Is anyone else enjoying the slower pace of content?
I had been feeling a bit drawn in to reddit for the past few months before the divorce. I feel like the slower pace at which content comes out on Lemmy is good for me in that way. I can't just scroll and scroll and scroll my entire day away.
There also seems to be a deeper sense of community, at least in a few instances and communities, than I've experienced in a long time, excluding some of the more niche-er subs
I definitely see it as a double edge sword. On one hand I don’t mindlessly scroll as much, on the other, the lack of content is just because I’m figuring out the quirks, and I have a feeling finding new and weird communities could be a McGuffin quest.
I've been constantly going on https://browse.feddit.de/ to see if there any new communities that I'd like to join. Really do wish it were easier to discover communities but it is what it is
Idk about everyone else, but I sort by new on Lemmy and "all" WAY more than I ever would on reddit. Even sorting by new or all on reddit it just shuffles around the same 100 posts they want you to see. Here people post about all kinds of stuff!
For the popular communities, yes. For the smaller niche communities it just feels empty and sad. Hope this platform catches on so the "there's a subreddit for everything" quote could be a thing here too.
I think you need to move to medium-sized communities for a little bit. like /android instead of /myspecificphonemodel, or /electriccars instead of /myspecificelectriccarmodel.
The great thing about small communities is that you only need to convince a handful of people to jump ship to get them started again.
To me, the problem is that usually only a small percentage of people in the small-medium subs were actually content submitters. Personally, I would comment on things often (or lurk), but not submit news and articles. I honestly still jump to reddit once a day to check major news, which will be much harder when my 3rd party app is gone.
I feel that. I'm finding myself gravitate back to going directly to individual blogs. Just in the past couple of weeks, I've been introduced to new blogs on these smaller, more slower-paced niche communities. So it feels reminiscent of how I used to use the Internet 10-15 years ago before Reddit and monetization of everything. I had a handful of places I'd rotate through. It was just enough that there was usually something new everyday, but not an infinite sea of content. And I'm finding now that I'm actually reading the links being posted instead of just reading the comments. It kind of makes me think of how people used to watch TV. A show would release one episode a week and you had to wait for next week's show. And there was a limited number of shows. Now with all the content on all the streaming platforms plus YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc. there's an endless amount of content to consume and no built-in breaks so you can literally binge non-stop.
With Reddit or other fill-in-the-blank service where your attention is the end goal to sell ads, the incentive is to get you to never pause, never take a break, never leave. It was exhausting. Here, it feels more relaxed.
Yes, I get that. I have a few fond memories of old old forums. With that said, Reddit's ease of discovery for niche communities and my ability to instantly join the discussion without signing up to yet another website is something I will miss.
I hate that the algorithm is super broken and the only meaningful sort option is "TopDay", which means Lemmy is only good for me to look at once every day at the same time.
Admittedly, I'm so bored, I open Boost for Reddit for more content.
Really hope more content comes to lemmy before third party apps shut down.
Since the 0.18 update I find that the sorting is working pretty well. I also like that there are now options for Top 1 Hour, Top 6 Hour and Top 12 Hours.
Agree. I find the slower pace or lack of an algorithm or whatever it is is leading to me opening lemmy, then kbin around once or twice per day (have 2 accounts and slightly different subs between them which is frustrating in itself).
Then I find myself back on reddit for a bit more scrolling, particularly of the communities I haven't found an alternative for or that are still more active on reddit.
I suspect this will change come July when the Relay app that I use on mobile presumably ceases to function due to the API changes. And my routine will just be kbin/lemmy (hoping for a unified app soon on android). But I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing and might reduce my overall screen time a bit.
Still, I am sad the reddit golden age is effectively over at this point.
No. I really hope a few million users move over to lemmy and make it a bigger platform. I want to see more diverse content more frequently. I don't need infinite content like on Reddit but I don't want to see the same posts days in a row.
There’s a decent amount of activity tbf, it’s just that the lemmy algorithm is worse at surfacing it than Reddit was. I recommend sorting by top(hour) or even new(don’t worry, lemmys new feed is a lot better than reddits!)
