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.
Be the change you want to see.
I expect it would be too much for me alone. And do I put them all in one poorly-named general community that I make that ends up a grab-bag, or do I make lots of communities that I only touch once in six months when I happen to have a thought or experience in some topic and I also happen to remember that I even have that community to write in?
Best to give up then
Hey things should be better!
Sweet, let’s get started, go make something better
Nah, gonna give up instead.
k
That’s the spirit!
Hello’s right.
Mastodon, Lemmy, and the Fediverse in general are what you make of it. I want there to be more content, so most days I post an article or two.
If you want more discussion, do the same, engage with people.
One large reason I haven’t rushed to start communities is that there are some personality types that live to be a moderator, and some that totally don’t. But I guess you do it and if it reaches the point where you have to moderate and you hate it, someone else must be around who can take it on.
The former, because nobody will subscribe to the latter, and therein lies the problem.
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?
Edit: Is this the kind of depth but in text for what you’re 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.
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.
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 :)
I think I’m going to take some days to find out what my brain’s impulses are to want to do over time. Does it have any intention of having interesting thoughts semi-regularly? I don’t know that I could promise that :)
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.
It is nice to sort Lemmy’s posts by new comments sometimes. Turns everything into a much more forum-like experience.
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.
Yes, that is very irritating.
The more classic forum format is better for discussions because replies bump the thread up to bring new attention to it.
Too bad they’re not very active, to the best of my knowledge.
Also a lot of people just don’t give a shit about random people’s random thoughts
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.
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 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.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
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.
I agree.
I used to use Reddit some, although I would never manage to stick with it well and become an accepted regular anywhere, but it was big enough that I never realized it was a link aggregator before all else, since people were just talking about whatever in communities. I actually had to look up some fediverse site yesterday when checking what’s out there for blogging and whatnot for it to label reddit and lemmy explicitly as link aggregators, for me to really get it.
Forming their own thoughts, is it the voting, is it the culture wars? I know I have the chilling effect of thinking that my response to some article will just get tons of downvotes so why bother. And I don’t think upvotes mean the same thing to me that they mean to the average person.
Coordinating with other people, I’ve had zero success with and must just not have any clue how to go about it.
Yup - Reddit is still mostly memes, questions, and links; this gets evident when you look at the top 5 subs: memes (r/funny), links (r/gaming, r/worldnews), questions (r/askreddit), “fluff” (r/aww). And yet Reddit is large enough that you can ignore those and find people sharing their minds in smaller comms.
That won’t last long though. The place is collapsing, and the first ones to kick the bucket will be the smaller subs, that’ll become ghost towns.
Forming their own thoughts […]
I think that it’s deeper: it’s the impact of social media in our societies, plus phones (that you mentioned in the OP), plus the voting system (that you mentioned now). Together they shape a culture that encourages short, shallow, uncontested, polarised worldviews.
And when people are exposing their thoughts on a matter, there’s a high chance that they actually thought about something that is longer, deeper, controversial, full of counterpoints. As they share it they get replies like:
- “WAAAAH TL;DR!!!”
- “U say dat 50 is not 100? than u think dat 50 is 0? dats dumb lol lmao”
- “If you’re saying that you like apples then you hate bananas! Fuck off banana hater! Why so hateful?”
- “I dun unrurrstand, why you think that [distorts what the other person said]? I’m so confused…”
Eventually you get weathered by that. Too much attrition to bother; you stop exposing your thoughts.
Coordinating with other people, I’ve had zero success with and must just not have any clue how to go about it.
Frankly? Ditto. But this is the sort of issue that we can’t solve individually, we need numbers for that.
It must be a great skill online to know how to write in a way that can’t turn into something else in someone’s head and trigger disproportionate reactions.
Since I remember Before Phones, I’m worried that people who grow up with phones don’t know how completely crappy a way that is to interact with the internet. It makes good consumers. I remember the shift in laptop display dimensions around 2010 so they would become Movie Watching devices. And phones take phone-shaped pictures.
I suppose I’ll have to start tracking what I wish to talk about to find out what communities could be needed. Today the only ones in my head are one of no importance at all that would fit in the existing casualconversation just fine and another that made me laugh but is nothing deep and I might feed it to asklemmy at some point.
I might have to ask asklemmy where questions that are a little more factual are supposed to go. Their sidebar says they want open-ended, although probably no one pays attention.
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.
Typing long form stuff on a smartphone sucks
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.
TL;DR?!
Phone keyboards bad
Corporations bad
Old Internet gone
People lazy
Thanks. I originally meant that as a joke but thanks anyway 😅
I know you did, but it was fun to tldr it.
