First off, I want to say that I love what the people here are doing but I do have a problem. There is never any conversation about posts. There are tons and tons of links shared but most of the time they’re just articles that someone found interesting. I never see any true, meaningful discussion the way I do on reddit. Does anyone else have a problem with this or am I just shouting at the clouds? Is there anything we can do about it?
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Does anyone else have a problem with this or am I just shouting at the clouds? Is there anything we can do about it?
Yeah I see this as well. I mostly try to at least provide some interesting content, stuff that I find and like. For some topics now and then a lot of people start discussing, mostly fediverse related ones. Otherwise it’s very quiet here often.
I think it’s too quiet as well, but don’t really know what to do about that, apart form participating more myself. We can just hope that more people find this place.
The people on chapo.chat for a while did a thing where they added a small banner to most of their memes and stuff, so if it was shared people would find out where it originated. But even for something like that we don’t have enough memes here ^^
I think there’s a few factors contributing to the low amount of discussion/participation.
First and foremost, we are small, much, much, much, much, much smaller than most communities out there. We’ve got a few hundred users, and of those maybe a few dozen which are active in any given month. It’s rare we see new faces around here (hello everyone who has recently registered!). More importantly we’ve got to respect the 90-9-1 rule. Most people don’t participate. Even for those that do participate, their likelihood to participate in a particular community or a particular comment will only reflect a portion of their contribution.
Secondly, I think many of the users who have come to this platform are tired of shitty bigoted and hateful speech that they’ve seen on so many huge platforms. They’re less likely to share their opinions on polarized issues or less likely to want to participate in charged discussions. Often times these are the ones which garner the most attention and commenting. In their hopes to create a safe space, one which is uniquely nice, they may unfortunately find themselves self-censoring, still hurt and feeling raw from experiences elsewhere on the internet.
Third, as has been mentioned here and is often mentioned on new platforms, tech saavy users are usually the first adopters, and they often have a restricted set of interests. This is why we see a lot more activity and discussion in tech and tech-related spaces. More activity in these spaces draws more users who are generally active in these spaces and you get a bit of an echo chamber going on. If we want activity more evenly spread out, we need to collectively prioritize it (try to find non-tech related things to share) as well as spread word of this place to non-techies and be willing to handhold them through the process of learning how to use a website like this.
I agree. I often find myself not investing as much energy into coments here, because I know that at best a handful of people would even see them :/
FWIW, I would see them. I read every comment. And I may even engage in a discussion with you.
Aaaaw
Reporting in as regular reader too 🫡
Another thing that I notice is that threads that somehow get traction and replies from mastodon tend to be very active.
So maybe we can encourage more people from mastodon to subscribe to communities and participate there, so lemmy content automatically gets federated to more mastodon servers, that then again have waaaaaay more users who might be interested and engage? Also users there should like the software and values anyways :)
