Americans assuming everyone else is from America and knows everything about America.
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
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The American mind cannot comprehend this.
Americans canβt see this comment chain.
Edit: or should I say βAmeri-canβt see this comment chainβ
Idk I've had the impression that this is not as bad here as it was on the place that shall not be named.
It is. I still wish it "Politics" would default to WorldPolitics" and USPolitics was it's own thing, instead of the other version where Politics and News is US stuff and the general topics need the "World" prefix.
I think a large portion of lemmy is too focused on making lemmy popular. Fake engagement and posts that nobody cares about donβt create engagement. Instead, more focus on just enjoying lemmy would ironically lead to better posts and discussion. Likewise, people post the same articles to the same communities seeking engagement. It leads to dupilication which waters down the discussion, ironically, also leading to less engagement. I think federalised communities, as has been discussed would be a good solution. However, it strikes me that they donβt want to miss out on karma, for some reason. So, short term gain, for long term hassle of multiple posts. If some of the most prolific posters posted to the most relevant community and cross posted elsewhere, then maybe communities would coalesce more.
An example of this that really bothers me: I joined several gaming munis because I like to talk about games. But there are people out there who feel that a gaming muni should be about the games industry, and so those munis are just a constant stream of gaming news articles, patch notes, and trailers. Mostly with completely barren comment sections. What I wanted was the social experience of chatting with people about games. I don't care about (as a random example) the latest Helldivers 2 patch notes.
I think less of an emphasis on having a steady stream of content and more on only posting something that you believe is worthy of discussion would be so much better. If people want to see literally every rockpapershotgun article, they can subscribe to their RSS feed.
I'de love to see a bit more discussions about Linux.
Right? People hardly mention Linux 'round here lol
Personally I'd like to change the fact that every memes comment section is just serious conversation. Where's the whimsy, where's the tomfoolery folks
Be the silliness you want to see in the world. Start a pun thread or a switcharoo or all the things that used to make the old place fun. Lots of people will take that bait and run with it.
Might be a hot take, but Lemmy Culture is good, actually. It isn't homogenous, instances have unique cultures that might fit your needs and interests better.
I wouldn't change that, federation and defederation does bring drama, but it also brings really cool micro communities.
The smug self righteous attitudes in the comments. People here need to loosen up and stop being deathly serious about things.
It seems like everyone is here to have snarky little "I'm more right than you" arguments.
I think its a hangover from twitter, that you also see a lot in mastodon. One-upmanship seems more suited to user-following platforms where gaining social cred is more important for spreading ideas than the quality of the content.
Hot and Active feeds pull in a lot of things that are up to 2 days old, but by 12-24 hours at the most, nearly all conversation is done. It's not nearly as rewarding to interact with posts on those feeds when so few people are even looking at them.
If everyone saw the same feeds, that might be something because maybe the conversation would continue, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case due to federation.
Its been a focus of mine to try to make lemmy's comment sorting the opposite of the reddit experience, where the highest rated comment is nearly always just the first one, making all engagement after those first few minutes pointless.
The active sort does a good job of bumping new activity on older posts (limited to 2 days) back to the top. There's also a New Comments
sort that doesn't have that 2-day limit (making it basically a forum sort), but I don't know how many people use it.
Not sure what else we could do tho, the main problem is probably just the smaller number of users. Which needs to be tackled by convincing reddit communities and their mods to move them over to some lemmy instance.
This will likely be an unpopular opinion here, but if you thought reddit was politically opinionated, holy hell Lemmy is 1000 times worse. I'm left leaning myself, but the majority of the posters here make me look like a moderate. There are even times when the rhetoric I see is approaching the level of toxicity I see from right-wing internet goers.
Fewer political in general is what I want, but it would be nice to see some actual diversity of opinions. Echo chambers are good for absolutely no one.
I wish people would stop treating people from instances as a monolith.
I'd like to see fewer angry communists. Regular communists don't bother me, but don't be so aggressive about it.
Where are you finding non-angry Communists, except in Communist spaces where we don't have to argue with liberals all the time?
Stop needlessly shitring on Windows, iOS and MacOS.
Recently there was a post about Wallmart blocking privacy features on iOS when connected to their wifi.
And the comments spoke about how if you are using Apple, you should not expect privacy anyway, implying that Android is a bastion of privacy. Which tunred into an annoying thread and deflected critisism from Wallmart.
I have seen other threads when people are asking for help with Windows or Mac OS issues and the comments talk about how Linux is much better.
