Do you feel that there's a lack of discussion on Lemmy about stuff besides the current Reddit and Twitter controversies?

rimlogger@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 180 points –

I've been on Beehaw and Lemmy.world for the past two weeks now and while people seem to be posting content that isn't about Reddit or Twitter or how great federated platforms are, such content does not receive as many comments/discussion as topics about the Reddit API controversy, or the current Twitter controversy, etc.

I prefer to sort by "new" when on the main page of either Beehaw or Lemmy.world. Most posts scarcely get a few upvotes and almost no comments. Without comments, I feel far less inclined to leave a comment unless there's a discussion already going on.

It feels like the gravity of discussion is still mostly centered on complaints and discussion about Reddit (or Big Tech in general), despite this platform being billed as a Reddit replacement. Hopefully that changes with time but there's a reason I haven't left Reddit yet.

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If you want discussion about something else, you gotta post. The Reddit thing is maybe the number one common interest among basically all Lemmy users right now, so of course it's going to be the most upvoted thing. But making a post complaining about that fact just exacerbates the problem. If you post about literally anything else then you will be helping the ratio of reddit-related to non-reddit-related posts.

It might seem that way (especially if you subscribe to the Reddit-discussing communities here; I did that at first, but got tired of seeing the same five convos happening a gazillion times, so I unsubscribed them, and that mainly solved the problem).

I went out into the community search, found a bunch of stuff I'm interested in, joined those places, and have been having some good interactions so far. So that's what I'd recommend.

Obviously it's also the hot topic right now, with a bunch of confused redditors coming over. Should die down more and more

Nope, I'm seeing discussions unrelated to Reddit every time I'm on here. And there's often more comments than I care to read! The main hurdle for me is the long load times and the inconsistency of the buttons.

But remember!

There's never going to be a perfect alternative. No Reddit alternative is going to function the same as a massive 18 year old site from Day 1. It takes some time, some stress tests, some development, and some dedication. Just remember the shit they pulled to bring us here.

Can you recommend some communities? I used the community browser to join the most active ones but I only see a few new posts every couple hours and most of them are reddit-related ๐Ÿ˜” I feel like I'm not looking in the right places

Why wouldnโ€™t people talk about the thing that is going on? What do you want them to talk about, how terrible the name beehaw is? The world isnโ€™t ready for that discussion.

Reddit is the big news right now, so that makes sense. It's news even outside of our own circle of technophiles and ex-redditors.

It's up to us to spread things out. A whole bunch of us are just waiting for someone else to take a step. If we take the step ourselves, people will join in, AND new users checking out the platform for the first time will see familiar things that make them feel like they've come to the right place.

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As early adopters, itโ€™s important for us to be active on the platform. You see posts without comments, and then donโ€™t leave a comment yourself because of it.

Be the change you want to see! Leave that first comment to spark a discussion.

I have taken this attitude very much to heart. Only slightly embarrassing to look at my comment count lol

What is fun about this post is that continues the conversation about Reddit. :)

I agree with many. It will take time to grow and fill out. I look forward to seeing the growth.

While I agree, I can understand why it's so Reddit-oriented. Mostly everyone who came here came from Reddit so news/ drama/ discourse about Reddit is relevant for the vast majority of people. The other reason is a lot of people just joined, so this whole topic isn't as tired out for them.

It is to be expected. Once more communities get established, conversation will shift to other topics. I mostly just skip past all the reddit posts. I'm sure they will go down over time.

You have to skip the bigger communities and just sort 'new' on your subscribed view. That way you'll only see content about other topics. It helps me to stay away from the reddit and twitter storm. But people are happy and proud of themselves that they left, so they need to vent.

It will blow over. It's just that the whole Reddit debacle is the most relevant thing right now. Check back in a few months.

The reason why there's a large influx of users is because the reddit thing finally kicked over so it makes sense that a large amount of comments about it. But I don't mind those as much as these meta posts complaining about people talking about reddit because it just puts a magnifying glass on everything that is worse here than on Reddit. Of course there's less interaction, the userbase on Reddit dwarfs Lemmy. Reddit was like this 15 years ago or however long it was. Either you understand why people have migrated here and accept that there's less of a community or here you stick with reddit. Stop complaining it's not a 1:1 copy.

follow communities that post about other topics then?

reddit has what, 100M users? lemmy only has 1% of that for now. so things will be quieter at the start, but i've found that people are more engaged here!

No, I blocked those communities that talk about Reddit. My feed had been pictures and memes mostly.

To be honest, no lol. I think up to this point, yeah that's been the case but with Reddit's API change coming in to effect and Twitter's issues the Fediverse has blown up and even my non-techie friends are starting to talk about it in real life. As a result of those changes we're seeing all sorts of discussion occur. But people, all of us, are still learning how this works and so far the thing that unites the most discussion IS the exodus so that's probably going to be top of mind for users initially.

