I’ve subscribed to a plethora of communities that really interest me and actually have posts and discussions in them, but I have to go to the specific community to see this. My “Subscribed” feed only contains a few of the same posts that I’ve seen for weeks in Hot, the same posts from even longer ago in “Active”, posts from the same communities as the ones in “Hot” in New and no other communities, and pretty much only posts from the Meme’s community I unsubscribed from when sorted by “All”. I also see a majority of posts barely have upvotes or comments on them at all from the “bigger” communities. Is this just the growing pains of this site? Am I still doing lemmy wrong? Is it the instance I’ve chosen to join?
UPDATE I want to thank everyone who posted and gave me helpful advice on this matter. It turns out that there are still lots of people here on Lemmy with me, I just couldn’t see you because I was sorting my feed incorrectly. I’m excited that there are more people here and I’m excited to continue to contribute to Lemmy with you! Thank you all for the help, I really appreciate it. The solutions are to continue to subscribe, contribute to my favorite communities, and sort by top day, 12, and 6 hours. It really helped liven up my feed!
You’re not going to like what I’m about to say.
You’re part of the problem. You can fix it though.
Ready?
You need to make original content for the communities you are apart of and stop expecting others to provide you the conent you want. Because if that’s what everyone did, then there would be absolutely nothing here.
That’s just the way it is right now. There’s not enough original content creators on Lemmy yet.
What does original content mean? It doesn’t mean reposts from other websites. It doesn’t mean articles from other websites. The original content was already posted by the writers of the articles, on the original website. It doesn’t mean comments you make. My comment here isn’t original content. It’s a reaction.
Original content is something you make. You baked some sourdough bread? Post. You made a chair from wood? Post. You made something out of leather? Post. You took a nice photo? Post. You made some digital art? Post. You drew a sketch of a building? Post. You did “insert hobby”? Post. You’re a collector of this niche thing? Post.
The truth is, original content can be hard and time-consuming. It takes a certain mind to want to post original content. If everyone here would make just one original content post, I think that would help make Lemmy a better social media site.
Be the change.
Your
rantpost is ill-placed, because I’m trying to do that. I’ve already posted and commented multiple posts in communities I enjoy trying to garner attention and content. But i’m also a busy person who’s trying to live with a family, children, and a budding carreer. I understand I need to be a part of the community and I am doing more now than I ever have on Reddit.EDIT: I also wanted to add that this post is not about me complaining about a lack of content, it was a misunderstanding of the sorting algorithm. After posting this, I got lots of very helpful advice to help me use Lemmy’s sorting better and my enjoyment of Lemmy has improved immensly to the point of where my experience on Lemmy is no longer lame.
EDIT 2: I must have misread your post because it was not condesending, but more motivating. I appreciate the sentiment and redact the condesending part, but stand by the rest of what I’ve said. I deleted the entire second paragraph because I was defensive and wrong in its entirety. I appreciate the sentiment while affirming I am trying to contribute more while my life is still very busy. I apologize for getting defensive.
You’re right, I didnt look at your profile. That was my mistake. My comment wasn’t intended to be an attack on you. It was more of a generalization of a problem of Lemmy at the moment. I should have gone out of my way to look at your profile and to better phrase what I was saying so that you and others wouldn’t feel as though I was making a personal attack. Sorry about making you feel attacked.
I commend your amazing apology. This is what makes this community better than Reddit.
I think what your post was getting at was valid, and I promide I will do my best to not be the reason Lemmy has a lack of content, i want to do my best to contribute! I don’t think your intentions were wrong, and hope you continue to advocate for people to contribute.
This type of ‘post or you’re the problem’ comment really gets on my nerves too. If no one replies, people won’t post again, and if a sub is nothing but single posts no one’s coming back.
It’s great you’re putting in the effort to post, and people should appreciate that. I’m autistic and I can’t post. I can give incredibly detailed information in response to a post or a comment if it relates in any way to any of my special interests. And I do. And so do people like me. It’s why you can find the answer to basically any question on the internet. These ‘post more’ people need to cool it, because the reason people like content like this is depth and engagement and it’s not going to happen without people engagine with the content too.
Yeah, I’ve made some posts trying to start discussions on a game I played or the likes. Posts that, to the extent of my knowledge, have literally never been made on Lemmy before (I searched – though admittedly the search system makes Reddit’s search look like Google). I actually did get a couple of replies to some and some were really great replies too. But it’s barely a trickle compared to what I’d get from even a middling popularity post on Reddit. I want waaaay more discussion, especially for novel topics.