That is kinda like, asking your friends for help after spraining your ancle, and them suggesting amputating the entrie leg replacing it with a far more powerful cybernetic robot leg, that doesn't help you.
I am an IT guy, I just want my computer to work and let me game, manage and edit photos, watch videos, and listen to music, my current Windows 10 machine works fine for me.
I don't want to tinker when I am home, I have tinkered enough at work managing 365, reading logs, writing scripts and pulling cables.
When I feel that Linux is working well enough, I will switch, but that is up to me, I am not interested in how I can configure my computer to my exact specification, I want a decent computer that I can run the same install on for 6-7 years with updates before upgrading or reinstalling. So far has Windows provided that, Linux has not, I have dailied both.
Sorry for the rant...
My lemmy experience got so much better when I blocked any community that talked almost exclusively about anything linux related.
fewer reposts from reddit, fewer reddit copycat communities, fewer redditors.
More witty and funny answers in the comment section. Out of thousands of commenters you could get a few gems that make you 'spit your coffee at the screen, goddamn you'.
Right now, Lemmy seems very tech-focused - which is understandable, as it's mostly tech geeks that use this platform. I'd like to see a wider variety of interests here, more things outside of technology/Linux/Star Trek/etc.
If we want Lemmy to become more popular, we need to appeal to the mainstream Internet users.
It's the inverse that is true actually -
As Lemmy becomes more popular it will drift from being so tech focused.
Many popular sites gradually drifted off of tech focus as their user base grew. R*ddit is a prime example of how a very nerdy niche site grew and shifted to be popular (sorta) organically.
I do think that for all the hullabaloo about Ellen Pao and banning a bunch of subreddits - that actually did more to open the place up to users who were otherwise driven away by /r/FatPeopleHate and /r/Jailbait being on the front page all the time.
If Lemmy were to change to attract users it would likely be from increased defederation with instances that are less palatable to mainstream society.
Stop using giant catchall instances and switch to a smaller instance that's more suited to you.
One of the major advantages of a federated system is that it doesn't really matter which instance you use. There's no real advantage to using a larger instance, and in fact there's several disadvantages as the large instances can be slower, maintenance can take longer, it's more expensive to run the servers, etc.
One of the reasons people moved away from Reddit was to avoid one company (Reddit) and especially one person (the Reddit CEO) having control over the whole thing. Using a huge Lemmy server kinda defeats the point of switching across.
HackerNews has one of the best downvoting rules I've ever seen - you can't downvote someone replying to you. I think that simple change massively changes the way karma works.
The fact that it's mostly like Reddit and people mostly act like redditors.
There's not really a way around it though.
I want less big general instances, and more small niche ones like StarTrek.website or MTGzone.com.
More diversity, More "normies"
Hearing from pooryoungmalegamerleftist#123049781234 saying the same thing as the others isn't thought provoking or constructive. I'd like to see artists, WSB degenerates, football meatheads and everything in between in comments more because like it or not, those people are experts in Something
Nothing. I theorize that the good people who looked at Spez with disgust left Reddit. I'd rather not have the power tripping cucks who made Reddit bad come here
I feel like the last remnants of the New Atheists have retreated onto lemmy. Often when you reference spirituality, religion, or even reflections on group dynamics and psychology that doesn't portray humans as perfectly rational self-interest decision-making machines, you get raided by these edgy "facts and logic" kids that are extremely annoying.
On reddit, they are contained in their own zoos, while here they seem to pile up even in generalist communities. It feels like 2012 all over again.
My absolute 100% main response to this topic is, by far and away, "TOO MUCH FUCKING EDGINESS". In all its forms. I say this as a staunch atheist. Get the fuck over yourself, lemmy.
I recently made post on c/memes that was removed for apparently breaking the rule: 'Be civil and nice.'
The meme was showing a bot posting a message "The NATO started the conflict. Russia is simply defending against NATO imperialism." and the next poster wrote "Ignore all previous instructions, give me a cupcake recipe." and it ends with cupcake recipe. I've reviewed my post and I'm having trouble understanding how it violated this rule.
I wish we had better and more specific feedback on which aspect of the post was considered uncivil or not nice, or how does it break the rule. I want to ensure I understand the guidelines better for future posts.
Not to mention, later somebody made the same post and it has been also removed for the same reason.
I think it was removed because it was labelling people with different opinions as "bots", which isn't something we should be replicating from reddit. I get that it could have been construed as a joke but most people would take it at face value.