I don't know who said it first.

"When I packed up and moved to the frontier to get away from people, I didn't realize that the people I was trying to leave would have the same idea.'

Only difference I've really noticed is that the attempts to create non tech communities died off, and the tech oriented ones are the ones that are left and remain active.

Nah, it’s kind of been like that. I think at this point, all of the people who got swept up “sticking it” to Reddit have gone back onto Reddit, so all we have left are the tech-savvy people and the doomers/gloomers in the news- and politics-related communities.

If this has taught me anything, I found that the best communities are still small forums - like the old school kind, not like here and Reddit. And sadly, those will probably go away with time, and then we’d have just shitty social media sites or the digital frontiers like the Fediverse.

I think it's like when you date someone while they're with their partner then when you're their partner they cheat on you.

A lot of the people who came here did because they're the sort to focus on problems and complain about them, they were hyper focused on problems with Reddit but now Reddit is leaving our minds we focus on the new thing.

Society needs all sorts and the first step of solving a problem is to spot it, I do think there's a really good quality of debate compared to Reddit so even the doomers are better here.

We could do will more positivity and good news being shared though, and trivial things the are just nice and fun.

I don't disagree. There are definitely a lot of negative posts and attitudes, though in the early days there was lots of negativity towards reddit. But perhaps more optimism about Lemmy. Recent ... events ... may have hurt that optimism.

I do still come across nice spots pretty regularly, though. Perhaps look at some Beehaw communities, which is an instance focused on people being friendly to each other. It's actually how I got started on Lemmy. (Not quite true, I started on lemmy.ml a couple of years ago, but it wasn't for me. Then earlier this year joined beehaw and it inspired me to start my own instance).

Also still mainly see technical posts, lots of Windows/MS bashing. I’d like to see more communities about non technical things. Perhaps I haven’t discovered them.

What kinds of things are you interested in? I'm keen for some good non-technical/non-news communities too but I don't know where to start 😆. Maybe we can pick something and make an effort to make the community more active?

Lemmy has been a lot more news heavy than Reddit was, and almost all the news is bad. It’s really been bringing me down- shitty politics, shitty politicians, shitty people doing shitty things, shitty companies, climate falling apart, food scarcity, enshitification of the internet, etc etc etc. it’s made my 10 year outlook very bleak, but I cant tell how much of that is because things are really bad right now and getting worse, and how much of it is just me being more exposed to the bad things than before.

I haven’t noticed too much negativity, but I don’t visit too many communities. I have to say smaller hobby communities seem to be struggling with engagement. There’s either very few active posters or posts get moderately upvoted but there are little to no comments.

You might be happier over in Beehaw; they've walled themselves off in a little saccharine hive.

Yeah I noticed that. People getting arsey with each other for no reason.

I've got multiple fediverse accounts so my solution has been to spend more time browsing local in lemmy.nz and beehaw.

Also, I started to block all the big news and politics coms (that's where most of the arguing happens) so that when I browse by new I'm more likely to find cool communities.

It's not just you. It seems like there's a lot of young, antisocial people on this platform who think it's the coolest thing in the world to dislike things. Any given subject has a thousand comments talking about how it's actually the worst thing in the world. That combined with an overall disdain for actually working to better your life makes a lot of the users insufferable.

I'm certainly missing the more niche subreddits I was subscribed to (a couple of really active permaculture ones, favourite bands, hobbies etc) but for the most part I find the general NZ news useful and relevant, and some good conversation around it. Other communities are definitely tech-focused but that may change with time. But as with any group of people, you always get the negative ones - and Baader-Meinhof had a thing or two to say about noticing things!

Every online community will eventually resemble the society at large. People are people.

I suspect someone must have posted a link to somewhere like truth social or thedonald, because the negativity and trolling happened all of a sudden on all servers

It literally went from common sense to stuff like "Trump isn't at fault" seemingly overnight.

Really happy I'm on Beehaw at the moment, because, I can't imagine how bad the less restrained servers are

The fediverse is mostly a great way to get extra politics in case you're too happy with the state of the world. Blare tons of mostly negative shit at people, even if wrapped in a "super funny" "meme", and the site is going to get negative. Outside of the politics and moronic drama, this place is still more chill - geeky, which colors discourse for better and worse, but at least less rabid than Reddit. When did Reddit have it's biggest increase in toxicity? 2015-2016, coincidentally right when the yanks jumped the shark.

My major issue is there's no escape from politics apart from leaving the platform, which... people then do. And that is really fucking stupid for a place allegedly trying to grow and gain users: people could just keep it in their pants (i.e. post in appropriate communities, same as everyone else), but actively refuse to. Apparently "everything is political" so that makes spam nice and considerate - basically doing us all a favor, really.

Sure, you can spend time pruning the overtly/covertly political communities and likely bad faith or just hilariously singleminded actors. After someone makes four new instances and 12 new political communities - each - on them, to fit all the users we don't have, you get to do it again! I'd love to be able to do the subbed-only thing, but finding communities is somehow even more awkward than blocking it out.

I can't tell if people failed to understand the whole federation thing, if I'm misunderstanding the finer details, or if they're literally trying to sabotage the whole thing (... again), but the trend kind of sucks.

I'm simultaneously not interested in a safe space as much as I'm not interested in Nazis openly discussing being Nazis in broad daylight. Lemmy is a weird mix of both of those things, somehow. It's okay.

Lack of content and the user base has always been ticked off reddit power users. If course you're going to get the craziest people here vs casual normal people on Reddit.

I've found that the quality of your Fediverse experience relies on your participation to a much larger extent than other social media. Lemmy instances tend to be tech focused and I've found it's difficult to discover new content via accounts there - you don't have the capacity to follow new users, only subscribe to communities.

On the other hand, Kbin, because it reads both Lemmy style and Mastodon style instances, has proven to be exceptionally vibrant when it comes to discovering new content, as it allows you to both subscribe to communities and to users. I've found that once I subscribed to about 100 communities and followed a like number of users, my content feed far exceeds what I get on Reddit - because as the users I follow post to new communities, they appear as posts on my feed.

I think when it comes to non-tech communities, a lot of them suffer from the fragmentation effect of having multiple communities of the same type across instances - because most Fediverse participants are in tech, tech is the theme that unifies the audience. To really match the quantity of content on /r/music, for instance, you'll want to be subscribed to at least 10 communities in the Fediverse. It's also harder to run a community in the Fediverse (although vastly more rewarding), and most mods often end up being the primary posters due to a lack of audience participation.

All that being said, shameless plug for @13thFloor if you're looking for a non-tech community. It's a pirate clearing house of sci-fi, music, fantasy, literature, movies, articles, and all other sorts of weird ass shit designed to engage your imagination.

It lost the magic but I still enjoy the day to day. I come on read a few things make a few comments and that's it. I try to share things I find cool but ultimately I just don't waste a lot of time scrolling like I did on reddit.

Because there isn't much content on lemmy I find myself always reading the post where as reddit I was guilty of commenting based on headline alone.

I've, anecdotally, noticed more shills or sycophants, more trolls.

Though, employing Hanlon's razor, I'll respond genuinely to find out if they're malicious or just stupid.

Either I've helped someone learn something or I've found an account to block.