And there’s so many niche posts that I can’t make. I really enjoyed communities like AITA or Best of Legal Advice or the likes. What, should I make up scenarios? I’m happy to contribute to comments of posts in such communities, but they basically don’t exist here.
Local communities are even worse. I’ve made several posts to my city’s community and can’t recall if I ever even got a reply to a single one. On Reddit that never happened.
Yes. You put more into a post, so it hurts more if you don’t get anything out of it. If I were to make a post i’d agonize over the wording and set aside time in front of an actual keyboard to respond and then i’d be completely overwhelmed anyway if there was even a modest response to the post. It’s a pretty self centered, basic misunderstanding of people to think that everyone can or should make their own posts.
If I reply to someone, I assume at least they read it. As a person who requires little social interaction that’s enough for me, even if I wrote an extremely detailed wall of text.
Is there a look at my turd sub, because that’s about the level that 99% of users will contribute to IF prodded. Beyond that, the “it’s you, your the problem it’s you” argument will not produce change. It’s simply a numbers game. Need to get enough users that 1% producing content is still a lot of content. Awareness / marketing tactics can help. Mention Lemmy on reddit boards and threads or whatever the kids are using, (instabook?). Oh, also someone needs to get some money and get some famous people on here. I could give a damn what they say, but the youth hang on their every word. Get that rapper guy or one of the telltubbies or something talking about Lemmy and you’ll get people to flock.
That isn’t true. It is not a numbers game. Reddit didn’t start off with numbers. Facebook didn’t start off with numbers. Tumblr didn’t start off with numbers. Twitter didn’t start off with numbers.
They all started small. Growing gradually. People stayed because they enjoyed the content and the community.
Hype and influence only attract a certain type of person. Fools. That will just create an inferior community. You’ll have a digital Fyre Festival that way.
Artificially inflating numbers creates a community with no respect of the community itself. There’s no thought in that. When you put no thought into something the results aren’t good.
This is already started. Those things started out small but succeeded because of aggressive marketing practices and huge investmentments. That could be the next phase for Lemmy. Growth can happen without but it will be slow and there is high risk of implosion during that period of slow growth.
When I joined Facebook in ~2006 there was already a decent amount of people using it. There was enough interesting content for me to stick around.
When I joined Reddit ~2009 it was also starting to really become popular. The Digg exodus helped tremendously.
The difference between them and Lemmy is that they already felt polished compared to Lemmy. Lemmy feels almost as though it’s in Beta. Lemmy goes down practically everyday for me. There’s not a lot of original content and it’s a very different experience than any other social media sites. Honestly, it’s complicated compared to the straight forward nature of other social media sites.
Instances, communities, Fediverse etc. I’m going to say that a lot of people will not like the hassle.
Can there truly be an implosion of Lemmy? I thought the nature of the Fediverse was that it can’t be controlled by a single entity? If an instance goes down, can’t there be something to replace it? As long as there are servers and people willing, it will remain. Right?
If you are experiencing downtime, you might want to create another account on another instance and clone your subscriptions using https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
Yeah, maybe implode isn’t the right word. Remember what happened to slashdot? Sad fizzle is more like it. Hard to kill Lemmy maybe, but I can easily see this devolving into a few grumpy communists and crappy ads for diet supplements. I sure hope not, but there’s no reason to be overly optomisitic about the tech world these days. It’s all so damn sad.
“Hey man. Just uhhhh… you know… paint some walls with colored rainbows and ponies and shiz. That’ll make the world better.”
- (You)
I mean, I know that complaining won’t change anything, but holy bimbles in my dimples, you are really suggesting this guy to just ignore all the porn and start adding some “healthy content” in? There is this thing called tendency… and if a certain community/place/etc has some “furry porn” in? Then its not him that’ll (magically) change it “for the better”. It’ll not make the “furry porn apologists” (suddenly) stop being degenerates. Its one guy versus a bunch of porn-addicted, degenerative individuals. He doesn’t stand a chance. Your post is just plain “wishful thinking”.
Instance war, ideology clash resulting in censorship, random rules on different instances.
That is also the cause why some people are reluctant to contribute.
It’s not that easy to make stuff. I find myself pretty creatively dead. I have communities I’d love to make content for but I’m a talentless waste of breath.