Less content but the quality/shit ratio is higher here.
[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation
Share a story, ask a question, or start a conversation about (almost) anything you desire. Maybe you'll make some friends in the process.
RULES
- Be respectful: no harassment, hate speech, bigotry, and/or trolling
- Encourage conversation in your post
- Avoid controversial topics such as politics or societal debates
- Keep it clean and SFW: No illegal content or anything gross and inappropriate
- No solicitation such as ads, promotional content, spam, surveys etc.
- Respect privacy: Don’t ask for or share any personal information
Related discussion-focused communities
I spent some time reading a significant number of the replies, so I'll offer this as a suggestion for some of the repeated themes regarding overbearing political stance, decisive topics, etc:
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encourage and support people discussing matters from an open perspective, trying to take a less decisive stance, or being open to different sides
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encourage people and participate in conversation with people who show compassion or agree to disagree rather than write people off
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ask questions instead of assuming
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sometimes, opinions don't have to be right/wrong
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opinions aren't facts
It's less engaging, same stories hanging around active for days with minimal engagement.
It's just quieter here
It’s mostly Linux and Politics, and most of my niche hobbies (and even most of the non-niche ones) are barely represented here, if at all.
It’s really disappointing. I have always been one to consume content, not create it, and it feels like if you’re not creating content there’s very little of interest. I want to like the app, but I find myself spending more time browsing Reddit in a web browser on my phone rather than using Lemmy.
I have ended up in a "view all and block" mode rather than a "subscribe to a curated list" mode because of the smaller community. That means I need to block a lot more communities I am not interested in and users that are just... Outside my window of civility or politics that I can handle. Raging tankies, for example.
Most of the time is great, but there's hive mind here too. If you're against running closed captions on your TV for example. That was the most recent I got bombed for, but there have been other times.
Most of the time it's more adult, but sometimes it's just like Reddit.
Sort of like reddit. There's less content, but also less comments just replying "lol, so true" to a political meme. That said, there's also, for some reason, more rape apologism than on reddit. Maybe it's because lemmy is even more male dominated than reddit was or is.
If I could just make a dumbass joke comment without someone trying to debate me on it (poorly) I would be sooooo happy.
I've started when lemmy.ml was the only instance, and stopped when !all was populated mostly by posts from lemmygrad.ml. I rejoined once Reddit cut off their API, and it certainly feels like the usual crowd has joined. So far, it has been a pretty effective Reddit replacement for the largest subreddits that migrated ([email protected], [email protected]), but it's still missing a lot of active smaller communities.
My main complaint is that the default sort type (Active) needs to be tweaked.
The best thing for me: I cut me sm consumption to a fifth of what it used to be. A few minutes Lemmy, a few minutes mastodon and I'm done. There is just enough stuff on here to scratch my itch for some content.
I'm still put off by the sheer lack of comments on some communities like the main videos community on lemmy.world, where videos that'll have tens of thousands of comments on Reddit will have 100 votes, but 1-2 comments.
I miss a lot of niche subreddits like /r/HajimeNoIppo, /r/BJJ, and /r/IBS, but I can live without. What would be great is if the big communities had more engagement.
There also seems to be a lot of duplication of communities across instances. While I get the whole decentralised thing, it's pretty pointless to not have a mechanism to merge/join communities across instances that have the same topic. Why should lemmy.world and kbin have two competing pro-wrestling communities when neither gets a lot of posts/comments?
It’s a bit like you read a news story about something that happened in Australia, and all the comments are about second amendment rights and the Supreme Court. So pretty much normal Internet.
Pros: Smaller, older, more reasonable userbase means participation is (for me at least) less intimidating and more meaningful. The atmosphere is very different and more pleasant. People are generally polite here. Comment fields have more interesting replies and less one-word comments and shit posts and memes and whatnot.
Cons: less content, not really feasible to endlessly scroll as an infinite distraction faucet. The userbase has clearly defined interests and certain fields such as sports don't have particularly good representation here, compared to tech fields for example. Comment fields are emptier.
What stood out the most to me was when everybody left Reddit and came to Lemmy that everyone helped each other to get settled into Lemmy and the Fediverse - at least where I settled. Knowledge was passed down. More tech savy users answered the questions of new users patiently. Everybody was (and still is) polite in general and it is a pleasure to participate in such an enviroment.
I experienced (and I still do) much more "adult" behaviour within Lemmy, compared to Reddit. I barely have to downvote comments due to bad/ malicious behavior. I think I have had to downvote 3 times within the last 8 months - and one downvote was dedicated to a bot which summarized some news content wrong. Here you can have nice discussions and most comments actually contribute. Less "This"-comments.
I like that Lemmy in general is more left leaning, and also more tech savy. Also, I experienced less gatekeeping than on Reddit - at least, within my home instance. Your experience, however, may differ.
I like it better than Reddit. I don't feel as over-monitored and as censored if I say something in support of progressive ideals. That's what got me kicked off Reddit in the first place - having the audacity to say that I feel like the younger generation is more liberal and open minded. After posting that i got a permanent ban from Reddit. (And yes that literally is all that I posted, word for word).
I still encounter a lot of people on Lemmy calling me an idiot for daring to have an opinion that's new to them or different from their own. I think that's just base human behavior at its worst. When I disagree with someone, I try to simply say, "I disagree and here's why." But inevitably they come back with name calling.
So I just try to remember that often times I'm dealing with immature people on here. And they don't have a lot of worldly experience in some cases. But for the most part it's been a nice change and a much better platform that Reddit in almost every way.
I wish there was a hide comment function. Other than that, it's fine.