I don’t know if others are experiencing a similar situation. My all feed is very sparse with engagement. If I sort top six hours or by top 12 most posts have between 5-10 comments. I feel like there was more in the past? Is engagement dropping off? I’m on lemmy.world as my instance.
I’m not sure I’ve seen this take expressed here before… but here I go. I think the thing I appreciate about Lemmy is that it isn’t absurdly active. Before my switch to Lemmy (from Reddit ofc), I was compulsively checking Reddit for new content every 20 minutes, even taking priority over hyperfixations of mine. I like that there isn’t new content every 20 minutes. It’s like checking your fridge every 20 minutes for new food, and Reddit just keeps feeding you until you’re upset. This place feels like it “restocks” every day so that I don’t feel the need to check it obsessively. It’s improved my relationship with social media entirely. My only issue is the amount of bait, not just in the form of trolls but people riling themselves and others up with politics. I get it, I’m extremely far left too, but god if I come here in hopes of being less anxious I always see something that feels designed to make me angry. It’s less than Reddit but we could all work on considering if engaging is worth it. Learn to appreciate boredom and understimulation and it will change your life, especially those of you like me with an anxiety disorder.
sorry for the tangent, tl;dr less content actually makes me less anxious and more comfortable and we should learn to appreciate the boredom that comes with that
You know, I appreciate this take. I’ve felt it too. Since I switched over from Reddit the doom scrolling has gone away. I’ve even started reading more books&comics. Maybe it’s time to appreciate what we have 🙂
Honestly, lemmy isn’t that welcoming. Read through comments and you’ll notice most of them are kinda snarky and rude. Look at no stupid questions (idk the name of “subreddits”) you ask a serious questions and almost none of them are on topic just people giving you shit for asking. If you have tech problems it’s “install linux,degoogle,stay away from that brand” for someone new reading through them they’ll probably leave because of the toxic community.
Yea, I try to be as nice as I can on the internet. There’s no reason to be an ass other than you’re miserable and want other people to be as well.
It’s a mixed bag though, I’ve had some people be assholes but I ignore them if they have nothing of substance to say and focus on the positive communications.
Also, blocking the Linux communities really helped my feed. Idk what it is about the Linux superiority complex. Although I feel like most of it comes from a good place, the delivery of the information usually isn’t the best.
A part of me feels like the .ml instance is working on behalf of meta and reddit to drive people away.
Obviously that isn’t what is happening, but when one of the largest instances’ user bases is turning every post into Palestine debates and allowing coordinated harassment against anybody who disagrees with them, clearly people are going to leave.
Sir, but have you heard about the Peele commission? Allow me to introduce you to 150 years of Palestine -Israel historical context before we can move on with this discussion about user engagement on Lemmy…
The problem with Lemmy and with reddit too. Is that conversations Die off or stale too quickly. Reason being most engagement happens with older more upvoted comments. And newer contributions don’t benefit from the same exposure. Which doesn’t give much incentives for people to comment. Which in return deplets the platform of its userbase. Lemmy apps should ship with viewing newer comments by default to combat this. And Lemmy users should also change this setting in their apps.
Interesting. I find myself participating more often here instead of Reddit. I’m not sure if it’s because the disinformation is more superficial or the user base is more monological in its thinking.
I’ve noticed a downward trend, not necessarily “dropped off suddenly”. One of the most notable signs I’ve seen is from the new comments sort.
When I’m interested in seeing what’s actually active and where the action is at, one of the things I will do is click to sort by “New Comments” and change my view to Comments. Typically I go to that page, see if any of the headlines or comments catch my attention, then go read or reply.
In the past couple of months, I’m seeing more and more new comments on that first page of results that are 5+ minutes old. When I get to the bottom of the page and click to refresh the results, there are times now when I don’t even get a full new set of comments because there haven’t been enough new ones to bump the prior comments off the first page.
That didn’t used to happen much at all, it was rare enough that it really sticks out when it does happen. Typically, the comments on that first page would be anywhere from seconds to maybe 2 or 3 minutes old and every time I hit refresh (I wasn’t spamming the button), I’d have a completely new set of comments to peruse (other than a bug in older versions of Lemmy that would cause some comments to get stuck at the top of that page even when they were significantly older than anything else).
My overall interpretation of this is that it appears there’s less commenting, at least during the times of day that I tend to be most active on here. Of course that’s not the only possibility. But like OP, I’m noticing a lot fewer posts in those top 6, top 12 filters with lots of comments than I used to see. So, those types of observations do have me thinking things are on a bit of a down trend. It could be a seasonal thing, perhaps a temporary lull.
Seems about the same to me, but maybe a bit less? I have noticed, for a while, that the comment count on posts doesn’t match how many are actually displayed when I open comments. It’s not about my instance being de-federated because we are federated with all other instances. I think there’s a bug in population.
Are you sure you selected English in the languages list? When I first started my account I left it on the default “Undetermined” and that made it where comments set to “English” would not appear, but still counted in the comments number. Need to choose both Undetermined and English.
I was missing dozens of comments on posts sometimes and for awhile thought I was blocked by hundreds of people (understandable… I know I post cringe) before I figured it out. I don’t know if the onboarding process made this clear, I obviously missed it if it did
I noticed that it didn’t solve the issue on a thread yesterday. I think my instance has an issue syncing comments. Oh well, thanks for the tip regardless. Maybe I’ll see comments that I otherwise wouldn’t have.
To be fair, what do you expect people to talk about?
5-12 comments covers most topics for a given article/meme. Any more than that, and it starts to just become a repeat of what someone else said.
Do you want to read 10 copies of “lol that meme is so me!”
I always thought it was wild that your average thread on Reddit could garner thousands upon thousands of comments, with the vast majority of them being repeats of something someone already said.
Then factor in that those same comments are in the next thread, and the next one. That’s not engagement, that’s insane!
The comments here are far more sparse, but they still cover all your bases. You still get the interesting info dump from some expert or hyperfocused individual who’s done a bunch of reading, you still get a humorous pun or joke, and you still get the “well, actually, this is wrong because…” just, now, it’s like 1 of each type instead of a thousand people all trying to crack the same joke in one thread.
Sometimes. I see a lot more monological thinking here because the average Lemmy user skews extensively towards one side. I don’t mind the lack of comments but they don’t seem to crack more nuanced layers that I used to see on Reddit (by the way: not necessarily layers that I agreed with). It could also be a consequence of me getting old and starting to outgrow this category of social media. I don’t know.
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