I cant let this gem from yesterday go underappreciated.

anolemmi@lemmi.social to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 239 points –
i.imgur.com

Beans for president!

45

I don't need Lemmy to be a replacement for Reddit anymore than I needed Reddit to be a replacement for Digg. It's a different platform and it's allowed to be different.

I need Lemmy to simply be a social link sharing and message board. And it's doing that perfectly.

Yeah, I've realized I mostly want "social media" as a place to create discussions. For that, honestly, the smaller community size is perfect.

I find massive communities have a way of devolving into hive minds. Once you reach a critical mass of people who think one thing, any comment to the contrary is just... obliterated, whether by an exhausting amount of argument, or downvotes. And then it just becomes known that that's the opinion of the community, and people stop even bringing it up. At least that's my theory on how it happens.

Over here, with a smaller community size, I'm finding a lot more genuine conversation, no matter the topic. It's awesome. And I'm still finding Lemmy large enough to bring me interesting links and memes to talk about.

Reddit has made me realise that I have an aweful sense of humor, because none of my silly joke comments would get any upvotes. On lemmy, I almost always get at least one upvote or a comment. It ain't much, but I like that my comment made someone's day second, even it's just one person.

Your sense of humour is great, I’d wager.

Reddit only upvotes the same rehashed, repeated, stupid Reddit phrases spewed ad nauseam. You’ll always be upvoted for “play stupid games, win stupid prizes!!!!111” or calling people Karens, or “equal rights, equal lefts” and all that absolute twaddle.

Damn, I just realized right now that I haven't seen a single /s or someone upset that another comment left of a /s here. At least, I don't recall any, there's probably been a few of the first at least. But it's nice being in a community where you don't have to bash some users over the head with what you're trying to say.

It wasn't that rare to see one comment heavily downvoted but that commenter upvoted in replies to replies. Sometimes it was on them for poorly presenting their thoughts in the first place, but it seemed like the majority would often put their own meaning to comments and any doubt would lead to assumptions that the commenter was evil or something. Though I have seen that phenomenon here, including today.

Once you reach a critical mass of people who think one thing, any comment to the contrary is just… obliterated, whether by an exhausting amount of argument, or downvotes.

There's also this effect where when you get further down a comment chain only people who really care about that particular argument keep reading. So past say comment 3 everyone is super duper opinionated.

I also don't need it to have a bazillion-septillion-megamillion users to consider it successful. In my mind, engagement with 10 people is worth much more than a thousand upvotes from someone mindlessly clicking my post.

"There's too few people, until more people have joined nobody should join!"

Lmao. I don't treat it like reddit, I treat it like lemmy. And yes, it has filled the role left empty from doom scrolling on reddit. I just see more interesting things that I wouldn't have sought out because there's no algorithm

LMAO almost as if social media does not define our lives. It's just a place for me to lurk while sitting on the toilet.

He is right, but I don't see any problem with it. Personally I prefer lemmy to Reddit, but I still go back to Reddit due to the lack of content here. It will probably be a gradual transition where I completely stop using Reddit, and I am fine with it.

"Be the shit you want to post in the world." (Mahatma Gandhi, Civilization)

I was still giving Reddit 5-10 minutes a day, but honest to god the last few times it’s all just been really meh. I haven’t been on in a few days and I’m feeling fine without it. Also helps that I spent the weekend spinning up my own Lemmy instance, so I was plenty distracted.

That’s besides the point though, tell me how you feel about beans?

I'm probably going to be downvoted into oblivion for this, but Bush's Best are way better beans than Heinz. I grew up in Heinz beans but discovered Bush's Best due to dating someone who grew up on better beans. More recently I bought some Heinz beans on sale but I should have just spent the extra 42 cents on good beans.

I really just spent 5 min creating a lemmy account and subscribing to the sublemmies(? pages? what do we even call the subreddits of lemmy) I found interesting. Perhaps I'll invest some time setting up my own instance

It was a full weekend job for me, a non-programmer and Windows daily driver. I work in IT but this brought me outside my comfort zone for sure. In a good way.

The fun starts here if you wanna go for it!

edit: oh and we call them communities!

Good for you! Thanks, communities make sense. Seems like an interesting project, I am a programmer so I'll give it a shot

I meant to reply to your comment with this, but instead accidentally made a separate comment:

There definitely needs to be more content, or more specifically more niche content.

There are some communities I would like to see that I don't believe exist (like Hobbydrama) which is disappointing.

People always reply "dude, just create one" but it's really not that simple for a few different reasons.

First, I don't even think we can create communities on sh.itjust.works instance right now. Second, I don't know how to moderate an instance and don't really have the time to learn. Third, the community would be barren unless someone just rips off like the top 30 posts from that subreddit, and I don't have an account to reach out to the redditors to ask for their permission (and I really dont want to piss off the people actually creating the content so they are so jaded they never want to come over to Lemmy/the community).

I hear you. That's why I think the process will be more gradual. We need to see communities evolve over time.

I haven't been back to reddit in a month (minus one link from a search that didn't even have the information I was looking for). I don't even notice anymore.

Impossible to find niche subs with only like 100 people? That's literally all of lemmy

If the communities he participated in while on Reddit had less than 100 people, surely he could start his own version on Lemmy and attract as many people. At least enough to have something to talk about. There's probably like 100 other people not finding the thing you can't find, too.

It's hard enough finding active sports communities, I doubt there actually 100 people on all of lemmy that would be interested in a community of 100 redditors, much less 100 that could actually find the same community.

Beans memes? That was ancient Lemmy, we've long since moved on to antique meme revivals

I'm currently using a patched boost to visit my niche subs and then coming to Lemmy for the memes and dreams.

Slowly moving away from Reddit because it is definitely worse than Lemmy.

There are some communities I would like to see that I don't believe exist (like Hobbydrama) which is disappointing.

People always reply "dude, just create one" but it's really not that simple for a few different reasons.

First, I don't even think we can create communities on sh.itjust.works instance right now. Second, I don't know how to moderate an instance and don't really have the time to learn. Third, the community would be barren unless someone just rips off like the top 30 posts from that subreddit, and I don't have an account to reach out to the redditors to ask for their permission (and I really dont want to piss off the people actually creating the content so they are so jaded they never want to come over to Lemmy/the community).

He’s kinda right, or for me at least. Lemmy is in no way a replacement for Reddit. I don’t really think it should be, but I bet a lot of people that try lemmy made an account in the assumption, or hope, that it would be a replacement for reddit.

It also has a total different vibe I think. 5-10 years ago I would have loved this place, currently it feels a bit of a too young crowd for me (34 years old).

honestly as one of those people, lemmy is a damn good alternative to reddit. It has most of the features and a lot of content, sure its missing its nitche content but it works for what I used reddit for