So I’ve switched to lemmy since the reddit meltdown started, experienced quite some withdrawal symptoms, occasionally turned back to reddit, more often logged out than logged in. Now I am merely using Lemmy occasionally and by far not as often as I used reddit before. No more doom scrolling.

So far so good.

Today I went on reddit for the first time in like 3 weeks straight (I couldn’t do that for the last years… yeah, I was very addicted in hindsight). I just… I don’t know what it is.

Reddit just isn’t fun anymore.

I turned away after maybe 5 minutes. There were maybe 2-3 repost-worthy pics, one interesting video and a few small niche discussions that all went straight tits up within a few replies.

If I ask a question on lemmy, it usually is a straightforward, honest discussion. Almost no blaming of the posters or answerers misunderstandings or senseless answers. It goes a bit back and forth usually and people tend to thank each other for corrections. I can’t remember when that happened on a reddit discussion. Maybe years back? Anyway, I’m not going back there anymore, not because I hate the CEO, but because reddit is not fun anymore. Lost all interest in it.

Did anyone of you have a similar experience?

    • Not OP but the issue isn’t creating the space, but creating content in that space. Growing a community is a lot of work. Unless you already have some strong engagement and or a few people creating content it’s really just up to you to keep making post until the community gets more traction. Most people like the idea of starting the new community but not the work it requires as it often just feels like yelling into the void.

      • Community building is more about moderation and evangelism than it is about clicking a button. Its a ton of work. People think a lot of the time you just kinda declare a forum and then it happens. I moderated a community of like 5 people for a while and even just THAT was exhausting and time consuming

          • Evangelism wasn’t necessary the right word, but its not a strictly religious word. I wrote it as “recruitment” at first but I hated that more since it made the process of letting people know about your community more mechanical and less personal. I wanted to emphasize letting people know about the community in a relationship building way, and couldnt think of a better word

          • Dunno if you’re being serious or sarcastic but I have in this thread already, it’s literature.cafe for books and writing and lemmyloves.art for more art focused stuff. Both communities have a “411” community that lists communities to federate into other instances. Honestly I am hopeful such a list will become redundant as community navigation improves. We thankfully have a leg on lemmy compared to mastodon as you only need to federate in communities, not users.