niche community will work?
I’m interested in your ideas and strategies.
additionally not quite related to the topic.
Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to register on BlueSky, or rather, I managed to, but my account was blocked for suspicious activity a second after registration. Idk why.
cat pictures
Do not force people to do it. It should be based on personal interest.
My wife checks it out about once a year because she likes the idea. Her measuring stick is when you can get a decent feed by subscribing to communities instead of needing to browse by all
Wait for the centralised thing to fuck something up (and they will), then say “hey I’ve been using this to get away from all the bullshit of [service name]”
In the mean time, post & comment. The more content & discussion there is, the more attractive it will be to others. If you’ve got a niche hobby you’re passionate about, get a community going or try to grow an existing one if it already exists.
I comment way more on Lemmy than I was doing on Reddit towards the end, partly because the people here are generally good to chat to, but also because I want this place to keep being good so I can continue to keep using it.
A lot of people are against it because they see it as the first step towards evil, but I still think we should have some sort of recommendation algorithm. New content discovery on Lemmy is way too manual for normies like me.
The sign-up process should be streamlined. It’s really intimidating to have to choose an instance when you don’t even understand what the heck that is. And then there’s the manual account validation. I’m not sure what the solution is but we might want to find one.
And we need to do something about the extremists. They have a right to exist, but the abnormally high prevalence of American-coded communist/anarcho-communist content that just casually talks about executing the rich and the like is weird and intimidating even to me, a decidedly left-wing person. Americans, who are famously doubtful of communism, probably run away from the platform seeing that. And as for non-Americans… Well the proportion of content that’s specifically about American politics is even higher than on Reddit, which is saying something.
First off, political “extremism” is a very flexible term. For some, it’s extremism to support a system that leaves people dying of hunger and treatable diseases while a tiny class becomes rich beyond belief and at the same time funding wars and bombings all over the globe for profits. For others, extremism is wanting to materially overturn the former, and not just on words or the imaginary marketplace of ideas.
You can block the political communities if that’s not your thing, but creating a nice capitalist neoliberal bubble that never challenges any world perceptions is not the goal of most instances here, unlike Reddit.
The sign up process is a small extra difficulty, but it’s also part of the reason why you’re not interacting with bot farms instead of people like you do on any big platform.
The strong presence of communists is very normal, actually, though I don’t know what you mean by “American-coded.” Lemmy was created and is developed by communists, and communists in general are atttracted to FOSS tools and platforms.
Well there’s a focus on American events, American billionaires, and the distinctly American flavour of extreme policing
Depends on the instance. A lot of instances let themselves be overrun by US reddit reposters, filling every community, and they moderate none of it.
At least on lemmy.ml we try to keep US content quarantined to US-specific communities.
The US Empire, in Marxist analysis, is the international dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, supported by its vassals like Canada, Australia, western Europe, Japan, the ROK, etc. As the US Empire decays, world imperialism weakens, and the ability for socialism to rise gains.
I see lots of non-Statesian content too, mostly from the communists. Lemmy.world tends to be Statesian centric, but is far from communist.
