Fediverse

I don't want to simply repeat what others have said, but on a personal level, I'm actually enjoying the smaller overall community - it makes it a bit more personal, I feel. I enjoy that. Yeah, fair enough, it's not great for niches, but you don't have to be tethered down to one place for your content.

Back in my day, you had to go to completely different websites for your niche content! Forums were the mainstream!

Unpopular opinion: it's okay to like Reddit, if that's how you feel. I don't - it's far too toxic overall, and that was affecting me to the point where I made the decision to leave it, regardless of the outcome of the protests (based in large measure on having read this article that further developed the thoughts that I was already starting to think: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb ). And I don't like where it's going in the future - you may use it for awhile then be surprised when yet another horrendous decision by Huffman or the people behind him sends content creators fleeing to other platforms, again.

But if you have found a particular niche group there, and they are not willing to leave Reddit, then you go to where they are, right? Perhaps you can also help make moving here more welcoming by starting a similar community of your own here, even if you are the only one posting there for awhile. That said, we simply don't have the userbase here to handle e.g. most individual games (some fairly major exceptions such as Minecraft aside:-) or sports teams or some such, and you may want to enjoy interacting with more generalized content, possibly in addition to rather than fully replacing Reddit.

Conversations here tend to be better than there. Deeper, richer, and fuller. But to each their own - if Reddit meets your needs while Lemmy does not, then it sounds like you have your answer. But perhaps read my link above and think about what it means: Reddit is predatory, and you'd be willfully walking back into that, hoping against hope that the leopard would not eat your face off (spoiler alert: it will:-D).

I would suggest blocking the communities that post all the content you don't like. After I did that, it's been smooth sailing, and I read the All feed. There's not that many large news and politics communities that you would need to block to get rid of that stuff on your timeline.

The internet has been mostly enshittified. The corporations are guaranteed to continue sucking in predictable ways. It'll never get better or good enough.

The fediverse is something new. It is, at the very least, immune to being reddited and twittered. If the internet has a future, it's on the fediverse, or on something like it that doesn't exist yet. Going back to shitty corporate stuff just delays the future.

Your real issue is that spez, musk, etc all suck. That's what you hate. This is the place where we are free of them, and it can only get better.

Unfortunately, community building is work, and it's work that users actually do on the bigger, corporate sites. Those community builders helped get those spaces going, helped make them appealing, and help trap users there. In smaller spaces like this, we need to be the community builders, not just the content consumers.

One thing I find really helps is to use something that doesn't look like the space you left. Lemmy looks an awful lot like Reddit, but it has themes, and even alternative web clients that can change the experience and make it feel like something new.

Lemmy also isn't the content and communities, it's just the website's server software. You can access... ugh... the "threadiverse"... from websites using other ActivityPub enabled servers. There's an ActivityPub Discourse plugin. nodeBB is adding ActivityPub support in its next version. Friendica and Hubzilla have group support, and work with Lemmy-hosted communities.

Find a new window on social media, and it might help you engage with it differently.

The other thing you can do is just niche down a bit here. Find a few active communities that you're interested in, and focus your attention on them. Lemmy is actually much, much more like classic forums, where communities or spheres of interest have their own website. The difference here is that you can actually look outside of those communities to interact with other forums, too. It works a a lot better if you treat it that way. Find your home, as it were, and branch out from there.

Unfortunately, the modern mental model of social media is the fire hose, not the node-and-spoke that is actually best supported by the technology.

On the other hand, Lemmy is full of political content lately.

Unfollow communities with political content, and all that goes away.

Browse by "subscribed", and subscribe to a lot of communities. Only do it by "all" when you can't find good stuff in the subscribed view.

I do this and, while I do see a few intrusive US politics posts, it's far less than when browsing by "all".

I really love community-driven social media like Reddit. Lemmy feels… too small. I really loved that Reddit let me jump into any niche hobby, and instantly I had a community.

Please note: you only ever had something like that with Reddit when it had already several years of operation. Even today, you can't jump instantly and find there a community for any niche hobby.

As with all these things: be the change you want to see. Add content, or else it won't be there when you or someone else comes in.

(There's also a feel that Lemmy is "small" becaue it's not only one place and all that)

It may not be for everyone. Lemmys growth has stalled out and barring musk buying reddit and turning it to shit i don't see another influx coming. So we're kinda stuck with the community that exists now. Its a pretty good and sustainable community which can provide a lot of general interest posts like news, memes and cats lately. But for other more specific topics if if it's not already a large community here it probably won't be. It's not even just niche interests, professional sports for example has very little presence on here as a whole much less individual sports or teams, and I don't see, for example, a baseball community taking off here no matter how much effort you put in since the current lemmy community isn't much interested in it and your average baseball fan probably won't be coming to lemmy to discuss things.

My recommendation would be to use lemmy for some of those general interest topics, and maybe some of the more popular niche communities if your into them, And go to other places, preferably independent forums or rss feeds, for other things. We don't need one unified scrolling app, it may be a bit more convenient, but the internet is better off if you spread your traffic around.

Growth is a process, not an immediate switch. Every social media started small and then grew. If immediatism, or however it is called, was the predominant factor for any struggle to become an achievement, nothing would be achieved.

And on lack of contents, I, for one, block everything that is not of my interest, quite a lot to be honest, specially with certain niches spamming the federated platforms, but even then, I get a feeling I should trim even some of the communities/magazines I follow/subscribe to as I can barely catch up to those already.

Someone has to be the first on the dance floor, and you don't want to be it.

Lately I tend to prefer lemmy over Reddit and mastodon too. It’s all about content I agree.