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.
The corporations of the time still haven’t really figured the internet out. But new corporations founded by slightly younger people who have a deep understanding of the internet, grabbed complete control over almost everything in the span of two decades.
As to your title, who says it isn’t? Just because it isn’t as commonly used that way doesn’t mean it isn’t for that. Also, my understanding is that Lemmy was created as a federated alternative to Reddit, and while I would say that Reddit did have more engagement for general discussion, it was/is probably better known for questions, links, and memes just as you’re seeing on Lemmy.
What happens to your thoughts? Do you turn them all in the form of a question?
This next part is just my opinion, but regarding this quote and your title contrasting commentary to questions, in my opinion posts with questions are likely to be more engaging as they give a direct point for responses. If you’re just posting your thoughts and ideas into the void, people are less likely to engage with them unless you are saying something particularly compelling or controversial.
If Lemmy had more of ourselves in this way, maybe it would be a healthier place.
Healthier in what way? Size of userbase? Number of posts/comments? Or are you referring to the quality of discourse and level of courtesy or toxicity between users?
I get that a question brings more engagement, but if I don’t have a question, I don’t have a question. And I might have a thought I want to put down in writing, and maybe someone will read it. Even if no one happens to read it, putting it where someone could read it and not just on paper or a nowhere unknown blog can feel better.
Healthier, maybe less combative from getting a better understanding of who someone is.
I don’t know if you’ve seen them, but since no one else has mentioned them, there’s a few other communities that might work for posting your thoughts besides casualconversation:
- !showerthoughts@lemmy.world (tends to be shorter form, perhaps more absurd or sillier in tone than you want. Alternate option at !ShowerThoughts@sh.itjust.works)
- !justpost@lemmy.world (mostly memes/links but occasionally someone does a text post)
- !goodoffmychest@lemmy.world (other posts might be less neutral than you’re looking for but your post doesn’t have to be a rant or vent or w/e)
- !general@lemmy.world
In one of your other comments on this post you mentioned somewhere to ask fact oriented questions rather than open ended questions as encouraged by asklemmy. For those, you might consider:
- !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world (some people might suggest just using google/search-engine-of-your-choice, ignore/block them if they’re jerks about it. Alternate option at !nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca)
- !askscience@lemmy.world if it’s science related
Otherwise just post your question in a community appropriate to the topic. Hope you find what you’re looking for from Lemmy.
Thank you, I didn’t know about goodoffmychest or general.
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.
Relatable.
Have you never been to !casualconversation@lemm.ee?
I have look at it, and if I have something that’s solidly casual, it could fit there, although I’m also thinking that if I have three casual thoughts in a day, now I’m already almost flooding the place. Would have to start slowly in that case.
We wouldn’t mind no matter how many thoughts a day you have that you’d like to share. Share as many as you’d like.
Thank you for being welcoming.
You’re welcome
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.
When a headline or thread starts with “Why…” you can often reply to it simply by repeating the question without the first word and emphasising the new first word, eg:
Is Lemmy not a place for thoughts and observations, rather than just links, questions, and memes?
I’m not sure that’s true as a starting point. So not point trying to answer “why” it might be the case.
I looked around for some time at the shape of Lemmy yesterday, and that’s what I found.
I think its just down to the lack of users, and esspecially lack of creators. There just isn’t many people who care enough about a subject to write multiple paragraphs on it, nonetheless to an audience of half-a-dozen users, who likely also have an extreme aversion to monitization of said content given Lemmy’s culture. For most users, there isn’t even karma to act as an incentive to post.
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.
I sometimes post thoughts/questions and usually get some interesting discussion, so it is worth it. I think I also prefer seeing other posts like this. I think that the reason for seeing more posts which are links is because a) it’s easier and b) most online content is somewhere on the clickbait spectrum and the result of that is manifested here on Lemmy much the same as it would be anywhere else.
Edit: Also, I’m upvoting your post because I think you are essentially calling for firsthand thoughtful discussion, which is a good thing for everyone.
Thank you. Whatever I’ve done online has always been more or less unwelcome. I saw that my post has a 0, which must really be some negative value. I knew at least some people would be defensive, group membership, tribalism, the angry insecure thrill of attacking outsiders, but I wasn’t sure whether it would lean that way overall.
Don’t take it to heart and remember that there are other posts/comments that received way more downvotes, my own included! I’m sorry to hear you’ve had a rough time online. I’ve appreciated this post though and you’ve had some upvotes, so I’m sure others have too.
Thanks. I’ve proceeded to have some positive conversations, which I must have been really thirsting for.
