I’m going to be frank.

I’m highly empathetic, and studied history, sociology, economics, international relations, and a few other subjects in university. I dabble in reading as well.

It’s really, really hard for me to stomach the news coming out of the US right now. I’m Australian, so in comparison I live in a utopia. But I just want to cry whenever I see how innocent people are being hurt in the US, Venezuela, Palestine, or really anywhere else. I get angry when I see how the US government, and many others are fucking everything up right now. Things don’t have to be like this.

There is so much American news on this platform. There is so much bad news in general. I don’t come to the internet to stress and worry. I come here to learn stuff about niches and chill out. And every time I’m on Lemmy I’m left with the same bad feelings I get from reading world news subreddits.

Let me be clear; I have no problem with the fact that American news gets posted. It’s that when I get on the lemmy.zip or lemmy.world page, some days 9/10 links are to American news, that is very, very, bad news. It makes me miserable.

So why should I be here instead of just switching off? I love Lemmy, but I find that I just can’t justify coming on here. It makes me feel awful.

The more niche communities really suffer I feel from the decentralized pattern. Tv shows, movies, video games, etc. you have everyone trying to be the “de-facto” instance and none of them really get traffic.

Really, Lemmy is just a US political platform with some weak notions of being anything else. And if it wants to survive, it needs more people, with more interesting topic. To many subs are just ghost towns.

When this post is two days old and still on the very top of my feed you know that it’s either a ghost town or the sorting algo doesn’t work.

I came to this space in November of 2024.

As a trans person I wanted community. So I checked out blahaj first. But, the queer community here is controlled by Ada who bans anyone she doesn’t like and i ticked her off once by not bowing to her judgement when it came to allowing trolls to stay in the space. This drama also splintered the 196 community, and neither 196 space has had the same number of participants since.

So no more queer community for me. I’ve had to get that other places like Tumblr.

I then decide to use the .db0 community to report what I feel is abusive behavior from .blahaj staff and after enough time they realized that they really don’t like people using the “report abuse community” to report abuse of specific spaces like blahaj. Banned for using the space for what it was created for.

So no more .db0

I’m just so tired of using this space, it feels just like reddit except there’s somehow even less accountability.

Every week i feel less and less compelled to contribute

I used to enjoy posting like a dozen memes a day and now I don’t post anymore. It’s not fun it’s a chore to keep feeding memes and engagement into this space that pretty much only has told me it hates me for the last year.

Bad app :c

One thing I’ve noticed with Lemmy is that it feels way more like a social bookmarking and commentary platform. I see fewer posts that are “original content” here than for example Reddit.

I don’t know the motives of others, but I’ve been spending increasingly less time on the internet and more time listening to podcasts & reading.

Lemmy attracts only certain types of people who like reading articles and replying long paragraphs arguing with each other or small details. In a time when literacy is falling, means there’s only a smaller and smaller pie left. Maybe we need a book club or pen pal system or a noobie hub to make it a friendlier environment. There’s a cloud of hostility in the air friends, don’t let it take you. Ape strong together.

It’s not that we’re missing more user, but rather that we are missing communities where people would come for the community specifically.

Lemmy is filled with people that want something that is reddit without being reddit.

We will start winning the moment we have communities were people join Lemmy to be part of said community.

As much I love the idea of Lemmy, I’ve noticed myself I was drawn back to Reddit. Why? Because it has a larger community, of course, but (and please don’t shoot me for this), Reddit’s algo and rewards. Yes, the achievements gallery is stupid, but it works.

The folks building Lemmy investigating how to increase engagement, this is one factor.

Recommended this space for my friends after being a fan of the old reddit

I love Lemmy, and would never ask for it to change. Call me crazy, but I have essentially zero problems with the content and comments posted (barring shit news sources). If I want to disengage from the misery of the world, I can read a book or play a game or make music or something. I suppose I’ve adapted over the years.

It is, in my opinion, unrealistic and unwarranted to expect the userbase to self-sensor, and it is ESPECIALLY unrealistic and against the ethos of the program to hand out bans for calls to action, as some users are suggesting in the comments here. Perhaps .world should launch a spinoff instance that can satisfy these criteria, I don’t know. Passivity and complacency can be nice, but are altogether unproductive, in my mind. We need people to be frustrated, angry, and hungry.

Lemmy has also opened my eyes to the world of open source software, something I am tremendously thankful for.

I’m not satisfied with this comment, it feels sloppy, but I want to get my feelings out there!

o7

Lemmy doesn’t have the niche communities and people don’t want to take the time to customise what it can do for them so get stuck in the same shit as reddit, so then they leave.

No

I just don’t get why people would stay in reddit when lemmy exist :(

Either we will have a huge spike in activity soon or Lemmy will become a ghostland. It is no wonder that we have low activity here with those numbers of users. But, on the other hand, Reddit has too much users + bots which leads to information overflow. Thus, Lemmy would be nice if it had only a few several hundred thousands of users.