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.

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
    6·
    3 months ago

    Lemmy has both thoughts+observations, and links+questions+memes. It’s just a lot more of the later than the former.

    There are a thousand potential reasons for that. I believe that a few of the ones that you mentioned have some impact, but there are two that you didn’t mention that might be extra relevant:

    1. Lemmy starting out as a federated replica of a link aggregator, also mostly about links, questions, and memes; this is bound to replicate a certain culture.
    2. The Zeitgeist of the internet of the 20s is considerably less kind to people who form their own thoughts.

    On how to solve this: perhaps the first step could/should be to co-ordinate with other people who have the same desire, and nurture communities with that goal.

    • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
      4·
      3 months ago

      The Zeitgeist of the internet of the 20s is considerably less kind to people who form their own thoughts.

      This rings true and it may come from the wider world. Seems to me that we have entered an era of fear and pessimism. Partly as a result of that, today’s younger generation had protected childhoods and now, given the state of the world, they themselves are afraid for their futures (with some justification). All this is creating an atmosphere of hypersensitivity, aversion to causing offense, a general lack of openness to new ideas and contradiction.

      Nothing I say there is particularly original and I can’t offer data to support it. But my anecdotal experience on this forum and elsewhere backs up the hypothesis completely. Something has changed.