I’ve been using Lemmy for a couple years now, and unfortunately I’ve noticed a significant decline in the niche communities that were originally active. When I first joined I saw much more variety when browsing the All feed. But over time, the communities I liked have faded as shitposting and meme communities have come to dominate the platform.
I think this shift has changed the culture of Lemmy. There seems to be more of a herd mentality now, where people downvote reasonable opinions they disagree with. The discussions don’t feel as nuanced. Some people have even been attacked for innocuous comments that don’t align with the prevailing groupthink.
The niche communities that made Lemmy special are fading away, and the resulting monoculture makes me less inclined to participate. I want a platform that supports substantive discussions in my interests, not just memes and shitposting.
I don’t know what the solution is on a platform level, but a culture shift is needed if Lemmy wants to retain users like me who valued the diversity of opinions. I may have to move to a platform that allows better filtering and proportionality between niche interests and funny or stupid content. I want Lemmy to succeed, but right now I’m finding myself drawn back to Reddit because the niche communities there seem more active. I’ll keep checking in, but Lemmy needs to recapture its original spirit if I’m going to make it my main home.
Yeah. I don’t know what these “just post” types think it’s like. I tried making some relatively niche posts early on, trying to spark discussion in communities for some games I was playing. Got a single digit number of comments at most. Sometimes none. Small communities don’t get seen and niche posts in bigger communities are less likely to get votes. It feels very discouraging if you spend 30 minutes to make a post that seemingly nobody even sees.
Some folks here don’t seem to want to hear it because they badly want Lemmy to be better (and I kinda get that), but where niche communities are concerned, Reddit is unfortunately better.
Also, the “jUsT PoSt” replies are acting like everyone wants to post. Not everyone does and we shouldn’t be acting like they’re idiots because they don’t want to be the one to make the posts. It’s perfectly valid to want to read other people’s posts. There’s also some stuff you just can’t post and expect it to work. Eg, I read episode discussions on Reddit. Those can really only take off if you post them immediately when the episode airs. It feels like only Star Trek has those here. For every other show, I just go back to Reddit.
Posting in a vacuum is pretty pointless. We need engagement but we need the posts for that. I’ll leave a comment but I’m far superior at replying to comments than I am at starting discussions.
And as to said. After you’ve wasted time curating a few comments and getting nothing back. You’ll just stop.