

Wasn't that notorious for being the worst Zelda by a long shot?

I think the old CDi Zelda games are the front runners. Zelda 2 was very different from the original Zelda, but it's still considered a classic.

Just decent quality content for various topics which aren't politics or tech. For the good of increasing the size of Lemmy, I think everyone ought to find a couple things they're interested in as hobbies and just dare to make content about them.

Lots of niche communities have the problem where no one posts because no one posts. At some point, you have to just pull the ripcord and start the darn thing, even if it takes a while.

Definitely more of this, there are a lot of cool people with different interests and no spaces for it. Make the content and people will come

For some things it might also be good to make partnerships with other spaces, such as niche subreddits

I'll hop into inactive communities for things that interest me, and after posting for a bit, others eventually show up and start commenting/posting too.

If you build it, they will come!

I'm trying to do my part in my niche, I'm still 90+% of the posts. I don't care tho, I'll keep posting for all 25 of us as long as I have content to post.

For me the fragmentation of the communities cause me pain so I would love to see less fragmentation.

Just do a search for any topic and there are at least a handful of communities all with varying member counts and no idea which one is active.

I’m a programmer so I like to keep up on some different languages.

Java has the few communities but still more than two Rust has at least 10 different communities And the list goes on.

I kind of wish there was some sort of centralization and that communities would either merge or disband but I only see this getting worse.

Ooh, having the ability for a community to set (and unset) itself to direct to another community of their choice would be cool in a baranganic democracy way

I googled around a little bit but didn't quite understand. What's a barangay/baranganic

a barangay is a precolonial / indigenous political unit in SE Asia that literally means "boat"; the ancient political structure was that a barangay (a group of people larger than a family but smaller than a tribe) would federate under a "fleet commander" and sail under their command (e.g. in times of war or raids). the barangay could withdraw their support at a low cost by literally sailing away and/or federating with a different chieftain.

a baranganic democracy is structured such that a group of people can stay together in their chosen community, but that community can pledge itself to a single decision-maker, with the ability to withdraw support at low cost. it's a representative democracy, but the legitimacy and power of the representative is essentially proven by the consent and backing of the governed.

in a fediverse way, this could be like having a Lemmy instance pawn.social that federates with lemmy.ca and lemmy.nl, but with all three in mutual agreement that lemmy.ca is in charge of reduplication communities; lemmy.ca's mod team then decides that in this cluster !memes goes to memes@lemmy.ca, !furry always goes to furry@pawb.social, !woodworking is wood@lemmy.nl and so on. that would allow both for server balancing and federation/defederation but reduce duplicates

More fun and hobby related stuff. Lemmy is depressing and hateful AF. Feels like most of the people here are afflicted by "Politics as a Personality". At least on Reddit it is pretty easy to avoid that by only subbing to hobby subs but most of those are dead on Lemmy. I switched to using mostly Reddit on my PC again and just using Lemmy on my phone since there is no good mobile reddit app anymore.

More explanation without toxicity. I think I have gotten shit on on lemmy more than I did on reddit by this point.

Don’t get me wrong. I‘m incorrect sometimes but if I see someone being confidently incorrect, I tell them and explain. And if I tell them that I find their attitude lacking and would like to learn, they get even worse.

A lot of people here are just dicks and the moderators don’t react to reports. They can tell you you‘re a fucking moron for not knowing everything and get away with it. Worse, they dogpile on you with their schoolyard bully attitude.

This is kind of a reason for me to leave if this goes on and it will keep other people from joining, hampering the growth.

I really hope this changes.

More explanation without toxicity. I think I have gotten shit on on lemmy more than I did on reddit by this point.

This doesn’t surprise me. I’m more of a lemmy person than I was ever a Reddit person, but I’m in the same boat.

Along with some of the cultural issues that have happened over on masto, I’ve come to suspect, somewhat controversially, that there is a major difficulty in founding a new and niche social media platform off the back of discontent with a major platform. And that’s because unless the discontent and migration is widespread, but instead marginal, those inclined to reject the mainstream in favour of something niche for some reason will often enough include people who aren’t the most naturally social people and can create and establish somewhat unpalatable cultures.

I hope I’m wrong, and hopefully it’s clear that I’m speaking statistically. But it makes some sense and could be real, both here and other Fedi places.

