this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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So, back 15 years ago or so, most people who wanted to discuss topics on the internet, and who didn't want that discussion to be ephemeral, found forums dedicated to those topics.
There were thousands of forums. Millions of them. Some had dozens of users, while others had 10s of thousands. Many of them discussed similar topics.
Browning Lemmy or kbin is like browsing thousands and thousands of subforums across dozens of websites. Some of those websites have similar subforums, but they might be populated by very different people having very different customs and discussions.
Reddit kind of pushed everyone into a single room, and in a single room only the loudest people get heard. Hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers just leaves most people shouting into the void, having no meaningful conversations, and rewarding performative antagonism and biting sarcasm.
You know, toxic shit.
The best thing to do with multiple communities here is find one that you like best, and engage with it. If there's something actually interesting going on in one of the other ones, trust someone to cross-post it. Some of these communities may not take root and grow, but some will, and they'll each take on their own flavour, and serve their members, not the machine.
This is the sort of echo-chamber romanticism you can expect in miniature silos. Fostering meaningful heartfelt individual conversations, person-to-person relationships, and small communities was never the intention. Its first-order focus has always been about a singular aggregated place for links on topics of interest, voted on by the followers of a tag/community, and sometimes spawning interesting discussions about those links in a peer-voted manner. Kbin and lemmy are both "aggregators", like Reddit, not "social networks" or "forums". [Edit: ability is not the same as intention]
Subscribing to hundreds of forums and RSS feeds with slightly different foci just to try to find the actual interesting stories, in most peoples opinions given Reddit and Diggs success, was decidedly not the "best" experience.
No one is preventing you from using things how you want, to seek our miniature echo-chambers so that your personal voice can be louder, but it is hardly the appropriate response to espouse how "great" microcosms are when someone is asking about how to better aggregate in a... checks notes... a "content aggregation" system.
Fascinating that you feel like having discussions with orher people is tantamount to being in an echo chamber.
Here's the thing, Lemmy isn't a content aggregator. Lemmy-UI is, but Lemmy-UI is not the only front end to Lemmy. LemmyBB also exists, and it gives you a front end that looks like a phpBB forum. The API also let's people make other front ends, to suggest other uses as well.
Lemmy is just an ActivityPub user and group manager. There are lots of AP groups out there. Friendica, which looks like Facebook, uses them for their "forums" , and you can follow Friendica forums from Lemmy. Importantly, you can also follow Lemmy communities from Friendica, where they're indistinguishable from a Friendica forum. You can also follow chirp.social and a.gu.pe groups on here, which are third party groups for Mastodon and other Fediverse microblogs. They're full of people just having microblogs discussion threads, without titles and everything.
Lemmy is however we use it. It's all just Fediverse down here. But if all you want is to aggregate links, what do you need comments and non-linking posts for? Just use Pocket.
I like how you stated that big platforms like Reddit encourage toxic behavior such as performative antagonism and biting sarcasm, and then someone immediately shows up to defend big platforms by using performative antagonism and biting sarcasm.