In the monthly server updates for lemmy.zip/piefed.zip there’s a mantra that’s repeated every month. I think it’s wonderful and can be applied to the Fediverse as a whole.
If you’re new here - WELCOME! I hope you’re enjoying your time here :)
Just one small teeny-tiny request. The greatest gift you can give
the Fediverse(Original: Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip) isn’t money, praise, or interpretive dance (although we would absolutely accept the last one). Its participation.Upvote the things you like. Start a discussion, debate, or ponder about whether water is wet or merely makes things wet. Make new communities if you don’t see one that fits your oddly specific niche obsession.
(We don’t judge. Well, we try not to judge anyway.)The fediverse naturally ebbs and flows, tides of people come and go. But if you’ve found yourself oddly attached to this strange little corner of the internet? Wonderful. Help it breathe. Help it grow. Help it be just a tiny bit weirder in the best possible way.
So if you’ve gone to the effort of clicking Sign Up and proving you’re not a robot (unless you are, in which case hello and welcome to our new AI overlords), then please, I beg of you:
Stick around. Add your voice. It really does make this place better.
Original post by @Demigodrick@lemmy.zip
This is not a personal account, it’s one for a site I’m building. I know many won’t like that as it might come as spammy, corporate or whatever, but I have decided to use Lemmy as a place for discussion -in a related community- and Mastodon as the one for news and updates (together with old good RSS) and I have done it because I believe in a federated web.
I’m tired of walled gardens and billionaire-run feuds -and every web loading endless MBs of scripts from a dozen of third-parties (I mean, sometimes it can be justified, like on very complex sites… but not on a damn text blog, come on!)- or not working with my OS/browser of choice… and I want the Fediverse to keep growing and become not only a viable alternative but -and here I’m just daydreaming, I know- the default.
And to this point this post made me realize that it won’t happen on its own -not the way most people are, anyway- and that we/I need to put more effort on it. I’m culprit of just signing up and… well, waiting. And that won’t work. So thank you from bringing this matter to me, and I’ll try to do my part from now on, if not with this account with a personal one.
There’s like 5 people that are firehoses of content that are keeping lemmy alive.
Probably bots.
I’m not a big fan of those absolute firehoses though. It would be impossible to read as much as they post, and therefore they can’t have much invested or interest in the subjects which is bad for discussion and reminds me of the reasons for disliking AI slop.
I make it a point to post a few articles every day.
Not a firehose, but I’m doing my part.
That would explain all the shitposts and memes. 😛
I’m the dribble of drool from a baby’s mouth every so often.
Well, 4 after FlyingSquid left.
Didn’t even know that. Thank fuck he left
What I’ve learned is that when you emigrate to the UK, you stop posting on lemmy!
He needs to get his Lemmy Loicence. I should have given him mine.
Beehaw thinks I should post less though.
Beehaw still exists? Didn’t they want to leave Lemmy, like 2 years ago?
They have an instance that doesnt federate with Lemmy.world i think. It works well for them. On my instance I see them sometimes since we federate with everyone.
keep going
How come?
They instanced banned me for 3 days for posting frequently outside their jurisdiction.
Kind of weird but suit themselves I guess
Never stop Sunshine
I genuinely worry about Picard Maneuver and Lady Butterfly. What of one of them got hit by a car!?
Picard Maneuver went and came back. I appreciate their work though, they’re one of the pillars.
I worry about Stamets.
I would say it’s more 500 than 5
1,800 comments and counting! One of them might even be valuable to the conversation.
Definitely a better ratio than me, that’s for sure.
uh i guess i’ll post a minecraft build somewhere on lemmy tomorrow if i remember to
Why not do it meow?
I’d like to suggest removing timestamps on all comments, like you could still toggle a button to see the timestamp of a comment if you wanted to, but the timestamp shown on default doesn’t serve any purpose other than tell the users how fresh or how stale the conversation is. When the conversation is say only a few hours old, many users will choose not to engage because we assume the conversation is over and there isn’t any point in engaging further, so we skip altogether and move on. I can tell from my own experience I’ve done this more than a few times, I’m sure others have as well. When you only have a few thousand users across the world, unlike Reddit, we must preserve the freshness of the few conversations we do have so as to increase engagement from all.
This is an interesting idea, or maybe we just need people to be more willing to comment in old posts. Reddit is actively hostile to old posts, but they should work fine in Lemmy/PieFed since we have sort options like Active and New Comments. On old forums people used to continue talking in old posts forever, we could do that here no problem, the software supports it.
You are on PieFed, so you can always use a bit of custom css to make them go away. Pop this snippet into the custom css field of your user settings:
.comment_time { display: none; }On the other side I don’t want to engage in discussions that are over. The Threadiverse is organized in a wayz where new content is favored in your feed. Of course there are discussions that stretch over a couple of days, but after, they die. And I think this is just the way it works, it is not meant to show all posts ever made in an equal way.
With the “active” sort, I regularly get posts on top of my feed that were originally made days or weeks ago, but still have discussions going on in the comments. I dont think thats a negative thing at all.
Right, they are not meant to show posts in equal manner - freshness & hotness do matter in engagement and are indeed shown higher compared to other posts and comments. But still, a few posts from last night might have only a couple of comments, but since it’s already a few hours old, we don’t reply or engage with it. We judge engagement by these timestamps and so removing timestamps will lift engagement on all posts & comments.
