28
Weekly thread - how is everyone doing with their communities?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
28 points (96.7% liked)
Fedigrow
844 readers
3 users here now
To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
- https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federate your Lemmy community to a lot of instances
- https://federation.quokk.au/ to federate your Piefed community to a lot of instances
- !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com to organize overall fediverse growth
- !reddit@lemmy.world to keep tabs on where new users might come from :)
- !newcommunities@lemmy.world
- !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
- https://lemvotes.org/
Megathreads:
- How (and when) to consolidate communities? (A guide)
- Where to request inactive or unmoderated communities? (A list)
Rules:
- Be respectful
- No bigotry
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I second your manifesto. It's always been a mystery to me that so many people seem to enjoy wallowing in misery and anger and negativity and helplessness. It really seems to be the essence of much of social media. I'm guessing it's something to do with catharsis, and release of frustration. But there must also be a certain personality type that is attracted to social media - and apparently we're the odd ones out. Just downvoting is a mystery to me TBH (I see it as pure toxicity and obviously antithetical to civilized discussion) and I know from bitter experience that quite few people here agree with me on this. But there are a few who do and I take heart from that.
It can't ever be that bad as long as there is no advertising. That's my positive spin.
I get the need to vent. There is a lot to be bad about these days. But it just feels like it takes over everything.
I only downvote on stuff where people are outright mean or lying. If it's something where I think people should just ignore it, I move on, but if someone is hateful or talking stuff that is knowingly false or dangerous and I feel others should know to ignore whatever they're saying, that's worth downvoting.
It is nice having a place that isn't commercial in any way. That is one thing we still got.
There are still a lot of positives here, don't get me wrong, but the early adopter phase feels over and some of the shine has worn off.
Yeah, we are not in growth phase, but maintenance. Finding fulfillment from the actual relationships and engagement we have is important.
The dopamine hits of growth phase Lemmy are very much feast or famine, but can't be the only reason we are here.
And I just feel like Lemmy is actually bleeding off users. People have become too extreme. It's keeping people from joining, and making others like AdmiralPatrick @ptz@dubvee.org leave.
I don't have any stats, but it def seems that way to me. Every real life friend I tried to turn on to Lemmy, tried it and very quickly nope-d right out. All of them think it's more toxic that Reddit. I agree with them too.
Yeah, that is why I stopped posting to every community - it mostly didn't start any conversations.
I'm just posting basically personal journals now that I can reference later to find something, or to send to friends on a subject i care about.
I do really highly value the good conversations and I have here, but they are fairly rare. Maybe 500 bad encounters for 1 great encounter.
Lemmy extremism (in any direction) is quite a challenge, the negativity users meet is a great way to drive people away. We need small niche safe spaces for common interest groups to grow and talk, mini-forums. The current everyone drives-by all and basically puts every post up to a popular referendum hasn't worked.
I said a unpopular thing on a YPTB post awhile back, but I'm sticking with it - People are communal, and they define their communities by a shared interest (belief, experience, geography, etc), but that is just a nice way of saying that communities need a way to EXCLUDE people without that shared interest (two sides of the same coin). Basically we need highly curated opinionated chambers to grow thriving communities where people like to come back as their home base.
Anger can cause a dopamine response too—I assume this is why it's so easy to doomscroll on political content even if you yourself aren't fighting. I specifically went and cut out all the online fighting by only using Subscribed and being very strict about what I subscribe to—not just the obvious "delete if you don't want to fight" places like Politics, but also many meme communities where a political meme or "haha I'm so depressed" meme will be posted, and then anger-filled analyses of what's causing the bad politics or depression (which ends up looping back into politics) in the comments. (My first cut was leaving Reddit for Lemmy once I realized they auto-sorted my homepage by Controversial and I couldn't stop it.)
I also try not to downvote unless someone is just being plain rude and mean to others. I know I'm commenting late here, but wnated you to know you're not alone and you have one more agree-er.
Some excellent points here. Needless to say, I totally agree.
Nicely put.