What are your thoughts on the Lemmy ecosystem?
I’ve been trying it out for the last week. I have my own opinions, but I’d like to hear others and see if we have common ideas on what is good/bad/indifferent about the Lemmy ecosystem.
As a ‘front page of the internet’ it has been a pretty great replacement for me as it’s where I go each day to just see what’s going on. However, due to the smaller size you do lose a lot of the activity in more niche communities and the sheer volume of posts/comments compared to Reddit. That’s the biggest downside. Still, you also lose the incessant ads/bad UI/UX decisions and ever accelerating late stage capitalism driven enshittification so that’s a big plus.
Yeah, I love it and actually prefer it to my old reddit experience for general browsing.
What isn’t quite there yet is the ability to like, sit down all day and scroll and post in a community dedicated to my current hyperfixation of the week. Be it guitar maintenance, some indie game, or whatever.
But reddit also didn’t have that when I started using it. Excited to hang here and watch the garden grow
But reddit also didn’t have that when I started using it.
reddit also didn’t have to compete with reddit.
No but it was competing with Digg and Slashdot until Digg screwed the pooch. It’s been a while, but reddit really owes its size and popularity to Digg 2.0 and the fiasco of bad decisions driven by investors.
I’m talking mostly about the vibrant niche communities the comment above mentioned. That all happened well after the Digg and slashdot stuff. Niche communities grew on reddit relatively unchallenged.
Sure, reddit could have a similar meltdown to Digg, but I don’t think it’s a forgone conclusion. Social media has inertia. The bigger a platform is is the harder it is to lose people, because the mass is the feature.
Wasn’t reddit competing with Digg, or whatever else was popular at the time?
I came to reddit from fark, before the digg migration or exodus or whatnot. There was also stumbleupon, and the others are all lost to me.
Some of us old folks remember when it had to compete with Digg.
A far more popular competitor that made some unpopular decisions and lost their user base to reddit.
“can’t scroll all day”
I keep saying that’s a positive thing for other productivity, but sadly, that’s not happening for me. Turns out, I want to sit and bum just as much as I always did before. I’m more likely to actually read articles, but I know meta gets more screen time now. As you said, lemmy doesn’t have those full niche communities. I know, sacrilege to admit around here.
I know, sacrilege to admit around here.
It’s not, but we also try to promote active communities to a wider audience on [email protected]
Is there also something like m.lemmy.world/posts/lemmy.world/c/upcomingcommunities ?
I’m sure this gets repeated on Lemmy all the time, but I feel like the quality of Reddit posts, even in niche communities about guitar maintenance or whatever, has really gone downhill in the past 10 years or so.
This might come off as mean, but I’ve noticed a significant dumbing-down in terms of what people contribute to Reddit communities but also what people expect to be spoon-fed by those communities. And it’s all presented as this sort of democratization of hobbyist knowledge, where it’s every hobbyist’s duty to educate newcomers on all of the absolute basics and persuade them of why they should care about any of it.
Maybe this is just a side effect of Reddit recommending subreddits to non-subscribers and pushing to become a Facebook-type service for “regular” people - after all, that’s how they make the line go up.
I still prefer old-school forums, which tend to be more insular, less accessible, and expect you to arrive with a modicum of understanding or at least RTFM first. To be blunt, I miss the days when the internet was primarily for geeks.
i think thats somewhat of an advantage
However, due to the smaller size you do lose a lot of the activity in more niche communities and the sheer volume of posts/comments compared to Reddit.
That also leads to a lack of diversity of opinions.
Same as reddit when it was new.
I’d actually say Lemmy feels larger over the same timeframe, but that’s just sticking my thumb up in the air sort of measurement.
The problem with growth is that too much, and it ends up trolls and bots making up the majority, and too little growth means it withers on the vines.
With federation (and the ability to defederate), I think the ideal ground can be found. We’ll see though!
