It is objectively a lot more male than Reddit or other social media. Reddit has many issues, but lack of women is not one of them.

Agree. I like tech and I’m subscribed to tech communities. But not a whole lot other than that here.

Concern trolling about the fediverse or lemmy.

Low turnout, mostly

That was reddit when it first started it just takes time the problem is reddit people want to speed run this and created a bunch of communities then abandoned them or filled them with AI Slop. Only making it harder for stuff to grow organically. I do wish Lemmy and Piefed had a network global name space for communities like how IRC does channels.

Relative to Reddit, probably the number of users. More users means more posts, more comments, more expertise on various areas, and more niche communities that become viable.

Somewhere down the list:

• Extremely determined negativity. There are a lot of...I don't know how to describe it. People who actively try to take the absolute, most utterly-pessimistic read on anything possible, to the point of having to make crazy assumptions to keep some kind of negative perspective on the thing. I don't know if it's people suffering from depression --- which I understand can produce that effect --- or doomerism or what, but it's exasperating. I haven't run into that sort of phenomenon, certainly not to anything like that degree, on other social media environments that I've used.

• The low-effort "capitalism bad" venting comments. I'm not really into far-left views, but that's not what irks me. I've seen people on here who you can at least talk to about left-wing positions. Like, some random user who is interested in, I don't know, adopting universal basic income and wants to talk about different proposals. But about 99% of the comments I see that contain the word "capitalism" don't amount to that. They're just venting. They aren't constructive. They don't reference any material. They aren't proposing any improvement or ideas or anything. All they want to do is to vent. I mean, it's like someone wanting to complain about their ex or how their sports team lost or something like that. And not only that, but a substantial percentage of those comments are complaining about something that has little to do with capitalism. Instead, it's virtually anything to do with the political or economic world that they don't like relative to some sort of idealized paradigm that they hold. You could use that "everything I don't like is woke" meme about the right, swap "woke" and "capitalism", and I swear, it'd apply to a lot of the comments. And I get that, yeah, one purpose of talking to people is to vent, and so you'd expect that occasionally when people talk to each other, sometimes they're gonna vent. That's human nature. But holy cow, as low-effort venting goes, the "capitalism bad" comments show up as a high proportion here.

  Occasionally I do talk about things, write larger comments about communal ownership. Like...okay, I know that on at least a couple of occasions, I've talked about the fact you've had communal ownership work at small scale, like families, say, or that there have been smaller organizations that have practiced communal ownership of property, and that maybe it'd be interesting to try working up in scale from smaller organizations to try and identify where any issues might crop up. And I have never had anyone actually respond with discussion when I do write something like that. No engagement. Like, it's not as if people have some raging unmet desire to talk about any of that. They just want to complain.

  I don't even see people who are writing "capitalism bad" comments engage in discussion with each other. Like, this isn't Marx and a bunch of activists in a London cafe throwing around ideas with each other. It's just one-off complaints, leaf comments in the thread.

Zionists

I agree with the politics part. I AM leftist but sometimes need an escape from politics because everything is just so bad all the time.

I’ve not come across as many here, oddly.

Mostly just the ratio of news/politics to fun/hobby posts. It's stuff I could already find on any other news platform or social media, and there's seldom discourse about the topics. It's often just negativity or some type of leftist gatekeeping. I'd rather just go to the AP news page and read it there.

I like seeing everyone's art, woodworking, 3D prints, origami, nature photos, and all that other good stuff way more. I like learning about you guys and your interests and I think having a small platform allows that, but many of us either forgot how to share things online or are too you to have ever been a part of mailing lists or IRC and the like.

Group think: I rarely comment here because of that..

I totally agree especially with the “everything I don’t like is capitalism” low quality comments. I’m pretty leftist myself and I love quality discussion about how to make the world a better, juster and fairer place, but lemmy is chock full of “capitalism bad” Doomerism. Tons of “the world is shit” and “you’re an evil neoliberal” for trying to make things better instead of just curling in ball of despair and gloom.

But it's not even overwhelming politics (though I can understand people being tired of politics, as a separate concern). I'm pretty sure that @LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net or @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com or a few other users I've run into could probably carry on a constructive discussion about left-wing politics. I occasionally see, on !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works, good-faith, well-meaning left-wing users who are actually trying to go talk about left-wing issues on lemmygrad.ml or lemmy.ml and are off trying to have a serious conversation. Usually auth-left-versus-non-auth-left, but that's just what gets submitted to MeanwhileOnGrad, and I imagine that there is probably other conversation elsewhere. It's just that the "capitalism bad" comments that I'm talking about aren't from those users and don't fall into that category. They're just the largest source of low-effort comment stuff that I see.

I both agree with you and also kind of unironically believe that everything I dont like is capitalism, haha

Some, not all, Lemmy World mods

I use mastodon and pixelfed to share that stuff but I should start posting here.

