I’m realizing I hadn’t actually voted on posts or comments in a long time, perhaps years. Between vote fuzzing and massive vote counts, it began to feel pointless to throw an upvote or downvote into the fray. Like how is my downvote supposed to count against over 1000 upvotes?
The smaller community here on Lemmy and the Fediverse makes me feel like I actually want to be involved again. Like I have a reason to want to vote and comment.
Also, for real, being able to see actual vote counts again after so many years of reddit hiding them for whatever bullshit reason, it makes it feel so much more organic and not a bot-crazed shitshow like reddit felt like. The absolutely massive communities combined with so many bots (including ones that would repost highly upvoted comments in the same thread) made reddit feel very controlled, and not like organic community growth was happening. Here, I strongly feel organic community growth.
Also, I don’t see a ton of downvoting going on in general, and when I do, I generally see responsive comments giving a reason for the downvote. Which is great! That’s an engaging community willing to communicate about their reasons for downvoting, which was always basic reddiquette back in the day.
Does anyone else feel like this? Like they feel energized to be part of a community again? After sort of listlessly feeling like they couldn’t make an impact on reddit, so what was the point?
No, I actually feel significantly less connected. I realize that’s because most of the small, niche subreddits had great conversations and in time Lemmy should catch up. But at this point? No. It’s not even close.
Maybe if you spent most of your time on reddit in the large, or default subs you’ll feel less connected, but when it came to the specific subreddits, Lemmy can’t hold a candle to it. Right now.
That’s an accurate assessment. I only had a handful of niche subs I was part of, and I definitely don’t see communities for those things appearing on Lemmy. Even if they did, I’m probably one of the few out of my local city subreddit using Lemmy.
I agree, if you were one of the many who mostly avoided reddit at large and subscribed to a bunch of relatively niche communities, Lemmy can feel a lot different and more striated and separated.