I really like your explanation! Thank you very much. Would you mind helping me make some kind of community with the idea of bringing some anti bullying standards to lemmy?

I have moderation experience both on reddit and on lemmy and I‘m pretty surprised at the passivity of mods here. It’s not that surprising considering that reddit is a single (sueable) entity.

I mean, those in Ireland can already sue for cyberbullying and the rest of the eu hopefully soon follows.

We might find more of our kind and actually get good content on this place as not every sane person leaves after being shit on 3 times a day.

I moderate a couple of light hearted communities pretty strictly. Name calling is not allowed, neither is arguing. Discussion is fine, but the second I see it become unpleasant, I shut it down.

That said, I’m the main contributor to the majority of my communities and I’ve dramatically decreased the amount of posts I make over the last couple of weeks. There’s a lot more criticism and negativity lately, and some of the abusive messages I receive after asking someone to abide by the rules are straight up unhinged. I have to moderate closely to keep it enjoyable and honestly, I don’t have the time or the inclination to deal with the nastiness at the moment. The crappy mod tools don’t help, and neither does me living in the UK when the majority of commenters are in the USA.

But anyway, check out the community rules and the stickied mod post in !dontyouknowwhoiam@lemmy.world They might give you a starting point to create a nicer community.

The others I moderate - !confidently_incorrect@lemmy.world !clevercomebacks@feddit.uk !murderedbywords@feddit.uk and !badrealestate@feddit.uk - all have similar rules, with varying degrees of success. !badrealestate is definitely the “nicest” community I moderate - it’s pretty hard to get worked up over estate agent photos.

ETA: SomeoneElseMod@feddit.uk is my mod account, I forgot to switch.

Fixed links.

Hi! Just meant to check out some of your links, and they are not working for me. Perhaps some formatting issue?

Wow! Thanks for this awesome explanation! It seems like there are a lot less people on lemmy than it seems. :)

I think there would also be people who benefit if stuff here got a lot more vile. That’s something we shouldn’t forget. Reddit and Twitter for example have ample motive to spread hate here.

There are bad actors for sure, but I think my naivety is partly to blame. I really enjoy discussing all sorts of topics and hearing all sorts of views - it’s an essential part of learning and growing imo. So I haven’t shied away from posting screenshots in my communities that touch on “controversial” subjects. Lemmy seemed so much nicer than Reddit at first, I truly thought I could help develop communities that discussed any topic in a calm, informative, respectful manner - particularly because these are light hearted communities. But it’s not to be. I wasn’t expecting an online utopia, but things have definitely shifted from “I disagree with you because XYZ” to “go fuck yourself you wanker” and it’s really disheartening.

I haven’t been a mod before and I really dislike the automatic mod = power hungry narcissist stereotype. I’m so careful to be polite, transparent and understanding when I act in a moderator capacity because I’ve had to deal with the less scrupulous Reddit mods in the past too. But honestly, the majority of people I have to remind to follow the rules are just so horrible that I don’t want to do it anymore. It’s like they’re stuck in the Reddit mindset of “everyone’s a dick, so you might as well be one too” or “it doesn’t matter what I say because this is anonymous”.

Shout out to the person who called me a “sycophantic child molester” after I gave them a warning for insulting 4 separate people. And the one who said I had “a personal moral failing” when I wouldn’t ban another user who hadn’t broken the rules. You suck.

Jeez! You're kind of the person I would like to associate with. I really feel you and it means a lot that you put yourself out there like this.

I'm a little different in parts but also the same in a lot of ways. Most notably, I'm autistic and I know it. Also, in my specific case, I tend to be brutally honest whereas honest is bold and brutally is the part I try to keep low because I really don't want to hurt someone. The interesting part is that I don't abide by social rules, mostly because I don't understand them or don't even see them.

This leads to very interesting situations. My strong sense for right and wrong (pretty binary, as well) leads me to look for the person who started to insult the other one because had they (for example) stayed constructive, the situation would have gone differently. But obviously I have a sence of nuance (after 36 yrs on this planet, even my autistic head does let in outside influence). So I don't just crash into someone I think has done wrong but my understanding of this right or wrong is very strong and a bit thickheaded. I mediate myself to not make people miserable.