I feel more the lack of my favorite communities that haven't made the jump. Some alternative attempts exist here but are dead.
I miss the variety of topics and random discovery as well.
I miss the /r/legaladvice drama and the fun on /r/bestoflegaladvice. That was my go-to "take a break and feel better about my life" sub where I would also learn things occasionally.
Yeah I still have to go to reddit for good, solid PC gaming news or updates about Starfield. The CFB subreddit as well. It feels like my frontpage/subscribed on Lemmy is a shell of what it used to be, and maybe that's a good thing but I feel like I have to keep going back for random stuff.
One big issue I have with federation is that there are like 4 versions of r/gaming, each with their own pace of content but they don't seem to be getting updated in Lemmy.world. I'm tempted to make an account on .ml or .ca just to get more content since .world is defederated by a few places.
Honestly It's been way worse for me lol, the discussions here are actually meaningful so I can sink way too much time reading threads instead of getting bored after looking at 5 consecutive reposted memes on reddit
Edit: I'm not complaining though, this is definitely better
i hope the bulk of reddit stay where they are now. we dont need those really. also so many instances to read from. we dont seem to be running out of content here any time soon.
The only thing that somewhat bothers me is that, if I Google something 8/10 times I'll have a reddit thread(s) as the top result.
I don't feel like giving reddit revenue or clicks though. (I do have adblock on PC and revanced on the reddit app so I try to minimise it).
But instead of using reddit every 1hr or so for 15min, I now use reddit 1 a week maybe for 10mins.
For real? Most of the frontpage of lemmy seems to be filled with memes and news about reddit, both of which I don't care about. Of course, I had curated my reddit feed over time and seems like it will take time to do the same over here.
Yeah, it feels like having a much smaller community harkens back to earlier internet days. I remember spending hours on the world of warcraft off topic forum back in the day. Always had great conversations and met some awesome interesting people.
Yes, kinda, sorta. It’s like an addict going cold turkey. I feel the urge for a faster paced feed from time to time. It’s unsettling how much I’ve been accustomed to this kind of BS.
Exactly! It's like I didn't realize how much I was itching for the next blue link until it wasn't readily available. It really helped out things in perspective for me.
The lack of unwanted rage bait posts and karma farmers has improved my mood by a lot. I gotta be honest though, I’m still scrolling through Apollo and giving myself my last dopamine hits before July 1st. Won’t miss that place
I think that's the feeling that I don't miss. It was like with reddit I could always get that fix. There was plenty of blue links left to satiate my dopamine drip. With Lemmy, the content is a lot less so I don't feel the need to just scroll and scroll. I hope on, get my kick, hit the end for that day, then go back to doing stuff IRL.
The thing with reddit is you would scroll and scroll and not find anything interesting, just little blips of dopamine in sea of inane content. I don't like everything posted on lemmy but I find it far higher quality overall.
The sea of most upvoted content in r/all always come from the same handful of subs anyway. I don't miss that one bit at all, but I do worry about my Google results showing empty Reddit links when I'm looking for reviews and answers about some niche products. Reddit is seriously the only place I trust in finding genuine reviews.
But you also can't just scroll endlessly through unknown stuff. There are thousands of rich, but extremely niche subs. There's one for cultivating worms!
On Reddit, you could just scroll through /all and get bombarded with stuff you would never even think about looking for. That's (at least currently) not possible here.
True but you don't really mindlessly scroll through those communities, you mostly go on r/all or other popular communities for that. I used to watch a ton of content on r/videos but then some days I would scroll through the front page and just not find anything relatable to me. I joined the site pretty early, like back when it was mostly tech people. So to me the site got worse content wise but if that was the worst of it I could of accepted just hanging out in niche subs.
I just visited r/all and mostly just found American politics and low effort content. It's just not for me personally.
Eh, whenever I looked at /popular or /all it seemed to be full of angry things like r/mildlyinfuriating or r/trashy and other stuff like politics which was just angry divisive stuff. I like the more chill and tech-focused things here.