That Lemmys's not too different from Reddit.

Clickbait/ragebait gets upvoted to the top if it makes people feel good; hardly anyone even checks the source. Getting called out in the comments hardly affects it.

Niche content gets absolutely smothered by this, too, and the niche posters eventually give up.

These are structural problems Lemmy/Piefed software can improve, but that doesn't seem to be the development priority :/.

I'd argue this is a larger issue of the Fediverse, too. Devs are unintentionally copying structural issues, prioritizing other things when unhealthy attention patterns could kill the whole system. Like it has for previous social media alternatives. Lemmy feels more and more like Voat to me, which has got me really worried.

I'd be glad to see it!

Also thinking about it more, it would be cool to see more people write posts on how to get into hobbies, cool beginner projects that are maybe below the poster's skill level but would make good first projects for people, or instructable type posts. Things anyone could do with little to no experience.

I really like how the origami community was doing theme weeks where we could share different animals we attempted.

What are your ideas?

I just started making different accounts for different things. This is my general account for everything I care for. But when I'm tired of news I have one for more fun things. And other accounts for more specific interests.

I wish Lemmy would let me de prioritize new, but not entirely get rid of it. But I guess multi communities when that comes out wil fix my need for multiple accounts.

There's also a vocal minority of just really pessimistic people on here. Politics I don't mind as long as it's a discourse about not only what is bad but what can be reasonably done about it.

I've been in several discussions where I add "look at community, we are strong together" and it's immediately beaten down with "the world won't change things are shit and always will be, be mad and angry about it, I'm mad and angry at you".

It's the internet, I'm not surprised. But I've definitely had to disconnect myself for a bit some days after severe reactions from people just to remember it's just strangers on the internet.

It's not all the time, but for some discussions that promote inclusion and understanding to be met with the hard "I don't agree so you are human garbage" can be an awful whiplash sometimes.

My main frustration is that the majority of instances are hosted in privacy-hostile jurisdictions.

I’ve been meaning to make git issues, but in a nutshell, one is “community taxononony”

Instead of being pigeon-holed into a single community, every community would be part of an inherited hierarchy, like a class system in programming. /c/thelastairbender might be part of /c/animation, or /c/television; perhaps both?

Organization would be mutual. Moderators of each have to approve to join and remain in the hierarchy, though the “initial structure” of the community could be set up by admins I suppose. The sub community inherits “global” rules from their parent communities, but can have their own rules as well.

And what’s the point of all this, you ask? Well, way I see it, Lemmy has a “niche” discoverability/attention issue, where big engaging communities like politics crowd out smaller niches. But being a sub community would show all its posts in the communities up the hierarchy as well, getting them the visibility of a “big” community while remaining in the niche. It would allow focused communities to exist, but users browsing bigger communities to see them as an appropriate topical thing. This aggregation is user configurable, of course, but I think it’s very important that this visibility be the default.

And in terms of programming, I think it would be feasible? Admittedly I don’t know the architecture, but it seems like it would fit with existing paradigms.

Another idea I have is a replica of Twitter’s “community notes” feature. Perhaps if a comment gets enough upvotes and is flagged by the comment writer as a “community correction,” and fits certain criteria (like being below a word count, maybe a certain percentage of upvotes being from the host instance), it’s automatically displayed below the original post’s title.

This would allow, for example, clickbait or questionable sources to be called out, or misleading titles to be clarified. Or perhaps the source of original reporting can be hyperlinked.

Theoretically this is a mod's job, but I feel that:

• Mods don’t want to be heavy-handed

• They’re often overworked/short on time.

• And frankly, let a lot of clickbait/ragebait posts slide anyway.

And for all of Twitter’s failures, this particular feature is a good idea.

Again, it ties into the idea of “attention control,” to try and give information hygiene a chance over people’s impulses.

Mind you, these are very rough ideas. They probably need to be peeled apart, but I do feel strongly about the gist of what they are trying to correct.

In the fediverse, the messy interoperability really bothers me. Sure I can follow Pixelfed users on Mastodon but I can only see the first 4 pictures if they post multiple. I can also follow Mastodon users on Pixelfed but I will only see their posts containing images.

This cross follow functionality should simply not exist unless it’s good (like between lemmy, mbin and Piefed) as it will frustrate users and cause them to leave the platforms.

I need to use my Subscribed feed more. I've been doing All - Top 6 Hour since I'm pretty active, but lately I feel I'm missing a decent bit of what I want to see.

Fewer places to talk about fun things.

I agree generally. Personally, I just have separate pixelfed and mastodon accounts. But pixelfed is mostly for browsing lol, I post, but it is just posting into the void with my 0 followers.

