Oh, I'm with you, and I don't need or want the endless growth thing. I was on Reddit a long time, and saw the good and bad of the huge user base.
But it's kind of like when you have a favorite neighborhood restaurant: you don't want it to get so successful that it's always crowded and you can't get a table, but you also want it to do well enough that it stays in business. If the Lemmy use base declines too much, there won't be a reason for people to come here and we'll lose our little corner of the Internet.
It's similar to Reddit, but one of the defining features is that it's not owned by a company, or by anyone at all. Anyone can stand up a Lemmy instance and participate as a part of the distributed system. All the instances can interact (federate) with all of the others, or choose not to with specific instances.
Currently there is only a fraction of the user base on Lemmy as on Reddit, so there's less content. There are also a lot fewer bots and trolls, so conversations tend to be more civil.
Because getting started on Lemmy is slightly more complicated than Reddit, more of the user base tends to be technically inclined, and they tend to be more liberal, so you'll find Lemmy is more left leaning generally.
I believe the browsing style defaults to "local," which means only content on your local instance. Change that to "all" and you'll see more. The other selector let's you see different sorting views - if you're new you might start with "top week" or similar to see what has they most upvotes over they last seven days.
Good point. Also worth noting that, since Lemmy isn't owned by a company trying to make a profit, there's no incentive to put up with outrageous jerks who drive up engagement.
Sorry to hear your experience was so bad, but welcome back.
The situation with bots and trolls on Reddit is horrific. Do you remember that time a few years back when Russia disconnected their whole country from the Internet? That day there was a dramatic decrease in assholes and trolls. Like, night and day, it was unmistakeable and widely commented on.
So hopefully Lemmy doesn't catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it's much better.
I knew someone would come back with that. But the goose has a round body. When the heads are chopped off, they come back full size, so we can assume the feet would, too. I think it would be different.
Yeah, it is that. I'm way left leaning, but I actually wish Lemmy was more of a cross section. I'm not sorry to see the total assholes on the far right not here (or not very vocal), but I don't prefer an echo chamber.
Hmm, my original account is on .world, but I started using this alt because it got slow. Maybe I should try browsing new there and seeing if it makes a difference.
As for why it subjectively seems to be declining… maybe you know what you’re gonna see in New, and so you engage less with posts?
I don't think so. For ages (maybe two years) I'll sometimes sit in bed in the morning and browse New until I hit the stuff I saw previously. That used to take me well over an hour - maybe two - but now it takes less than thirty minutes.
Apparently it's a lot of things. Maybe why such a popular pattern.