I want a good community. And by “good” I mean smart, insightful; full of people who make me stop and say “holy fuck, this is brilliant”. I don’t mind if it’s slightly rough or slightly unwelcoming, as long as users are rational enough.

I also want a diversified amount of topics to talk about. Cooking, gardening, games, anime/manga, so goes on. Once in a blue moon I do talk about politics and society, but I’d rather talk about something else, you know?

Control and ownership by the community, not by a corporation or other business entity. Over the nearly 20 years I’ve been a regular on the Internet, I’ve seen too many platforms go from loved community spaces to abysmal ad-centered hellscapes because the powers-that-be decide their asset isn’t generating enough revenue to keep the shareholders, venture capitalists, or other greedy suits in control happy. Digg, Twitter, now Reddit are of course the top contenders in the race to the bottom, but so many other platforms have suffered a similar fate. You see the same shit with YouTube. You even see it with code hosts like GitHub and GitLab. It’s about time we stop using platforms run by people who are just seeking to profit off of owning a platform, because that model is literally doomed to fail, it’s just a matter of time.

good and consistent moderation is important. a lot about what I didn’t like about reddit is that bad actors would creep into otherwise friendly places and be disruptive bullies. subreddit rules and site wide rules against that sort of thing, against hate-speech/racism/lgbtq-phobic remarks were ignored, and the the whole sub would be taken over by nazis because the mods never took action in the beginning to nip it in the bud.

now, a lot of reddit is crawling with really nasty people spewing disinformation, propaganda, and hate speech of every kind, and attempts to even report abuse will get you temp bans for “abuse of the report function”.

Search engine exposure. For technical topics (cars, computers, whatever), information topics (example: such as discussing a TV show, book, music band or film)…

Twitter and Reddit are often pretty good at getting postings and comments onto Google Search results so that you can find past conversations about a specific topic.

Discord is the kind of social media site where I almost never find anyone link specific content or get hits on a search engine.

No bots and no creepy engagement algorithms.

Not in a specific order.

Moderation: No tolerance for the intolerant. I’ve dealt with power mods and been a mod myself (not on reddit, but on forum boards and a large discord) and it’s a shit show, but I’d rather have a heavier hand than allow crap to seep in. When you let something go on long enough, it gets ingrained in the culture and gets harder to get rid of.

Activity: I don’t need endless scrolling of content, but enough posts, or enough posts with interesting comment chains, to last a long bathroom visit when you have a bad stomach, lol.

Learn Something New: Seems like a weird one, but the things I really liked about reddit is getting down deep into the comments and someone has a weirdly specific interest or specialty that teaches me something new. If everyone is alike and thinks the same, the experiences are also too similar to be as interesting. I guess you could call this diversity, but I think people automatically assume you mean racial diversity. More than that, job and hobbies and locations and age diversity. Love seeing the 60+ people on reddit, hearing first hand stories of a time ago is really nice (though sometimes terrifying), and current social media is very younger at the moment. I’m only 31 but it’s getting a little tiring starting to be the oldest one in my social groups just because I’m a ‘content creator’ and the audience that goes with that.

Lots of engagement. One of the things that kills communities is people too shy/afraid to say something, and/or they just read posts and not contribute “content” like comments.

One of the smart things Reddit did was gamify the whole posting/commenting system with karma. Sure, it lead to a lot of really stupid and petty online drama, but it helped build the website where people engaged in it more because folks like seeing numbers go up.

I feel like lemmy needs a similar system, but I am aware that it can and will lead to some low quality posts/comments.

Three things matter to me:

1. Activity: A dead or inactive community is obviously no fun to participate in

2. Moderation: If you want to see how a complete lack of moderation can play out go check out some usenet groups. It can quickly turn into a cesspool. I do have issues with power mods who get a swelled head and start banning people because they disagree about something or other petty stuff like that. But I think making sure the community is friendly and having some enforced ground rules is necessary.

3. Experience: The interface itself matters a lot. It’s why some people love reddit and others love twitter and others love Instagram, etc. I think actually making the community easy to engage with and digest the content and conversations is vital. Tangential but I remember looking for a community to talk about a certain college football team, and it had 3 sites/message boards with active communities. One of those sites had such an awful user interface that while it had a seemingly active and nice community, I never wanted to go back.

If those three things are in good shape I generally have a good time. When one of those aspects become problematic it can ruin the experience.

A modicum of wit and morals would do me nicely.

I’d say like-minded people is #1 and lots of engagement is #2 (with the catch-22 that if there’s a lack of engagement, then it doesn’t provide the opportunity to meet like-minded people).

I think that once the bare minimum of engagement is achieved though, #1 becomes vastly more important.

For example I’d rather have a thread w/ 20 comments and 80% of the comments are meaningful to me, versus a thread w/ 1,000 comments and 20% of the people have responses that I like. Although the 2nd thread has more meaningful comments overall, I have to sift through a lot of noise to get there.

That’s part of the reason I’m optimistic about lemmy and how it has self-selected similiarly-minded people currently.

Building relationships with people, shared experiences and welcomeness.

1. Moderation. Reddit circa 2015 with its cheerful encouragement of bad actors and fear of censorship is the opposite of what i want. I need a community that isnt afraid to drop the hammer on groups that make the site unwelcome. There is no place in a decent community for racists, sexists, homophobes, or transphobes.
2. Activity. I need a reason to access it every day and train my brain to access it and worthwhile, engaging, entertaining, and educational content is what I’m looking for anywhere on the internet.
3. Engagement. I love the feel of web 2.0 style forums and that included a solid bit of engagement in what now would be considered comment threads. Its one of the only places on earth i feel comforable talking so an engaged userbase is ideal.

Variety is important. Beehaw has communities for gardening, programming and gaming - three distinct interests I like to read about all with an active (albeit currently small) userbase. The more variety there is, the more people will engage and the more people engage the bigger the community will become.

Too much of a good thing can be detrimental though and I’m curious if Lemmy will be capable of avoiding the same pitfalls that Reddit had. You go to one of the mainstream cooking subreddits for example, and the sidebar will have thirty other cooking related subreddits, most of which will probably be cross-posts, which dilutes the content. I feel like the federated nature of Lemmy will actually make that worse, but we’ll see.