I really want to like Lemmy
I really want to like Lemmy
I hate big tech controlling social media. I desperately want social media to be federated.
I really love community-driven social media like Reddit. Lemmy feels… too small. I really loved that Reddit let me jump into any niche hobby, and instantly I had a community. Lemmy, you’ll be lucky if that community even exists, and if it does, chances are nobody has posted in ages.
On the other hand, Lemmy is full of political content lately. I’ve basically been doom scrolling everything US election-related, and it’s really starting to take a toll on my mental health.
I know I can filter content. I know I can post and be the change I seek. Yet, it feels like an uphill battle.
Not sure what the point of this is, or if it’s even the right community to vent about this. I just really want to replace Reddit, but I find myself going back more and more (e.g. r/homekit is very active compared to Lemmy version).
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i think that your experience is the most common experience that moonlighting & ex-redditors have with lemmy and is the biggest "sore spot" that most lemmings have.
like you, i hate how big tech enshitifies social media and that's been making me move from one social media platform to the next since the 1990's (since before it was called social media). i'm convinced that the enshitification is pushed by big tech's investors in an effort to squeeze out as much profits from the platform as possible; resulting in the types of enshitification that you see on reddit, or facebook, or bluesky or etc. i think that this fact gives lemmy the best chance out of NOT enshitifying, or at least not as fast as reddit or bluesky did.
i used to be on reddit too, but lemmy works better for me and i think it's because of what it was designed to do; it's as if all the left leaning political subreddits (eg r/communism, r/socialism, r/anarchy, r/politics, etc.) got together to create their own social media safe space on the fediverse away from reddit's toxicity. so they did in lemmy and; when the investors pushed u/spez to enshitify reddit; a whole bunch of people left reddit and filled the ranks of lemmy.
when that happened this tankie safe space did the same thing that its real-world counterpart safe-spaces-for-the-ostracized spaces do. like gay neighborhoods, they got gentrified by a MUCH LARGER group of people with better finances and social connections and, during the transition, there's lots of things that the gentrifiers don't like, like late night loud music; or lack of schools; or the "politics" (in this specific situation).
the gentrifiers usually succeed eventually and those pesky life-altering politics will be pushed aside like the high rents & $10 coffee shops push away the artists and agitators that originally made the neighborhood an attractive place to inhabit and they'll go do it all over again in some other neighborhood somewhere else once they're successfully pushed out where the cycle of humanity repeats itself all over again.
I agree with the politics. I just think drinking from a political fire hose is terrible for your mental health. Especially with all the doom and gloom after the election. What we need is for people to feel empowered against the incoming administration. I don’t think consuming an unhealthy amount of doomsday political content makes people feel free and empowered.
I think it’s less specific to Lemmy and more specific to the current US political situation. Before the election, there was a lot more hope, and I think I could have consumed much more political content without it negatively impacting me.
To be clear, I don’t want to switch off. We need to stay informed, and we need to know there are other people that want change. I guess what I’m trying to say is we need to take care of our own mental health so we can show up for the next battle.
So it’s less about “gentrification” of Lemmy and more about fostering a rich community that discusses more than just politics. Politics can be part of it, but not all of it.
It's only seems like doomsday if you don't learn from the people who had encountered it before and wrote down their experiences.
Empowerment is a side affect of knowledge; yet most Americans will never bother to avail themselves to the knowledge from people like marx or MLK Jr and that only leads us to those needful mental health breaks over and over again without ever fixing the root cause.