Part of the difference I see on Lemmy is that there can be multiples of the same topic area being discussed on different instances with no connection between them and no straightforward method of determining which instance will have the more active discussion.
Active subscriber count should be the more active one, but I agree.
Ideally we’d have native multi a communities right now, so I could see all of my subscribed Linux communities in my Linux multi, all of my subscribed ttrpg in the ttrpg multi, etc.
Definitely an improvement that could be in place. I think letting the user combine the groups to see would be best, because then you can group how you’d like. Having multiple communities with similar topics is no different than reddit, but reddit has multis.
Usually the number of monthly active users for the comment is a good indication
Of course, but you’ve still got to hunt through a dozen instances to find the most active ones.
i think there’s plenty diversity outside of .world
That’s part of the issue. There’s a hundred instances that each have their own version of most of the subs, and none of them can see each other without users having to find and follow each of them, or at least look at them to find the most active 2 or 3.
There’s also a wide and endlessly customizable variety of web/mobile clients, something reddit will apparently never have again.
e: Federation is pretty cool, too.
Once upon a time, there was Then Reddit, and Now Reddit was Then forums. One day, Future Lemmy will be Now Reddit, and Now Reddit will be Now Forums.
Welcome here!
Copy pasting from a recent thread on /r/RedditAlternatives trying to address usual criticism against Lemmy.
Federation is confusing, people want a single website they can go to
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Go to https://lemm.ee/
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Have a look around, see if the content and the formatting is appealing to you, register an account if you want to be able to curate your feed further
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Go to https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.
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Use Voyager as a mobile app: https://www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your “instance”, use “lemm.ee”
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If you want more choices for apps, have a look at https://www.lemmyapps.com/
Email has been working on a federation model for decades. People have to remember if they use Gmail or Outlook, but that’s it. It’s similar here.
Several communities have the same name, it’s confusing, active communities are hard to find
Reddit has a similar issue: you have /r/games as the main gaming community, but there is also /r/Gaming, /r/videogames /r/gamers, etc.
How does someone know what the main community is, whatever the platform? Looking at the number of subscribers and active members.
There was the example of beekeeping: if you search for that topic, the most active one is definitely https://mander.xyz/c/beekeeping with 97 users per month.
The others have barely 1 user: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=beekeeping
To find active communities: https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected]. There are regular threads with active communities on topic such as gardening, movies, board games, anime, science, etc.
Who is going to pay for the server costs?
Here is a link to this question to Lemmy admins: https://lemm.ee/post/41577902
Summary of the answers:
- lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
- a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
- some instances are running on infrastructure that the admins would be anyway, so it’s virtually “free”
Most of the instances costs are paid using donations. They regularly post financial updates such as this one: https://lemm.ee/post/41235568
Obviously there is a sweet stop where you can minimize the cost by having the maximum number of users on a fixed infrastructure cost.
If you want to have a look at the number of monthly active user (the “MAU” column): https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/
Anyway, $ per user is usually meaningless because most of the servers are small enough to be hosted on some random cheap server - adding more users doesn’t cost more because they are still well below server capacity. Only the biggest servers have to worry about $ per user.
I had posted this earlier this week on this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fiuuo5/how_much_does_it_cost_per_user_to_host_a_lemmy/
There is too much political content
You can block entire servers and specific communities.
Instances to block to avoid political content
Communities to block
- https://lemmy.world/c/news
- https://lemmy.world/c/politics
- https://lemmy.world/c/world
- https://lemmy.ml/c/worldnews
- https://lemmy.ml/c/usa
With those blocked, you are avoiding 95% of the political content. There might be a few other communities that pop up, but blocking them is still one click away.
Lemmy is developped by hardcore tankies and I don’t want to use their software
As Lemmy is federated using an open protocol, there are other options to connect to the communities without using Lemmy itself.
The first one is Piefed: https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]
The other one is Mbin: https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]
However, those are stil a bit less mature than Lemmy, so for instance if you want to use mobile apps a lot, Lemmy is a better choice.
