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.
Lemmy’s format just kind of sucks for discussions and visibility. If you comment on a post from a year ago, you can expect that to not been seen by anyone ever.
Lemmy is primarily a link aggregator, just like Reddit. It also happens to somewhat work for Q&A and help forums, but fundamentally Lemmy is more oriented towards new content.
The more classic forum format is better for discussions because replies bump the thread up to bring new attention to it.
Also a lot of people just don’t give a shit about random people’s random thoughts, that’s why I’m not on Mastodon and never really used Twitter either. I don’t know why people feel the need to dump all their thoughts on the Internet, like I care that a celebrity is on a plane or enjoying a nice meal.
Lemmy is about topics, not people, that’s what I like about it. I don’t care about people.
What if we encouraged everyone to sort by “active” now and again?
Doesn’t that sort by whatever people are commenting the most on? To my knowledge it doesn’t put something back at the top if 1 or 2 people comment on it. Unfortunately the threads that most people are commenting on are all rage baited political drama.
Yes, that is very irritating.
Too bad they’re not very active, to the best of my knowledge.
Yeah, it’s true. I remember the stereotype of Livejournal, which might be before your time, of being teenage girls telling you what they had for lunch. They could be accused of tending toward narcissism. Me, when I want to communicate, sometimes it’s that I want to point something out, but sometimes it’s driven by a wish to socialize.
There are a few active forums, but they’re very niche. There’s a forum called Thumper Talk for people who ride single cylinder dual sports, and a forum for Doberman Pinschers that are both pretty active. But people are lazy. Most people don’t want to create an account to talk about one subject. They want one account to talk about everything. That’s why Facebook and Google login are popular, despite the fact that you’re sharing waaaaay too much information with some random website and with Facebook or Google by using that option. It’s also unfortunate that a lot of active forums have never taken the time to make their sites mobile responsive, since most people online are on their phones these days.
It is nice to sort Lemmy’s posts by new comments sometimes. Turns everything into a much more forum-like experience.
I never saw the value in that format because you can’t say anything meaningful about anything in 180 characters or less unless you’re Earnest Hemingway. Why do billions of people want to engage with a character limit?
I very much didn’t expect tight character limits to be accepted and take over as opposed to just when you’re on your feature phone but you have something to say.
We didn’t expect the phone to become the default device online either. But the vast majority of people on the internet are on mobile devices now. Even I only ever visit sites in my free time from my phone. I’m on a computer at my desk in my home office for 8-10 hours per day for work. The last thing I want to do after work is to spend more time at that desk.
I hate typing on my phone so much.
It sucks, but I’m not going back to my work environment to browse the internet. I started setting up a dedicated gaming and browsing desk elsewhere in my house, but I never finished, because I didn’t like the way it looks.