What this also means is that if I tell someone my honest opinion, they often can't see how I got to that conclusion and I have no idea that they don't, so I'm shocked when they call me names (psychopath, narcissist, cruel and others) while I ask them to just explain to me why they see it different. Then (recently more on lemmy) they pile onto me like a gang of rabid dogs when I'm the only food available.

And it wouldn't be as ironic if the overwhelming conclusion after hours of back and forth and me explaining/asking and them beating me up wouldn't always be "Ok, so you're actually correct and it was a misunderstanding, tough luck I guess." (as said by the people doing the beating, btw.) This accidentally coincides with an old friend from elementary school joking about me getting beaten up all the time for "inventing words" which he much later learned were just very obscure and he learned at the age of 30.

Appreciate the offer, but I'm sorry to say that I'm in no position to take on any sort of commitment like that.

That being said, are you aware of beehaw? If not, you might want to check out their instance and their documentation. From what I've been able to glean, they're pretty dedicated to creating a more humane social media space, with generally more active moderation than anywhere else on lemmy (they, as you might know, blocked lemmy.world, and are rather unhappy at the lack of moderation tooling in lemmy the platform).

Otherwise, if you do find yourself setting something up, let me know. I'll likely check it out and be involved however I can!

Thank you very much for the information and kind words. I will absolutely check them out. I‘ll also try to hit you up if I decide to make a community dedicated to the cause.

Last thing: The reason I‘m so adamant about this is that I feel like we are having this massive problem with people being bullied all around the globe (by their bosses, coworkers, schoolmates, parents, you name it).

When they complain, most people answer with „suck it up“ or „your own fault“ or „bad but can’t do anything“ which leads to suicides, school shootings, cults, political extremists.

All because people are not feeling heard and stuff is not properly explained to them. Instead they are ridiculed, pathologized and beaten into submission by the „normal“ (just larger in numbers) crowd.

And I feel like those of us who have already split from real life because they can’t take it anymore are now bullied even more online.

Sorry for the rant. I just needed to say this. Thanks for reading. Have a good one.

Any conclusions or constructive ideas to take from this?

I mean we could potentially have all kinds of policies, technical solutions or learnings for future platforms. At this point I struggle a bit to imagine a way to apply what you're saying.

Well it’s probably tricky!

Best I can think of is that open sign ups for a brew and niche platform are probably not the best idea or are at least risky for the reasons I stated.

Sign up by application and approval like lemmy.ml and beehaw, from what I’ve seen, actually work at filtering out bad actors.

For something that scales better, an invite system could work well. An interesting extension of that might be to record who invites and maybe enforce some sort of responsibility for the people you invite. Nothing extreme but just to prevent people from knowingly inviting douche bags.

Beyond all of that, realising, at a moderation level that there are bad actors and actively banning them is more important than you might seem in the early stages of a platform.

As for us, reporting bad actors as often as we can might be best seen as a responsibility for the sake of the platform. Actively willing to then e to let them know they’re out of line too.

Thanks for replying. And for your input.

I wasn't really aware of this. But now that I'm thinking about it, I've also had contact with a few annoying people on some of the more popular and 'open' communities. And usually a nicer atmosphere on the more focused ('nerd') communities. Just to be clear: There are also many exceptionally nice and helpful people here on Lemmy.

I've been critizising beehaw for their way of de-federating at will, a feature that's unfortunately also designed badly. And causing all kinds of trouble for the rest of the fediverse and effectively dividing people. Just my opinion. I get the point but I think this is detrimental to the fediverse as a whole and shows small-minded thinking. But I only know half of the story. Maybe I'm wrong here.

I share your view of things. And I'm not sure about a conclusion. Maybe it's something like an invite system. But that takes away from being welcoming to new people. I like to take pride into allowing people to take part, no matter who they are. But allowing everyone in has the obvious consequence of you needing to deal with the a-holes later, when it's more difficult. And I don't think an application form slows down people who like to be emotional and argumentative or troll.

I've been part of PeerTube for a while. And during the pandemic, there was a massive inrush of Covid-deniers and conspiracy theorists. After some time they got banned from, or got in trouble on the major platforms. And they started flooding PeerTube with re-uploads of their most crazy stuff. To the point where everyone was annoyed and new users immediately been turned away after having a glimpse of a timeline of one of the instances. It's been some hard work, but we confined them to a corner of their own and cleaned the timelines of the major instances. To highjack one of their terms: I think this has been my 'awakening'... Regarding 'free speech' vs 'moderation'. And dynamics like we're just now talking about. We can't directly compare our situation here on Lemmy to the events on PeerTube or Mastodon. But we can (and should) draw conclusions.

