Since a lot of folks sort by “all” on Lemmy, popular posts get overwhelmed by people who don’t daily drive operating systems like iOS or MacOS.
I like outside perspectives and all, but when the majority of the “community” discussion is coming from people who aren’t even using these products, it is pretty hard to have informed conversations.
Moreover, I feel like this type of engagement creates a lot of threads that get pretty combative and catty. They’re often started by people who are trying to argue and convince iOS / MacOS users that they’ve picked the wrong side of the fence.
Anyone else feel me on this? I imagine this is a problem for other communities on Lemmy as well.
Absolutely. I’ve come to realize that you just can’t have a positively minded, widely federated community on Lemmy about something the majority of active users across the system feel negatively about. It’s a shame, but I might just end up filtering the community and waiting for better times.
The problem is probably more that there’s so little content on Lemmy right now. That means most people are browsing /all, so you get more people that aren’t part of this community, and therefore more dissidents.
The c/Apple threads get seen by more people that aren’t necessarily interested in seeing it because they don’t get lost in the noise like they would on Reddit.
As much as this is the right thing to do — I’ve revoked my subscription on several world news communities myself, so I am no saint here — by withdrawing from communities on subjects we actually care about, we reduce the chance of steering content in the positive direction, thereby stifling growth and contributes to the downward spiral vicious cycle. This is also exacerbated by the very toxic “go find your own instance” mindset these people bear, which is what’s driving communities to their demise.
Sadly, the amount of activity on Lemmy reflects this decline. Only the active user count is showing any signs of positive movement due to it being masked from the change in stats counting in the new version, which makes it look like there are more active users than there actually is. The instances count and post count are all going downhill and less and less people will interact because of the toxic behaviours.