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No, it’s not a joke. I’m frustrated and I’m probably not choosing my words carefully.
This community has had steadily falling engagement - our last 3 weekly threads have had a grand total of 1 (excellent and well-articulated) response, and the number of topics not generated by myself (or the other mod) since the inception of the community has also been 1.
Very few people want to actually talk. From what I’ve seen, the masses want the same things that they wanted on Reddit:
- Memes
- Articles they don’t read (but will bitch about endlessly) that reinforce their opinion
- Angry responses to someone (who may be trolling) that reinforce the current politics of the reader (that they couldn’t have given a fuck about a few years ago until it became heavily politicized)
- Shitty easy jokes
- Personal politics circlejerking
I hate that I can see a hundredth point-free meme post and view 200 replies on it. I hate that it’s just the same talking points being strawmanned over and over again in every thread. I hate that any point outside common groupthink is downvoted to oblivion and buried instead of discussed.
The reason I’d like to back away from Lemmy seems to be the same reason I started this community: we need more people who can articulate points, and less downvoting, but it doesn’t seem to be getting better.
Maybe one day, but today is not that day. Lemmy needs to mature in more ways than one.
I just learned about this community from the piefed issue tracker. Glad that i found it! Looking forward to hopefully take part when i have something to say. I feel like this community here is especially hard to find, just because it is so broad and not a niche interest that is easy to search for with an obvious keyword. I was also wondering if communities being home to instances with a localized TLD may have it harder to grow because people just assume it’s a f.e. canada centric discussion. I may remember this wrong, but i think last summer the !bicycles@lemmy.ca community was the largest and most active cycling community (it was very small though), but somehow !bicycling@lemmy.world has now more than three times the subscribers (looking at lemmy.world numbers), even though i’d say that !bicycles@lemmy.ca is still the most active english language cycling sub (strangely the german speaking !fahrrad@feddit.de community seems to be the most active of all of the cycling communities that i know of).
I thought quite a few times that i need to leave lemmy, i felt like all the negativity i was exposed to had a bad effect on my mental health. I was also thinking that i didn’t want to be associated with all these super angry people. I blocked a lot of meme, politics and news communities but it still seeps through. Still i have some hope that this can take off more, i generally like lemmy.
I had high hopes for the “scaled” sort, to find some interesting communities, but i ended up not using it at all. Maybe i should give it another try. On lemmy.world they have this “community spotlight”, where they promote a smaller community on top of the homepage. I think that is a pretty cool idea, although i feel it would be nice if they changed it more often, or cycle through a group of communities for a month randomly, then on to another group.
All in all i think this community here has great potential! I will have a look if i can propose this community for the lemmy.world community spotlight if you don’t mind.
*edit: i have now suggested it for the lw community spotlight, i hope that’s ok.
Thanks for the response! I would very much appreciate any way to further grow the Community, so I’d love to get added to the spotlight.