Being used to high-traffic subreddits it's definitely a change one needs to adapt to. But I slowly start enjoying it. I just wish there was more non-meta content. Most of it is directly or indirectly related to Lemmy oder the Fediverse in general.
Personally no. I used the scrolling to escape stress and just be mindless.
Now I don't do it as much since there isn't as much. When I try, it's not the same since it's slower and just not as much stuff. Also too many posts either about reddit or the fediverse. Honestly I'm tired about (metaish) posts of either of those.
Also the comments were better on Reddit (for me) just mainly because of higher quantity leading to semblance of quality.
I personally hope it goes faster over time with more variety and niches... I miss posting a comment on some places and getting more responses/conversations.
I don't know. Feels like a lot of content is mirrored from reddit, just with less engagement. That being said the quality is a lot higher. I also like that there are less comments trying to be comedians with quirky one liners
Yes. Truthfully for the last 2-3 years I have been dismayed with the direction social media in general were going, not only Reddit. Here were the 3 major issues I had: 1- lower quality of content & the volume of bad content drowning out the good, 2- the corruption of the companies themselves, and 3- the toxic social environment with nasty behavior becoming the norm. I think that fragmenting the web into smaller and more distributed communities, with a slower pace, will probably be a good thing at this point in time.
PS I'm happy to admit the web has always had a dark side, but it had gotten noticeably much worse in recent years.
3 is the biggest thing about pivoting more towards Lemmy / traditional forums for me. It's been really nice feeling like I'm not drowning in a sea of trite idiocy and unempathetic rage every time I open a comment section. It's genuinely refreshing to feel like I'm actually engaging with normal people again.
I had to take a break from Instagram because of this. I used to enjoy scrolling through the reels and reading the comments. Sometimes there'd be some really funny chains, but lately they just got to be so rude and negative. I'd spend hours throughout the week and at the end of it just feel sad and empty. Lemmy's been a nice change because it's still small and feels more positive. I'm hoping that as Lemmy grows it doesn't lose that.
It's taken a bit to get accustomed to it, but I am finding that I can go longer periods without checking the feed now, so overall it's a positive effect.
But I must say that I wasnt enjoying reddit in the way I used to anymore. I used to scroll reddit in bed to wind down, mostly text posts (meaningful conversations) or cute animal pictures. Last few years it turned into doomscrolling with way too much video content like tiktok/reels/shorts. So I enjoy the text and image focus on Lemmy which also seems more civil (for now?).
Yeah doomscrolling started to be a real problem for me. I am a new(ish) father, so scrolling through /r/all was starting to give me some serious dread every day. I realized if I just scrolled through my subscribed subs and made sure there was nothing political there, my mental health went waaaaay way up. Like night and day difference, I became a much different (and better) person to be around.
I think I find it a bit harder to find exactly what I'm looking for on Lemmy for support and help on various topics. So, it's good and bad. When it becomes easier to search for content Lemmy will definitely improve on that front.
I'm still discovering new instances every day and it has been a much more slow paced browsing experience due to load times and the frequency of new content.
It's definitely a different (but in no way worse) experience to what I'm used to on Reddit, but there's a whole lot less upsetting content (like personal stories of abuse and such) that show up on Lemmy, so I think it's been better for my mental health, even if I feel a bit less connected to the internet than before.
It is a blessing for someone like me who had a lot of difficulties to stay away from reddit. Lemmy gives me a slow paced window of reddit, with RSS feeds taking up the rest of the free time. So in the end the time I spend is more focussed on my interests but driven by reputable sites instead of someone in reddit.
Yeah, content is lacking. I haven't tried telegram but my fear is that it will be the same issues reddit had for me. Too much content so I just sat there all day sucking from the content teat. The conteat if you will.
Reddit used to be slowly to refresh a long time ago, before they tweaked how the front page worked. You would pretty much have the top posts all day, and maybe it would change by the evening.
It was slower paced and fostered more discussion before people would move on, but it wasnt as good at giving the novelty dopamine hit compared to a faster churn.