On top of that, every Lemmy server is managed by different people. You can see regular criticism of lemmy.ml (the instance managed by the Lemmy devs) on threads such as this: https://lemm.ee/post/33872586 or even dedicated communities like https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected]
That shows that even the Lemmy devs are not protected from criticism.
There isn’t enough people
Lemmy has 46k monthly active users (https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats) (Mbin and Piefed have around 800 each). Active user is someone who voted, posted or commented.
In comparison, Discuit, which was praised during the API shutdown as “easier to use as it’s centralized” has 234 active users: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/KdiI1akq. Not 234k, 234 total.
For obvious reasons, the activity is not going to match Reddit levels, and niche communities aren’t there.
But it’s not an all or nothing situation. Most people on Lemmy still use Reddit for their niche communities, but are also active on Lemmy. And some niche communities are getting more active on lemmy. https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] ([email protected] ) promotes them.
Also, having less people provides better interactions, as your comments are less likely to get buried in thousands of others. And bots on Lemmy are quickly spotted and banned, while Reddit doesn’t seem to do much about that: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1fmcelm/askreddit_is_simply_over_run_with_bots/
Lemmy is developped by hardcore tankies and I don’t want to use their software
I think the main point about this is that, so far, the development has been completely politically neutral and developers have in no way interfered with any instance having other political opinions.
So they have been more neutral than Reddit developers even if they are public about their tankies ideas on their personal publications.
Furthermore, it’s open source, so it could be forked any time if needed, unlike Reddit.I agree with you, that’s just a point I’ve seen raised quite a few times in the past, in a similar way to https://old.lemmy.sdf.org/post/17733
There was an infamous post by feditips against Lemmy, but it seems to have been removed
Because everyone at this point uses Gmail, I prefer to use phone networks as my analogy go to, as usually most people know others with a different carrier
Outlook is still strong, especially for companies using Microsoft, but indeed phone carriers work too.
sweet stop
I think you mean sweet spot. Now I’m wondering if it’s a typo or an eggcorn.
You’re correct
How does someone know what the main community is, whatever the platform? Looking at the number of subscribers and active members.
I don’t disagree but this is also kind of sad. We’re just recreating the same issue on Reddit of “definitive” subreddits controlled by whichever moderators were there first, and once a mass of people settles there, it becomes virtually impossible for smaller alternatives to grow.
You’re also basically just telling people to go to whichever community happens to be on Lemmy.world. Which means centralization on one instance, which is the opposite of how this place was sold.
Edit: Ignore the double comment.
I’m not
[email protected] is more active than [email protected] in monthly active users.
Same for [email protected] and [email protected], which also doesn’t have any moderator besides bot accounts.
[email protected] definitely outclasses any other piracy community
[email protected] is the most active for green text
[email protected] is the best community for maps
About mods power tripping, you can have a look at [email protected] . I reported there an example which shows that you can create a better community over a power tripping mod.
deleted by creator
Why are you actively against lemmy.world?
On Reddit you list several alternative instances, and you somehow left us out.
LW is already the largest community by far, to a point where geographically distant communities cannot stay synchronized
That is a software problem, I thought you guys were all computer experts.
If world wasn’t so big, it would have probably not even been noticed, now it is hopefully getting fixed with the next update, if I understood that right.
Federation works waaay better than when the big reddit influx happened, that was kinda disappointing and I’m glad Lemmy will be prepared better for the next wave.
It’s also a governance problem as well.
If a billionaire buys LW tomorrow for a few millions because they host most of the Lemmy active communities and users, and prevent instance migration overnight, how many users are going to go through the hassle of creating new accounts from scratch, create new communities? That could kill the platform, with the LW starting to show ads and only being compatible with an enshitiffied app, so most users would probably go back to Reddit.
