General Discussion

I've been active. Any time I share an opinion that isn't in-step with the crowd, I get bombarded by people defending the status quo, insulting me, and telling me that I'm wrong because "just look at the downvotes" which is a hilarious metric.

I got banned from the Vegan community for suggesting that meat was deeply ingrained in our behavior from a cultural perspective, and simply messaging to other people that animals were alive and conscious wasn't going to cut it if they wanted to reduce meat consumption.

I also tried to convince people that rubbing BLM/anti-"all lives matter" rhetoric in conservatives faces wasn't going to convince them to support our movements, and the whole thing devolved into everyone throwing insults out, and not one person could ever explain why I was wrong.

Maybe becoming active on Lemmy isn't a great thing lmao

I left the shitposts and it's been much more fun. I'm there with you, I deal with anxiety. I'm an informed voter, I keep up with things, but when I'm scrolling and wasting time I don't want to be bombarded with how terrible the world is. I just want to see cats and chuckle a bit.

I dropped political and news communities, feels better

As suggestions

• !casualconversation@lemmy.world
• !movies@lemm.ee
• !lego@lemmy.world
• !nostalgia@lemmy.ca
• !til@lemmy.ca
• !map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz

I hope I start seeing my hobbyist community come to life.

Me too. There's nothing to really replicate the D&D scene from reddit. Most smaller spaces are dead on Lemmy. That was pretty much all I did on reddit towards my later years but it's not doable here. And if it doesn't change soon I'll probably be done with Lemmy. There isn't enough engagement even with All/Hot sorting.

It is a shame that the news communities have filled out better than the more hobby-level stuff. I think that will come with time and hopefully some more users

I just wish the political threads here were better. I'll read the headlines and some articles, but I feel the comment sections are largely either the same anti-corprorate or anarchist things over and over again or just bad takes in general. Not that Reddit was any better, but as I don't see the country giving up on capitalism in the next few generations, so I feel a lot of the opinions just aren't constructive.

What my solution has been was to find a dead community I liked and now I just post. I try to research and write good articles and curate cool pics. When people comment, I try to reply to everyone to build the community. By the time I'm done all the work, I'm mostly ready to wrap up being on here, so I'll quick browse All - Top 6 Hours to get the headlines, then All - New and try to find 1 or 2 posts that I can add a comment to, even if it just "Thanks for posting this, I never knew about this" to break the ice for other commenters.

Plus even if nobody else comments, the poster knows at least someone read it and their effort was worth it at least a little bit. As someone who is primarily a poster now, that's what inspires me to continue posting. If I'm doing the work and no one participates, the upvotes are ok, but I'd rather hear some feedback from a real person.

With this approach, I'm mainly focusing on what I DO want to see, because the bulk of the time is now spent on a community of my choosing, and it's building it up and it encourages me to read and learn more about that topic when I'm not on Lemmy.

The rest of my time is expanding my horizons and helping others build up other corners of Lemmy. It's a win for them and me.

So I guess basically, instead of being a consumer, try making what you want. If you make a post, you're at least going to see one thing that makes you happy. You may even make someone else happy with it. Then when you get in that kinda feedback loop, you notice you've created exactly what it is you wanted.

It doesn't have to be complicated. Find a pic or article you enjoy. Post it. Write a sentence or 2 why you liked it. I often try to end with a question to encourage comments, and hit post. People will say "I agree" or "nice" or "how does that work" and you reply. It's easy and gets easier the more you do it. I'm introverted, yet now I love sharing things on here.

It may take a while for people to find you and develop a little following, so start in an established place if that bothers you. Something like Birding is good. Everyone can find a bird they think is pretty. Google pretty bird pics, find one you like, and post it with a blurb like "Yo, I just learned about the Long Legged Purple Tit. It lives in the jungles of Grand Yolanistan and eats toads. I think that's awesome!"

This is about 5x longer than I planned to tie so I'm stopping now. Go be the change you want to see. Leave a comment on !superbowl@lemmy.world if this was helpful while you're at it. 😁

I'm in the same situation. What has worked for me to make me engage more is the opposite, I subscribed to a bunch of smaller communities about my interests and then I feel more compelled to comment something on a post that I know about.

Sometimes there's not much conversation happening but at least I'm providing what I know or my opinion, and 'rewarding' the poster for providing interesting content, even if that has not much quantifiable value for them.

I also switched my default feed to my subscriptions instead of All, that way I see less active posts instead of the super popular ones where everything has already been said hours ago.

I'm burying my head in the sand. Only way to not get emotionally manipulated every day.

I actually don't see any politics or news in my feed at all but I guess you mean that it's showing up in the meme feeds sometimes.

I generally browse via kbin.social, with lemmy.world as my backup, but since Ernest has gone MIA, things have become quite laggy and the frequency of errors is getting to be too much, so I've been exploring other instances and apps. One of the key things I'm looking for is an alternative that provides keyword filtering, so I can block out the majority of posts on certain topics. The Thunder app has keyword filtering, so I've been using that for the past couple days, and I'm definitely enjoying myself more and engaging more.

I've had to block a lot of communities from my lemmy.world feed since they're in languages I don't understand or are porn (I don't want porn popping up while I'm killing time on the bus!), but it's like whack-a-mole, so I'm really looking forward to instance blocking!

I've noticed that a lot of the negative news posts are all posted by a few users. I usually check their profile, and if I see that is the type of content they almost exclusively post, I block them.

I'm generally pretty informed, like you said, so I don't feel like it's being willfully ignorant. A good amount of it is pretty biased as well. So I don't feel like it's the best way to be informed.

You can tweak a lot of what you see. You can even make accounts for politics, and accounts for hobbies! That's actually what I'm planning on doing soon.

Everything is politics. Half of us are here because of reedits bad politics.

I'm almost hoping that with the upcoming IPO, Reddit will make another stupid move and make more people to leave..

I try to comment here and there if I find the time. I definitely lurk as well.

Oh man... you're basically speaking directly to why I made our small community (consider this a personal invite). As I said elsewhere, I find Lemmy actively hostile.

The number of indignant replies and comment-free downvotes we get inundated with continually is… disheartening.

People want content, but actively detract from any content that doesn’t explicitly cater to them. It’s hard to take.