For Lemmy, there are a few low hanging fruit left. I mean when it comes to technical solutions. Better moderation tools etc. And things are already been worked on. But I've always been curious about the sociological aspects. It's been mainly one big migration event for us here. It felt like a revolution and a fresh start after Reddit. And people picked up on this. Nonetheless we're often rebuilding the structures we already know. Sometimes including the tone of speaking with another.

I 100% agree on your assessment that moderation in the early stages has an important effect. We're in the process of inventing/defining this place. Every interaction counts. From the atmosphere and tone the users set, to what moderators deem appropriate behaviour, to how instance admins handle disagreements and security incidents.

I have to think about this a bit more. My main takeway at this point is: Next time I want to say 'I wish more people would realize Twitter is a bad place, Elon is making it worse by the day, and they should leave and use the better alternative...'. I'll stop and think about the consequences and if this is really what I want or need.

Weird, my experience in Lemmy is much more positive compared to Reddit. Usually I can have better discussion here compared to my time at reddit.

Understandable. As a straight white male, my experience in job seeking for example is usually much better than people in any other config.

Harassment is usually not a problem if you‘re part of the majority. If you don’t deviate from that, you‘re good.

But if you‘re more of a nerd, gay, autistic, or any other of the things that severely deviate from the norm, you can have a bad time fast.

Less hate and radicalism. I’m sorry to say this because I would love Lemmy to rule over Reddit, but most headlines I get are about hate: from Elon Musk, to Apple, to any browser not being Firefox or any OS not being Linux or Android.

Absolutely this. As if browsing Popular on reddit wasn't bad enough, but I really only look at my subscriptions on Lemmy

More activity in the hobby subs.

I wish people would actually use the writing and art ones in particular.

Also more activity in the “get some mental help so you’re not calling everyone a nazi like it’s going out of fashion” sub.

More sharing of hobby pictures

Less Elon spam. Imagine spending your time obsessing over someone you hate

If it helps (it doesn't), everywhere I've been where the users generally hate Elon are also usually talking about him.

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More communities for making friends, casual discussions, and local Lemmy meetups.

Some variety in content that is friendly and fun. Not all doom and hating on corporations. I am not advocating for corporations btw.

More serious communities.

Might it be technology (no musk or apple, it's like drama, not tech) but that new litography or the board for under 20$ etc. Robots. Drones?

Biology/longevity/gerontology, no vitamine or supplements BS but studies and trials moving forward to make us live better and longer.

The Arts and people creating, whatever it might be, paintings, sketches, knitting, sewing, woodworking, statues made of clay, and all the other arts!

I guess I hate sensationalism and love sincerity & creativity <3

Cheers

Askahistorian but it needs to have the same level of moderation

Yea the moderation tools just aren't there yet for such a nicely organized community

Or much of the ability to search content on Lemmy

Community search yes, post/comment search not so much

Active communities for the creative. Like the Affinity Apps DaVinci video editor and other apps besides Adobe Creative Suite.

More content around individual games so there feels like more of a community here. Some times its like talking into the void.

Less political respost spam from multiple bots to multiple communities at the same time. Just gets anoying to filter out after a while.

Niche content. I miss my balisong and machined pens communities. Some of them are in EDC. There's lots of tech because only tech people would use this, if we make it as easy to use then more normal people would come over. Which is good in bad because it would essentially bring the regular reddit society over again.

  • Video/film production
  • Audio production
  • More activity on https://kbin.social/m/truegaming (we got a little community but would love more posts! We’re fun I swear lol)
  • home brewing
  • coffee
  • creative writing

Yes me too. I've subscribed to Lemmy.film Meta@ lemmy.film and Lemmy.graphics@lemmy.graphics and although both communities sure look promising, they are inactive.

Same goes with other communities such as the Blender one.

I'm a commenter mostly, I tried creating posts for some of those but didn't get a lot of attention.