Completely correct. Its not great at thr moment opening it up 12 hours later and still having this meta news.

It's either Lemmy/reddit drama or memes for my all feed.

Like posts about other stuff exist but don't get the votes to elevate high enough.

Somewhat, but it's just the "how's the weather?" of this community because most everyone is here from Reddit, so it's a starting point to me. I don't think Lemmy exists just to spite Reddit, and I participate in discussions having nothing to do with the subject.

At the moment I definitely don't look at Local or All very often on the homepage because of this. There's plenty of communities out there that definitely just want to discuss their niche, or are at least trying to make sure this is where the focus is. I'm sure people will eventually get to the point where they don't want to share that content and it will pass, but no idea how long that will take.

Nope, because I subscribe to lots of different communities and for the most part none spend much time talking about Reddit.

Nope. I only look at places I've subscribed to, and I've gone out of my way to track down places that relate to my interests across multiple instances. It's not the most lively, but very little of it focuses on reddit.

Though you're right, the stuff with twitter, and also youtube, have been major news topics. It's to be expected from major internet resources shooting themselves in the foot.

I've done the same, going through fediverse observer and subscribing to all sorts of communities on niche instances and even deploying my own. At this point my main front page feed is very close to what reddit was, but what I don't quite have yet (due to lacking both feature and content) to recreate my interest specific multireddits.

How was the experience of hosting your own instance for the sake of personal convenience? It's something I've been considering along side a few other things that might be worth the effort.

As a Linux and travel enthusiast I think it's fun. Mayne a big ambitious to position my instance as the go-to place for local communities, but I'll give it a few months and see how it goes.

I recommend paperspace over AWS, Azure or Google Cloud just because it's easier to setup and the pricing is more straightforward. I just went with the entry level Linux server, it works fine but I can upgrade later. You can install xfce and connect to VNC over SSH if you want, but I find I do 99% of the server work through SSH on PowerShell.

I've had one downtime issue so far this week but I honestly think it was due to so many other instance also having downtime and the federation workers stalled. I installed netdata so I can easily monitor CPU and RAM usage, which to no surprise, workers be working. I'm also running scripts to post from RSS feeds until things get going on their own.

I run mine over at Linode for the last couple weeks without any downtime. Can't recommend it enough. And it doesn't use a lot of resources so you can host multiple things on one server.

I personally donโ€™t. I like the occasional updates about reddit.

I agree that the all section with default active sorting feels a little to Reddit/Twitter. Things get already much better with sorting by hot or top.

One thing I wonder is, if people actually know how to use Lemmy subscriptions. Reddit used a algorithm to customize your frontpage and Lemmy doesn't have that. There is one single video on lemmy.world/c/videos with over 1k upvotes while the rest has only between 15 - 30. The difference? That one video ended up in the all section and enough people commented in it.

My local instance feed is pretty good and has almost no Reddit or Twitter stuff in it. Same goes for my subscription feed.

  • Install the wefwef app (optional)
  • Click the Posts icon at the bottom
  • Choose 'All'

That way, you'll see all posts on the fediverse and not just the posts in your subscribed communities or the local communities (registered at your instance).

(All posts from the fediverse that at least one person on your instance has subscribed to at one point(

@rimlogger

Without comments, I feel far less inclined to leave a comment unless thereโ€™s a discussion already going on.

I am used to being much more of a lurker, but I find myself jumping in on new posts if I have any thoughts to offer. I figure we can all pitch in a bit to try to stoke conversation.

Yeah, just a glance at the posts is what I see from what you describe. I find myself over at Squabbles.io and the community is a lot different with discussions on various topics.

I still come here to glance, but Iโ€™m not engaged because of what you said.

Well a lot of users are affected by it and it's the current hot topic. Once it isn't interesting anymore it'll die down in conversation.

I guess it's also the one thing almost everyone who took part in the early wave of the Reddit migration had in common. And it also falls within the interest of people who are generally interested in decentralized platforms.

Seems to be getting better every day, hopefully soon real content will take over. :)

Go and find the magazines that are interesting for you! You'll fill up your subscription queue in no time

I agree, though hopefully this will pass with time as people default to Lemmy rather than Reddit for their downtime. That said, when the Titan submersible craft story broke a week or two ago, there was decent discussion on here. For the most part, comment threads are a ghost town aside from threads bitching about Reddit, but there are occasional exceptions to the rule that should become more common as people get adjusted here.

I saw android and selfhost/selfhosted has many content unrelated to reddit there. You can check it.

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I am on kbin, and no, I do not feel this way. Maybe lemmy filters posts differently by default? Maybe local lemmy.world posts are like that?