That's what I was saying when I first came to Lemmy. This is how reddit used to be. Before the digg migration it wasn't uncommon to see the same posts on the front page for days at a time because they were so active. It also wasn't uncommon to check it in the morning, and then see mostly the same posts that night. But, like here, usually the comments have developed and you can chat and have friendly banter with people. Reddit at that time I think still had loads more users than Lemmy does now, but the vibe was way more akin to what Lemmy is in its current state.
Because of the slow nature of content I ended up being subscribed to more communities than I would have back at Reddit. My feed is still 99% 196 just like in Reddit, but instead of needing to pop into r/all or r/popular every few hours, the New Comments sort ends up "sprinkling" interesting stuff from other communities into my feed.
There once was a r/195 which I'm late to the party for but was apparently just a dumping ground of memes by a bunch of students who all lived in dorm room 195 (or something along those lines) so when it shut down people who wanted to keep something like that going decided to set up r/196
The only rule (technically there were a few more such as no NFT avatars, or that one specific person could post porn if censored correctly) was that you had to post something before you left if you opened the sub. So it became a weird meme dumping ground, and because the mods weren't assholes it ended up being a pretty nice space for left leaning folk and gender minorities.
No clue why posts are just titled "rule". I assume it started out as people simply not having a title in mind when posting, and then just kinda stuck.
Yes and no? I'm definitely checking for content less but also... I have IBS and I spend a ludacris amount of time on the toilet. Sometimes, I just need some content.
In the early 2000s there were a couple of different forums I liked, so once a day I’d walk over to the library to use the internet and catch up. I’ve missed having that kind of healthy relationship with the internet, haha.
Breaking free of radicalizing algorithms and agenda driven rage farmers will feel weird for a while. There's a process of recovery when healing from any destructive addiction.
I feel like the Fedverse has the same problem that IRC has. There's (by design) no easy way to discover communities outside of your instance. You can search, and to an extent get relevant results, but there's no cross-instance (and cross- service) /r/all equivalent to help new users find communities they're interested in. Seems like if that piece could be figured out, the entire thing would be in a better place. You might end up with the endless scrolling issue again, but with enough visibly into communities, you might just be able to keep focused only on the ones you're truly interested in
I think it does too but not 100%. I feel like I see communities in All that don't appear in search and vice versa. I guess my point is that even this is a bit off-putting for non-technical users
I find it really annoying actually. I open the app and see a bunch of posts 24+ hours old that I've already read or don't care to read and they don't automatically hide when I vote on them
Yes absolutely! I like that I can basically catch up on all Lemmy content in an hour or so. It means I don't spend hours mindlessly scrolling (like I did with reddit) and gives me more time to do something more meaningful
My Reddit experience over the past few years has been primarily focused on smaller communities, so I’m finding Lemmy somewhat similar. But I am definitely enjoying being more active and engaged on here (as I slowly overwrite and delete all my old comments on Reddit).
If all communities were decently active I'd agree. But I have some topics I've followed 5+ communities for yet never see posts about on my feed.
But to fill in the more niche communities will require more users, which then takes away the slow pace.
At the end of the day, I'd rather have a shit ton of content and practice self control rather than not having anything to read.
I found that in those cases, making a few posts myself (one a day or so, no spamming) with relevant discussion prompts helped those communities get off the ground and drew out lurkers. You can also cross-post to all the communities with a couple of clicks, and just see where bites. Idk what topics you're here for but it might be worth a try.
Totally relate to that. I love discovering new things and reading many different people's thoughts on a topic, but every platform based around scrolling on a feed is too addictive to me. If I use them too much I can already start to feel some cognitive abilities decline after a few days. The slow pace of lemmy is really nice.
You might also be interested in curating an RSS feed for yourself if you haven't already.
I use the app Inoreader for that. No idea if it's the best, just the first one I tried and I'm happy with it.
Then you just subscribe to the feeds you are interested in. Almost every blog or news site has an RSS feed. Just make sure you don't subscribe to any that make dozens of posts per day, or you'll end up overwhelmed. My personal favorite feeds are the top 10 daily hacker news and a few youtubers I like.