Ask Lemmy

Yeah, I try to save my snarky or sarcastic comments to top level replies about the article itself, I could do better for certain.

Maintaining a good vibe is an important issue, I used to be more active on Beehaw which was all about that and I still am cognizant of it when I comment there.

[email protected] is one of the cooler communities with your frequent photo posts, we could use a lot more of communities like those.

Ultimately the points don't matter, yet it genuinely feels bad when you or someone that you're certain is posting in good faith gets downvoted, which we need to deal with if we want to encourage posting. Stuff like hiding scores for 20 minutes or vote fuzzing can deal with this issue, but at the same time, I do appreciate having the transparency that Reddit had taken away for years.

A lot of negative news coming in (which has been over the past month) does get reflected in the snarkiness of my comments, but I know that maintaining a positive tone adds a feedback loop for the non-trolls to contribute positively or at least interact genuinely. In threads like this, I try to reward people that have contributed with a similar effort reply.

A bit of a rant here.

Recently joined the wider Lemmy community (coming from kbin.social, o7). I like it, but the constant negativity and fear mongering/bait in large communities keeps me from engaging more. I just kind of wish there were more relaxed communities like how niche subreddits can be. I've seen a lot more arguments here than the kbin-specific communities or even Reddit honestly.

I'm going to continue using Lemmy at least for now, but I just hope this place can move past the negativity that plagues major social media platforms already. I get everybody has their views, but is it a requirement to share them every comment/post? It's all jokes and no seriousness on Reddit to all seriousness here. Not very enjoyable. Feels like a lot of the users who created cool niche communities after the Reddit exodus got driven away by the negativity and frivolous downvoting.

Agreed. It's sad that so much of modern media is wired for negative engagement, and it's probably hard to avoid "the anger" spreading to the nice corners of the internet as well.

However it sounds like you're doing your part to bring positivity and rational discussion to Lemmy, so thank you for that :)

I get a sense that people (including me) hesitate to be the very first to post in a community after a few weeks or more without activity.

I think there's no real need for that, even if that post doesn't get traction, chances are there will be a post inspired by that post which starts a cycle.

I suggest people who are worried about visibility try posting in a small community, and then crosspost it to a popular community (e.g. posting an Age of Empires discussion in both [email protected] and [email protected]), until things get off the ground.

Can't say I'm a sports guy. I do see some sports articles specific to Canada on [email protected], related to hockey, soccer/football like the Copa America, baseball and basketball. You're right, I also haven't seen much sports discussion outside of that in dedicated hubs.

I was going to mention more pictures, which is similar to what you were saying about creators.

I understand the appeal, and I like these types of video posts too sometimes. It's hard for me to say what is the correct amount because I wouldn't like Lemmy to turn into the Tiktok form that Youtube, Instagram, Reddit have adopted from the mass of brainless short-form video content.

Attaching video media to posts is harder in Lemmy than it is in Mastodon, that is something that could be improved.

I wholeheartedly agree. There are so many communities that seem to be created just for one specific post and then remain empty (most commonly for games or shows from what I've seen). Instead of building up a more general-purpose community of interactions, the result is a lot of fragmented ghost towns that are far less than the sum of their parts.

Searching from within Reddit has always been terrible, Lemmy's internal search is very slightly better imo to that low bar. Search engine results are an interesting challenge just because of the way federation works, it's information accessible from all sorts of pages.

I'd imagine to get something like that to work, we'd need a proper "Fedisearch" tool that can crawl and aggregate content across the entire ActivityPub Fediverse to reduce duplication, then search engines would hook into those results, rather than trying to make the Fediverse compatible with SEO algorithms.

So much this!
It's really hard to find someone here who can engage in a healthy discussion, it's ad hominem over and over and over again (not even talking about downvotes, as I don't really care about those funny nunbers)..
And I really don't get it, is it Lemmy specific thing for some reason? Why? It's so absurd, that I think even /pol/ despite everything that is going on there has better discussion to noise ratio.. :/

There have been a few comments on helping niche communities thrive.

While tagging and inbuilt community grouping on the software side would be helpful, I suggest posting to small community, then crosspost to the overarching category that is more active with a mention of the original thread.

I know this will improve if Lemmy grows, but at least personally, this is the main reason I don't spend much time on Lemmy relative to Reddit. I've tried posting some, but I'd need to write a bot to even maintain the base level of activity for the communities I follow on Reddit (IE major game updates, new TV show episodes). Don't get me wrong, I'm working on a web scraper for exactly that, but even then, the discussion is what makes these communities, so Im not expecting much.

I look forward to it! Some of the best moments in post-exodus history are the chains of memes spontaneously created from funny posts/comments (poop, beans, jeans, etc.)

Definitely some ideas for more network wide events like canvas, Lemmyvision would be fun!

It happens. Just check the front page and make the post. If it's a repost then people will say but not everyone is on all the time. Unless it's a real recent repost just let it fly. Otherwise delete.

I'd like posts and replies with videos or galleries attached in Mastodon to be visible on Lemmy.

There are a lot of communities, certainly a wide swath could use more signs of life than they have at present.

So far the only things coming close to Reddit live threads are political events and silly Fediverse drama.

We have some areas that see good discussion, you're right that we are missing long, meaningful discussion chains, as long Lemmy chains are usually either two users arguing getting nowhere, or a classic Reddit-style meme chain (the "and my axe!" type of reply), otherwise you're on [email protected]. Those don't need to be any longer than they already are.

You aren't the first to bring up sports, we have hockey and baseball "live threads", but sports fans haven't shown up in these parts en masse just yet.

(Edited) I've gotten used to receiving downvotes occasionally and I'm not bothered. Still, it's true and unfortunate that the way downvotes are given out around here can discourage people from sharing their creations or opinions on interesting topics like music, arts and crafts. Especially since those first few votes can feel like a lot to OPs.

I've been throwing some of those onto /c/technology and have received some mixed results.

On one hand, they are usually upvoted and some people are really cool about maker projects.

On the other hand...people can be downright mean and will downvote anything they can't personally buy right now or think perfect. The level of snark and straight anger is interesting. If you say anything positive about such a project, there is often a huge amount of downvotes as if people are trying hard to drown out any positivity. Dunno maybe it's just me.

I'm all about testing new and prototype technology and I was hoping it could have its place there. You can't get more diy than hackaday I feel.

"Nothing" is a perfectly valid answer. Even if development on Lemmy is slower than many would like, it is improving on the technical side. I'm sure excited for future progress.