The fact is they probably should have made communities on an already existing instance instead of trying to spin up their own instances. But that’s neither here nor there. I just want to get into more discussions about these topics! Perhaps I should go join those instances and start posting haha

Go ahead! Those were already set up before the Reddit exodus and our numbers are higher than when I joined up. You never know, we might get this thing rolling eventually

God yes. I miss my cooking Subreddits. I haven't really seen too much content like that. I pretty much only read asklemmy even though I'm on kbin. I don't care for the memes and political news and it seems like that's all there is.

Sounding.

At least Reddit had a decent community there.

Modded Minecraft. The community seems to stick with Reddit. There are communities here, but not very active.

Science. I find /r/science to be one of the best subs in reddit. Not perfect, but one of the best. It would be great if those with a science background moved to lemmy.

More entertainment, whether the content is original or not.

What I miss from reddit are the funny videos, memes, the crème de la crème of tiktok and youtube. It doesn't have to be original, it has to be high quality and entertaining or insightful. I miss the old r/videos before it got split into r/videos and r/publicfreakout.

Not always, but most of the time when I come back home, I want to turn off my brain, laugh and be entertained at random shit. I don't want to see random political debate, outrage, etc...

I was actually surprised when the first thing that came to mind for this question was "funny videos." I'm a pretty avid reader, and I like the discussions a lot, but there are a lot of good discussions here. There are also a crap ton on memes. What I don't see many of is funny videos.

Geocaching! Yes, it's a very niche hobby that I'm obsessed with, but I really miss the discussions in that subreddit...

!geocaching@lemmy.world is still mostly me shouting into the void, although it's been getting better lately. It'd be awesome to hear other people's stories, if they're out there!

More of the masto crowd getting involved here. We'd enjoy each other's company, and many of us probably enjoy both formats (microblog/reddit). That much conversation is basically split and mostly cut off along platform lines feels like an unnecessary failure of the fediverse.

In a way this is a bad answer as it's essentially a technological issue. Yes there are things that are possible now, including kbin, I know about them, but they don't really provide truly usable bridges between spaces. But it still irks me a great deal.

I'd like to see people talk in a wide variety of communities. I've been trying to post to !malefashionadvice, and there are a handful of people upvoting there, but the only other posts are super basic questions once in a blue moon. Most posts don't get commented on, and most comments are empty one liners about how nobody should enjoy X type of clothing, rather than anything positive or engaging. I haven't found another fashion community half as active as that.

There doesn't seem to be a Jewish community here... the television community I've found is kind of active, but not really... The NYC community sees maybe one post per week...

It seems like there are plenty of niches going entirely untouched. I feel like people are less likely to discuss hobbies here unless those hobbies are focused on "nerd culture," software, etc. Most communities are just memes or something. !asklemmy seems to be 30% askreddit-type questions, 30% questions about fediverse, and 40% are like, "hey, how do you fix a broken air conditioner" or, you know... non-discussion questions, non-opinion questions, non-story questions, just "help me with this shit" or stuff you could look up in an encyclopedia.

!foodporn seems to be pretty good...

!malefashionadvice@lemmy.world , and indeed thank you for posting there

Help me out, I forgot how to format it again because it doesn't make any sense. I'm on kbin, if that makes a difference. I know there's one rule for linking to internal communities, and a totally different rule for linking to external ones, but I can't remember what either of those rules is...

Just use ! followed by the community@instance like I did

ohhhh, I just made a typo in the one I was testing, thanks.

Long text, especially like Hobby Drama type of stuff.

Yes! I miss Best or Red**** Updates so freaking much. Hobby Drama is amazing too. They're like little addicting shows where you're emotionally invested and can't wait for the next series.

To be fair there is Hobbydrama@lemmy.world but they have had 7 users in the past month. You could be the eighth! We really need a way to advertise communities better. People keep asking for this stuff that already exists, but few are finding or using it.

I do think a best of Lemmy would be the easiest community to grow. I see some fire comments (well thought out, new ideas, with sources) on Lemmy that could have fit a community like that.

Original content and dank memes.

I haven't explored communities much lately, what are some good dank meme communities that aren't 196?

196 is so good tho, feels better then /c/memes or /c/dankmemes to me

I got no issue with 196, I'm just already subbed and looking for others.

Communities with older people. I still need Reddit for communities on old motorcycles, cars, etc

One of the biggest things I miss from reddit is the discord videos sub.

Lively Rocket league esports discussion