Also, there has been some concerning behaviour from LW mods, which know they can just go with it as people are already on their communities and are not going to move: https://lemmy.world/post/20947890?scrollToComments=true
If a billionaire buys LW tomorrow
lol that is a new one.
concerning behaviour from LW mods
Would you look at that, a mod of a big community for heated discussion said or did something that people took offence to. Surely must be the instance’s fault, would not happen anywhere else.
Fair. I don’t agree with most of your points, but you make a good argument.
I still think we over prioritize decentralization. Federation is important, but’s not a primary feature to be sold to users. It’s not because we need a thousand instances. It’s so that if Gmail gets too enshittified that we have another email option.
World is where the activity is, and you do a reasonable job of balancing that.
World is where the activity is, and you do a reasonable job of balancing that.
It depends.
[email protected] is more active than [email protected] in monthly active users.Same for [email protected] and [email protected], which also doesn’t have any moderator besides bot accounts.
[email protected] is more active than [email protected] in monthly active users.
You are doing a good job there, also with advertising the community, but I’ll say again that the world community looks more healthy to me, it’s a variety of different users posting there, while the ee one consists half of emperors and your effort to try and force this, actually it is only three topics that have been created by non moderators on the first page.
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Short answer is No. It suffers from many of the same issues of echo chamber, bias, and bullying. Just on a somewhat smaller scale due to fewer users. And never forget - Winter is coming. There will be a time in the future the bots will notice lemmee and come for it also.
But I suspect this is all a human thing. We are a contentious bunch at best and down right hateful at worst. We build communities only to poison and kill them in the end.
Platform-wise, it’s already proven that it’s a viable alternative (with some advantages even - the federated nature for one), but content-wise, it has A LOT to catch up (because let’s be honest - in addition to all the bullshit and toxic people, Reddit has tons of useful information and good people still).
I last logged into Reddit in 2022.
There’s a lot of things missing - especially niche communities - but there’s enough people to get into silly debates with and enough memes for me to scroll each day.
Yes for me it’s absolutely a viable alternative. It’s still small and that has pros and cons. The overall quality of discourse is high because it’s a fairly hip crowd that has found Lemmy and joined. Feels more like the early days of the social web, before social media shat the bed. But being small has cons too. Some communities just aren’t here, and a lot of the ones here are small and less active. But there’s absolutely a viable base here that can grow over time. I’m glad that the internet figured this out because we were too dependent on Reddit before - it had totally consumed all concepts of online community and that was okay before the enshittification got into high gear. Lemmy from its inception is structurally designed not to go down that path. So spend time here. Share it. Help it grow. Start a niche sub and feed it.
I was a 15 year Reddit veteran and modded a couple dozen communities over there. I’ve moved over here with no regrets. The only thing that takes me back to Reddit is search results, and that’s getting less and less as more people have abandoned it and deleted comments.
The amount of bots there now is astounding. It’s making me believe in the Dead Internet Theory.
Well, I deleted my r account the day they fucked over the app developers. Been here since, so I guess it’s a decent alternative. Not as much current content and it’s 90% politics on the front page… That can be filtered out though.
The militant Linux missionaries though, they get blocked. They show up in most tech threads and it got old a year ago.
Hello my dear friend. Can I ask you what distro you are running?
WRONG here’s why Arch is the best, and I know because I spent 13 years getting my first install running
No. Reddit has a userbase that allows it to be all things to everyone.
Lemmy has a userbase that allows it to be a pretty good linux disscussion forum.
Once you venture away from technology, its crickets. There’s a community here specifically for the Cleveland Guardians. It’s dead quiet. The Guardians are even in the ALDS right now…granted they’re down 0-2 in the best of 7 series…but the ONLY post since they started the playoffs, is me asking why the community was so dead. That topic has 0 replies despite being posted days ago. On reddit, I wouldn’t have even needed to make that post, because there would be topics on almost every minute thing the Guardians have done right, and wrong, since the playoffs began.