I guess this also has to do with user amount in general. The more users are active in the Threadiverse, the more users would engage with these posts.
You cannot fault people for following rule 33.
Can I fault them for following rule 34? …please?
Don’t tell me how to live my life.
Sometimes I debate on making a comment, and sometimes I simply don’t have the energy to complete one. But sometimes, I think, “every comment grows Lemmy a little bit more” and decide, fuck it, I’ll say something. People might like it, people might not like it, but you never know what can grow from such a little spark.
I appreciate Lemmy in this regard. We live in a world with many voices trying to drown out each other for a bit of public attention. It’s enough to make some people think their own thoughts aren’t worthy and to stay silent, discounting their potential contributions. Having a platform that’s low-stakes, where people aren’t chasing internet fame, gives many of us an opportunity to express ourselves for the sake of expressing ourselves. Having this outlet is vital for many of us. I’m glad to be a part of this community, and it is truly a community. I have no idea if anyone recognizes me, but I definitely recognize other frequent commenters. It’s almost like we’re neighbors, not in physical proximity, but with a shared gathering space to meet and share our thoughts.
And I love that.
I’ve been posting more often lately. I’m doing my part, soldier!
I try, mostly through comments and votes.
Comments might actually be the most valuable thing right now, even moreso than posts
I sometimes post questions that get a few answers, but recently those people have been ignoring my follow up questions which is quite annoying, is engagement getting so low that people don’t care to reply anymore?
IDK, I feel like I usually get more replies here than on Reddit
Same. I am too lazy to write full posts. Sometimes I do but i like up/down voting and writing short comments more.
You’re not the boss of me!!!
No, but I am. Your lunch break ended five minutes ago. Get back to memeing. Chop chop!
Curses! Foiled again!
🌽
Reporting for duty
Nice post, and thanks. I usually only comment and vote but have not created posts yet. That is my goal for 2026, to post at least one thing. I’m scared of the potential hateful insults I would get for posting something but I can be a dick sometimes, so I get it.
Start by posting a pic of a pet. You’ll get upvoted and will get over your fear. If people do downvote or complain, just let it roll off and try again.
I never posted nor commented in reddit, here I try to overcome the social anxiety
I fear only one thing. That I will be too bland/boring or what I deem in any way interesting won’t be. Or that it will be and I’d get overwhelmed with amount of comments and wouldn’t be able to reply to even third of them and would come off as a dick or a bot :< That and I am well aware I am not compatible with most of lemmy so yeah.
This is the main resistance I see. I thought I’d be boring in the beginning. I didn’t know much about the subject I began to post about. But from continuing to interact, I learned more about the subject, and I learned what the people I was talking to liked more or liked less.
If you’re just being yourself and talking about things you’re interested in, you’re gonna be fine. People here are pretty chill, so if you’re not spouting outright lies or antagonizing people, there isn’t anything to worry about.
I post a lot and don’t usually get hateful insults, in fact most of what I post gets no comments at all.
The way I find most things I post is literally just that I repost them from my Mastodon feed.
I’ve found that near every post I’ve made only has nice comments. Unless it is political lol, but thats par for the course. I believe in you!
Thanks!
Yeah, unless you’re making a discussion about human rights, or you have the most brain-dead opinion to ever disgrace this earth, people are pretty damn nice here
If you commit to making a post, I commit to being nice to you and not being a jerk.I try not to be like that in general and appreciate people’s willingness to contribute.
All decent advice. Here’s a thought experiment.
Start a discussion, debate, or ponder about [etc]
By the same token it would be bad to stop such a discussion, right? Right.
Make new communities if you don’t see one that fits
Therefore it would be bad to *destroy" such communities, right? Indeed.
Upvote the things you like
So, it would be bad to downvote the things you - personally, subjectively - don’t like - right? It wouldn’t? Why so?
Don’t downvote other people’s good-faith opinions. It’s petty, it’s juvenile, it’s toxic. Even if you don’t see it that way. It’s precisely what will discourage the participation we all want to see.
Because the fediverse is still fairly small, downvotes stick out a lot more. A number of them I think, “How could anybody downvote that?” and just wonder because often they seem to be “I had a shitty day and I particularly don’t like YOU” downvotes.
I often sort a thread by Top, and even the highest voted posts are often +(big number) -1. Because I personally do not downvote without cause, I assume they are sincere, but then it becomes a question of why, and I could never figure it out. Okay, whatever, no biggie.
But recently I had some time on my hands and I am aware of lemvotes.org, so one day I saw this again and decided to just informally start looking up these weird ass loner downvotes. Nothing sustained, just whenever one stuck out to me as being why??? I’d go and look it up. I’ve been doing this for roughly 2-3 months now, no schedule or commitment other than whenever I felt like it, across the board, no attention paid to community or post content (other than anything political pretty much not being worth the trouble, lol).
What I expected was a variety of usernames attached to these single downvotes.
But what I saw was a core handful of users across the board, with the occasional outlier.
Kinda pathetic, honestly.
So you’re saying that (you think the data says) most people here are not blanket-downvoting anything that gives them marginally bad vibes, and that the damage is being done by a busy few? Interesting if true. I too basically never downvote, on the principle that it’s toxic and hostile and just not something that has a polite equivalent in person. I had assumed I was a massive outlier.
