Does it have something to do with the rise of smartphones and no one typing on real keyboards? (Maybe why blogs died.)
Is it a consequence of voting, which blogs didn’t have?
What happens to your thoughts? Do you turn them all in the form of a question? Do you tear them down into a Mastodon one-liner and hope a popular person notices it?
If Lemmy had more of ourselves in this way, maybe it would be a healthier place.
Being idle until the media put out an article on something for us to talk about gives them too much power over us.
There’s an actual_discussion community, which isn’t exactly lively. There’s a casualconversation community, and even that’s all in the form of a question.
This is a problem on the internet in general now. People used to have active conversations on the internet, and type multi-paragraph long replies to each other. Each new platform has shortened the attention span of people on the internet, spoon fed more nibble sized content to people, and reduced their reactions to the tap of a button. It’s really sad, because I love talking to people online, and it doesn’t really happen now. I think part of it is that we’re almost all using phone keyboards like you said, but a lot of it is probably due to the changing internet landscape. We’re not participants anymore. This isn’t our Internet. It belongs to the corporations, and we’re consumers.
And to think in the 90s, there was the belief that the internet was going to free us from corporations (because the corporations were going to be too stupid for cyberspace or the information superhighway, etc.). I’m not sure whether that was young-person naivete or whether it ultimately came from dot-com marketers, but it was around.
TL;DR?!
Phone keyboards bad
Corporations bad
Old Internet gone
People lazy
Thanks. I originally meant that as a joke but thanks anyway 😅
You want a deep conversations, you never ask on what. Why pontificate on the reason Baja blast gelato is the color it is and not the fact it’s only available through the app and capitalism in general. Where are you subscribed to what are you seeing and what in general are you truly looking for?
I’m not thinking specifically of deep thoughts or shallow thoughts, but when I happen to think of anything, it could be nice to communicate it to other people where it might spur thoughts for them or conversation or even just put it down in writing even if no one cares. If it’s casual enough, there is casualconversation, but if it doesn’t fit in the box well, it doesn’t fit in the box well. Or not even thoughts exactly as I might want to talk about what I did today or saw today.
Perhaps a new community is called for; something which encourages earnest thinking and open discussion but is not hardcore technical philosophy. I think it should be called ‘interestingthoughts’ or ‘thatsinteresting’ or maybe even just ‘thoughtful’. There is already ‘showerthoughts’ but that seems to be a bit more humour-based than what you’re talking about.
I would enjoy reading and replying to posts on it and posting to it myself too. I haven’t started a community on Lemmy before and I’ve got quite a bit on my plate at the moment, so I don’t think I could take it on as a mod alone but if you want we could try doing it together. Let me know what you think :)
It sounds like you are describing a blog. If you want to stay in the fediverse, there is WriteFreely. I have an account on paper.wf, but I haven’t used it yet tbh.
I tried to have blogs back in the day. People were not terribly interested, and the prospect of having to cultivate being-known so that anyone will see the thing I found unpleasant. It’s strange to think how many people are very driven to promote themselves. Self-promotion feels dirty, and writing for no one feels foolish.
Building an audience over time is exactly how blogs, and publishing in general, work unless you start off with a lot of advertising or endorsements. For better or worse, there’s far more content than there is time for a large audience to read it all.
This gives you three choices:
- specialize and post in an existing community that’s aligned with that specialization. People will nearly always engage, especially if the content is good
- specialize and start your own blog. You could even try seeding it by referring people to it from already existing specialized communities. People will know what to expect content wise and keep coming back if the subject you’re talking about is interesting to them and the content is good
- don’t specialize and strike out on your own. If the content is good and you stick with it your audience will eventually grow. This will probably take more time because your audience will initially be looking for content that relates to what they’ve seen in the past, but what you’re really offering is your personality, writing style, world view, etc
Personally, if I’m looking for engagement I choose the first option.
the fediverse is young, and still incorporating itself into something awesome… something more structured. in the meantime, ive found myself falling backwards into some amazing conversations with clearly very intelligent people.
im not sure why your experience is different, but im having a blast
Seconding this. I find that sometimes in the comment sections, there is an actual worthwhile exchange of interesting ideas and information, and when I participate in this I sometimes manage to fool people into thinking I’m intelligent.
I’ll feel like it would be nice to interact with some people, and maybe I want to write some, but I won’t have any questions, and I don’t feel like reacting to what happened in politics today perhaps, and I don’t enjoy memes.
You either want mastodon which has a higher proportion of thoughts and conversations, or a classic forum which is entirely dedicated to long form thoughts and discussions.
I can look at Mastodon more seriously, but I would have to figure out… I mean a regular person wants status, right, set themselves up as an expert at something, enjoy fame, and there’s careerism. So it’s natural to them to look at who’s a big name in their field, who they want to be noticed by, who they want to be associated with, and follow those people, and craft the right kind of comments so those people will respond to them in the right way to advance their goals.
A forum, yes, that could be it. There probably aren’t many that are so alive today.
Although I am skating past the point, aren’t I, that Reddit didn’t seem to be missing this puzzle piece to the extent that Lemmy is.