What I miss most are the (physically) local communities. On reddit, there was a subreddit for my general locality, and the nearby big city, and several subreddits on different aspects of life (the music scene, the food scene, etc). I miss that - randomly finding an event or something interesting simply because I came across a random post.

I know it's a function of the fact that it's still (comparatively) early days, but I do miss it.

I'm on fedican (Canadian) and it is pretty good!

The AI hate is almost like medieval witch hunting. Someone says, “It is AI” (which translates to “witchcraft and the work of Satan”), and the rest seem to run and grab their pitchforks and torches, ready to burn the author at the stake.

The incessant spamming of infographics by innerworld@lemmy.world.

They are mostly from voronoiapp.com, which the user seems to have a financial interest in.

The data often appears outdated or AI hallucination filled.

It would be good if this user disclosed their commercial interest in voronoiapp.com, the level of bot usage in their posting, and the level of AI use in the data collection and infographic creation.

I've seen several users block them based on the misinformation portrayed.

* As an example, this post I am replying to is bookended by 2 infographic spam posts from innerworld.

I had never heard of that website.

Tankies and neutral voters

I'm glad there aren't many apoliticists here, I hate talking about politics with apoliticists. They always want to complain and demand that policy change to ban the things they don't like. I'm sick of all their political activism.

Black pill leftism, I guess

I would like there to be more activity in a greater variety of communities, which I think will happen in time as the Fediverse grows. The main thing preventing me from posting my own interests and creations is a (probably excessive) caution about sharing personal/identifying things online, so I’m not going to criticize others for choosing the same. More users also tends to bring with it lower quality content, which leads to the next point:

As others like @tal@lemmy.today (who makes a lot of great comments in general) pointed out, there are a lot of political posts which seem more interested in venting their own frustrations and parroting popular opinions than having a constructive discussion and being receptive to different opinions. There is a lack of nuance. It’s possible to criticize the systems and people you do support without it meaning that you support the opposition, and it’s also possible you admit when someone you dislike makes a valid point without siding with them. You could even see a question like “how do I resolve this specific issue with Windows?” and one of the top responses will inevitably be something like “ew, you should be using Linux instead” and while I may not disagree, it does nothing to answer the question.

I’m not bothered by the gender ratios since it’s not a factor in how I interact with others, and users here are pretty quick to shut down rare instances of hostility towards a specific gender.

Interesting equation. Yes, AI is like an evil spirit. It promises to help you with your homework, and then helps you plan your suicide. It offers you knowledge, but at the cost of your intelligence. It tempts you with sloth, greed, lust, it says it'll make your job easier, earn your company more money, be your girlfriend. And then it takes your soul. It saps your independence and creativity and isolates you from your family and kills you.

To be fair you kinda are on the liberal instance, so yeah you're gonna find genocide apologists

Probably the federated nature of it... i know the whole point of it is decentralisation but with the likes of reddit or discord at least you could attempt to have all your content salted or deleted (whether it actually is is another story) from a single server. Knowing anything and everything you post on here will stick around forever no matter what you do, by design, makes me uneasy.

I'd skip visiting it.

The clashing ideologies makes it hard to gain traction for the fediverse. Since no one ever agrees on things, it ironically turns into the politics people complain about with the republicans vs democrats always being at a stalemate.

To understand why there’s so much politics, it’s worth taking a step back. Lots of people in Lemmy understand that politics is simply how political goods are distributed.

What are political goods? Anything that people value: material resources, labor, ideas, attention, significance, etc..

So, if attention and significance are political goods, can you come up with a single thing that is not a political good and therefore isn’t political?

There could be more activity in the arts and crafts communities. I want all of you to pick up a nice creative hobby like knitting or stitching right fucking now! And then post all of it!

I agree. My politics, thoughts and feelings change over time and it makes me uncomfortable to be potentially judged for things later and not be able to delete that isn't ideal, even if I'm the only one reading it.

What I don't like is that so much content is spread between so many different places, this along with the complexity of it all as a new user is intimidating.

I think we're asking a lot of non technically minded people to use the fediverse and that is hurting adoption.

Having said that something I like about it is that it's smaller and people actually "communicate" with me here which isn't really a thing on reddit anymore.

I do kinda miss having a total karma count. Not that it ever really meant anything, but number go up is fun

I appreciate your owl posts, Anon! 🦉 💖🌛

"Everything is politics" is an "um ackshually." It's technically true but you know damn well they're talking about partisan politics or ideological politics.

You're running apologia for people who can't go on a thread about cake without posting a Trump joke or a Communist slogan. Mainstream social media proportionally does not have nearly as many of these people.

Not nearly enough cats.

The fact that it's mainly just a FOSS and Politics forum.

I love what the technology is trying to do but the thing is, the platform's main selling point being the liberatory potential of it's technology, is that it's mainly used by people who are interested in politics and technology.