I kind of feel like Reddit is the biggest bar in the world and having a conversation there feels like it. If you aren’t loud and early, you can’t really participate in a meaningful way. The smaller crowd of Lemmy is a sweet spot for me. Enough people that it’s not dead, but small enough that I can still participate in conversations.
Most popular english communities are already too big though. They're always flooded with comments, and sometimes everyone says exactly the same, such as if they didn't read through the comments before commenting themselves. Discussions on, e.g., c/[email protected] are much more fun.
Agreed. On Reddit, if you weren’t there in the first hour of a rising post, your comment won’t be seen by many.
I love that Lemmy posts have a longer “shelf life,” so to speak. I can see something posted days ago and still find fresh comments, which in turn encourages me to add something if it feels relevant. If I had scrolled a two day old post on Reddit, any comment I add would be rarely seen, or at most responded to with “Why are you commenting on a dead post?”
Also, on Reddit I felt dread seeing that there was something in my inbox. On Lemmy, I'm excited to see what someone wrote. Just a very different experience overall.
Especially when you comment anything remotely social or political. The mouth breathers clamor to project their personal war on the nearest comment that vaguely resembles some words they can latch on to.
Agreed, and it's kinda neat to start recognizing people's names across different communities. Really feels like old-school internet forums in that way.
I once got into a brief disagreement with Flying Squid and to their credit they didn't stoop to any kind of personal attacks, didn't behave or speak unreasonably, didn't flex or mention their mod status, and didn't penalize me for disagreeing with them with their mod powers in any way. And yes of course all of these very reasonable normal behaviors should be a given, but just fucking try disagreeing with a power mod on Reddit and see what happens.
Isn't it crazy how we're able to connect with each other when our activity isn't guided and filtered to serve the interests of advertisers? It's almost like we're all real human beings with the capacity to relate and connect... What a concept!
Humans work better on the tribe model. Having diverse communities and even fractured topics covered by multiple communities on different instances promotes this model.
It feels like a properly social media that isn’t trying to exploit me, and I think that’s something special.
I don't disagree with you on the scale/tribe point, but I do question if the larger factor at play isn't the invisible hand of advertisers and corporate interests guiding and manipulating the landscape for their benefit rather than ours (which you touch on, I just think it's a point worth really hammering)
Hint: it very much is - all the way up and down the scale, from why Reddit's search function sucks ass and subs are only allowed to have 2 pinned posts that cannot be edited by a mod team - why promote listening when talking is what makes more ad revenue? - to making it harder to read a sub's ruleset prior to posting, anything that would be a barrier to showing another advertisement to a lager group of people gets smoothed over, while things that promote human interaction and peace of mind get forgotten along the way :-(.
You can always be heard on Reddit. Reply to the top level comment with a sex related joke or the popular meme trend and upvotes will roll I'm fast. You could also make a post that allows others to be judgemental, like relationship advice or am I the asshole; and again you'll get lots of attention. Or pretend to be a girl and comment of weed and sexuality. There are lots of ways to get attention.
All of those ways get you attention, yes, but they’re all vapid dopamine hits. Which is probably a positive for the right person I suppose.
If you want meaningful engagement you will never find it in the larger subs, only in the super niche interest subs. We don’t really have many niche anything here on Lemmy save for a few vocal minority communities but the great thing is the engagement with the larger community is a real draw for a lot of us.
It's small enough to recognize names. Big enough where running into a furry with an unreasonably flashy emojis in their name, or someone from some place you never herdhad the knowledge of its presence forcefully injected into your brain through an unspecified method of perception is common place.