Reddit didn’t seem to be missing this puzzle piece to the extent that Lemmy is.
With this comment it’s clear that you are lamenting userbase count, and thus “Lemmy” (there is no singular Lemmy) isn’t meeting the content expectations you built with reddit due to this far lower user count.
Be the change you want to see, set up an instance and craft it to this concept you’re after. If not, Mastodon exists as the comment you replied to mentioned.
I agree that it can look like people are self-promoting and seeking prestige on social media. I find that following hashtags on Mastodon is a good habit for sidestepping this. It shifts the focus to topics rather than identities. The same goes for Pixelfed. I’ve got a beautiful feed on Pixelfed made up of different types of art and photography that I like.
The answer is Lemmy culture.
I had seen people posting long form content on Reddit even after it’s enshittification.
The reason why a lot of people here don’t post their thoughts here is that there is a good chance they will get downvoted to oblivion with no comments.
I personally never suffered from this, but I had seen it in multiple places here on Lemmy and I personally think that as more users join Lemmy there will be a naturalization of this culture which will make most users think that they are accepted here and that will make them comfortable enough to write long form thoughts here.
Our demographics don’t support uncertainty. Most of us are here because we are certain distributed is better than centralized, community run is better than corporate run, FOSS is better than proprietary, etc. The sign-up process discourages casual users, so most users have made up their minds to be here.
For better or worse, we’re highly opinionated, and we’ve decided some things are bad and others are good. Very few topics are open to discussion because we’ve already decided.
And if we haven’t decided on something, it’s usually because we’ve decided it doesn’t matter, so we’ll ignore it.
It isn’t a sustainable community, but I fit in, so I’m still here.
I see a fair number of posts that are diatribes or questions. I upvote all questions to help raise visibility to help get more answers. There are fewer people here, for sure.
you should check out tildes or metafilter both are link aggregators that are highly curated to foster discussion
Didn’t they say they don’t want to wait for a link to be posted to have a discussion about something?
Of course that depends where you read and post on Lemmy. I don’t really agree with the premise of your question, so I can’t give you a good answer except to say look around. Depending on the topic, you can find people who are going into great detail about their own thoughts and presenting arguments and facts and whatnot, all as might be appropriate to the topic at hand. I’m not really sure what you’re looking for. It sounds like maybe you want to start a blog, and if you want to start a blog, go start one. You can even post the links here, for an extra touch of irony.
Start a blog is a little like “If you don’t like the huge corporation, you have to start your own huge corporation to crush them”. Make a blog, never be seen again.
As for people giving their thoughts, it seems held back until you free it with a link or a question.
Typing long form stuff on a smartphone sucks
Why is Lemmy not a place for thoughts and observations, rather than just links, questions, and memes?
First off, Lemmy isn’t “a place”, each instance is unique in their own way. You are quite welcome to set up an instance around this concept, it’s not hard.
That’s kind of like saying the United States isn’t a place, it’s a collection of States that are each unique in their own way. Yes, that’s true, but combined they make a place called The United States of America.
I don’t wanna socialise with anyone, that’s it. And my life is too “un complicated” and meh, I don’t have much to say or add.
I don’t know (or, frankly, care much) about the “why”, and I like Lemmy the way it is, but if your looking for deeper discussion and longer posts I do recommend Tildes, if you can get an invite: https://tildes.net/ It’s not open to the public, so the post volume is quite low, but most responses are well thought out, longer and often thought-provoking. I don’t post much there, but enjoy reading it a lot.
I did see tildes when exploring around, and it did seem intriguing, although I didn’t really look down into what was getting posted. I never get invites to anything because I don’t know people. It’s like at times I’ll feel a little interested in lobste.rs but don’t know any of them.
I tried to sign up there a while ago, but I never got an invite.
They used to have invite threads on Reddit - that’s how I got mine when the API changes were announced. I think it was in Reddit alternatives subreddit? Not sure, haven’t been back since. If there’s still a thread (and if the subreddit even exists still), asking there might work.
Thanks
Most of the threads I’ve started (on other accounts) have been about ideas rather than events or people and they’ve reliably made it to the front page, so there’s definitely demand for it. There’s probably several reasons for why threads like that are so rare, but I’d imagine a big one is fear. The reception on Lemmy to a post like that can, and usually will be quite hostile. People do have opinions and they’re quick to hop in and tell you’re wrong about something but at the same time they’ll think twice before putting their own ideas under public scrutiny.
People do have opinions and they’re quick to hop in and tell you’re wrong about something
Are you sure about that? I don’t see very many unique opinions any more. Everyone seems to have the same conditioned replies to everything. I used to constantly be exposed to unique and interesting perspectives on the internet. Nowadays, I rarely see people saying anything that hasn’t been said a thousand times over. It’s all just angry parroting at everything that exists.
Isn’t that what Mastodon is for?
My understanding is that on Mastodon, you keep it pretty short, and that you have to be followed by people by having gotten reposted by the right popular people or no one will ever know you exist. I’m not very comfortable with chasing popularity. And when I looked at Mastodon, it didn’t look very light.
Good point. I have an account there, but I don’t really like or use it, I think for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
