Its really astounding how many completely empty communities there are. Communities that have always been empty. As soon as an instance opens up some people just start shotgunning tons of communities at once with no intention of actually using them. I do wish more instances would delete them somehow so they dont make parts of the fediverse look like ghostlands.

Politics. Some of us are stuck with the chaos and destruction of US politics, and the rest of lemmy is probably tired of hearing about it.

Every day brings a new disaster for us science, technology, environment, education, quality of life, freedom, new abuses of human rights and constitutional authority, new violations of leadership holding themselves above the law. Outrage of racism and classism, stoked divisiveness. It’s certainly exhausting and horrifying but it’s also my future, my kids future.

We try to rein it in but it affects our everyday lives, so it leaks online. I understand wanting to avoid it. I wish I could

That’s sort of what /all is. Unless you mean something like having a /lemmy community that discusses lemmy meta in general. Reddit actually had no communities / subreddits when it first started. That eventually turned into the /reddit subreddit as one of the many meta communties, which was then eventually set to read only, if memory serves.

I think this style platform has better engagement when a community has focus and direction, which is why you see smaller communities stay active and on topic here.

I don’t think there’s anything stopping anyone from undertaking the task of starting a general topic community, but on the same token, you need some direction and focus, otherwise it’s probably going to be a challenging mess, both in terms of content and engagement. This is where reddit subreddits, and ergo, lemmy communities, originally came from. Prior to subreddits, it was just one big posting board like /all, which eventually led to issues like spillage and brigading and private communities.

We all hate each other.

youre not wrong. the signal has been lost on lemmy largely because ex-redditors flooded the fediverse with empty communities. soo many empty communities.

‘subreddits’/communities/magazines/groups should be created out of necessity to extract a specific signal (‘sub:toy building’) from a general-purpose feed (sub:‘general’)

then theres the whole distributed nature of the network issue which makes ‘auto subscription to general content’… interesting.

Browse by All (hot or new, your choice), filter out what you don’t want. Can’t do that on reddit anymore.

It’s a fundamental problem with the fediverse, it’s funny that one of the fediverses biggest features ‘decentralisation’ works against it

Someone had a similar question before about how the place was getting smaller and I actually posted about it somewhere but the original post has been deleted so here’s a repost of my post in response to someone:

You’re 100% right to be concerned and to be honest I have doubts lemmy will ever crack more than a few million users, the same thing happened with Mastodon, something that relies so heavily on volunteers running the infra almost inevitably results in burnout because the fediverse works on a disincentive basis:

Basically the more popular a server is, the more funding it requires, the more admins it requires, the more work it requires, and all of this is on a slim margins or more likely requiring on people to donate time/money/effort ‘for free’ is a huge ask.

The supply of people sitting around doing nothing all day who care enough to dedicate their time/effort/money to running a social network… for free… is a very small group, almost as small as the amount of people who are willing to donate every month to a social network.

You can find mods of communities are usually fans of the communities they mod, it’s a topic they enjoy and so the incentive for them to invest their time is to keep their community clean and great. But running a social network which has hard costs not just time is a whole other thing

This is opposed to a regular website or social media network, where as it gets bigger, it makes more money through ads/subscriptions, the incentive is to get bigger to make more money

And then they can simply pay people to do the shit no one wants to.

The reality for me is that the money has to come from somewhere, you can do a paywall like newspapers do or beg for donations every page visit like the guardian/wikipedia do, or the usual suspect allow advertising, but the money has to come from somewhere.

Thus the fediverse has a disincentive to growing larger, it is simply easier and more sustainable to remain small

So sadly we’ll just have to enjoy our fragmented, over-moderated, over-dramatised, sometimes slow, sometimes down, sometimes goes out of money, sometimes the server owners just burn out, little spot until something better is invented

I’m pretty sure our melting pot community is either /c/memes or /c/shitposting

Tbh, it feels too me like that is either Lemmy Shitpost or 196. Plus scrolling the front page rather than subscribed

It does? !justpost@lemmy.world and !general@lemmy.world are exactly what you describe. I’m subbed to both, although obviously not everyone is (we can’t force people to read things they don’t want to).

Not sure the point. There’s already big communities that are fairly active that are more targeted. If I felt like looking at memes, why would I go to a general community instead of a meme community. Or if I wanted news or politics, why wouldn’t I go to one of the large news or politics communities over a general one? Megas within specific communities seem like something that’s only used by a few communities that could be used elsewhere (with the drawback of how /all handles them if you don’t sort by new comments or go directly to the comm).

/all already includes content from all communities, so something posted to c/general is just as likely to be missed my me as stuff posted to a new niche comm. But that latter gives me to option to sub, so I’m more likely to see any future content posted over the next several years. And I might even get motivated to add a post or two, which a post in a general comm would never achieve.

Uh, I think it’s the exact other way around. In practice most of the activity already is centralized in more general “melting pot” communities and the lack of engagement is the reason why the content is not distributed across the more specific communities.

Why is this situation not intentionally desirable (on paper)? Well, it kinda misses the whole point of the federation. Lemmy, despite decentralization, is currently more dependent on a few of its communities than the evil corpo social media. Then again, this just proves that technical centralization has always been a lesser issue with the traditional social media services and that activity is where activity is.

I still don’t like the idea of one big general community. I’m certain that a lot of the people here don’t want content just for the sake of content. Being forced to manually filter out most of the content would be a hot mess. On top of that, while activity might increase slightly in quantity, the quality would become even more superficial and shallow. For me personally, it’d be a reason to stop using Lemmy.

I know reddit used to have a “general” reddit.com page at the beginning, but here it is more like world shitpost where people put whatever.

You may or not have seen recent cross-instance dramas, but that is part of the reason why I think it is better to have a fragmented and decentralized set of instances instead of one melting pot, so that it’s not one set of admins calling the shots on behalf of all of Lemmy.

For some reason, every admin of every instance feels the need to have the same communities like everyone else.

My #1 guess is that it just wasn’t thought out terribly well. It looks a lot like it was meant to be “Reddit, but with federation”. With that mindset, just having each instance be its own minireddit with its own equivalent of subreddits is pretty intuitive, but it turns out to be really clunky once it’s working. (Hard to find communities and content, dozen different but identically named communities, weird federation behavior)

This being said, nothing’s stopping people from making general/chat/hangout communities, it just takes a lot of work to make a place active and discoverable enough, especially since activity is generally low across the board anyway.