And then I’d get heckled for saying that Ketchup is the hot dog derby champion. Now and forever! But on here? Nothin…
Start posting updates for your team. Even if it’s lonely talking to an empty room. Try to post a couple times a week with news or trivia or… old players new restaurants or whatever they do when they retire. We’re so little here that we can’t afford to lurk. Be the content you want to see.
Or post to the sports community rather than a specific team
Update: WE NEED TO BEAT THE YANKEES!!!
I’m almost completely indifferent to sports, but fuck the Yankees.
Yeah all of my hobbies are ghost towns here. I don’t care about Linux, US politics or Communism so I filtered them out. Now all that’s left is general interest posts and AI generated porn.
My spoon is likewise just too big.
That’s not true! Besides Linux, there’s also ⭐Star Trek:-) ✨
Ah. Yes. I do stand corrected. Lemmy is home to MULTIPLE subject matters that I equally don’t care about.
Ah so then you know what you have to do then.
Become an Arch user btw. 🤪
It seems to be sport dependent, I just opened [email protected] and stumbled upon a 120 comments thread from 5 days ago: https://fanaticus.social/post/4293058
You can probably post about this on [email protected], it seems the most active baseball community.
Yeah, but no, but yeah.
On Lemmy, individual communities aren’t big enough to be communities but the community is big enough to be a community.
So any post that makes it to the front of the entire Fediverse has quite a few familiar faces and feels like old reddit would.
The issue I find with wanting Lemmy to be as big as Reddit is, you’re pining for an era of Reddit that doesn’t exist anymore. You can’t go back to 2011-2020 Reddit. It isn’t there to go back to. Bot posts aren’t just indistinguishable on occasion, they’re upvoted all the same, by other bots.
This is the best you’ve got. Pitch a tent and make the most of it, fam.
Unfortunately the bot problem is coming to Lemmy.
Bots posting content is already a thing here, and then taking up front page space is already a thing.
Lemmy is speed running “How to lose your sense of community”.
Depends on what you mean “effective.”
The structure is very similar, and on the surface, it works about the same way. So in that sense, yes.
The lack of centralization improves on reddit - no authoritarian rule-making, no limitation of content by the laws of a single country, etc. - but also adds flaws. The biggest one is the potential for redundant groups on different servers, but also a concern is the potential for someone taking down their server and leaving the users high and dry. (I don’t know exactly what happens to the content in this case, but that could be another issue.)
Practically speaking though, it is not a meaningful replacement for reddit because it is lacking content. I browse “all”, and get fewer total posts that I saw on reddit on my 20 or so subscribed subreddits alone.
Community is the key. Community is what made reddit, and lemmy doesn’t have a developed community. Yet. We can get there, and then discover what other problems with the platform are.
I feel like the decentralization brings some downsides in the quantity of bad actors, extremist views, and the like.
The open platform certainly has an overwhelming advantage over Reddit in other ways, but there seems to be a higher number of trolls, shitheads, wackos, etc and in some cases entire instances dedicated to them.
While these people get banned on Reddit, Lemmy hasn’t yet solved this moderation issue; user accounts are basically disposable and moderation is super distributed, so it’s easy to abuse.
higher number of trolls, shitheads, wackos, etc
That’s because they’re actual humans and not 95% bots like Reddit.
Defederation is pretty effective
Heres the thing, this is what huamns are. A shithead may be a shithead to one but a golden god to another. A truly open forum will reflect that. Moderation effectively splits different views and both can thrive without interaction with one another (echo chambers). I personally dont mind extremist views because it reminds me they exist and I am of sound mind to ignore them. However, I know not everyone is and I know the dangers of letting extremest views go unchallenged. I doubt technology can help us cover both fronts (open forum of ideas without echo chambers). Education can probably do a lot more. We need to be better humans, accepting of others and critical of ideas instead of people.
80% effective. The porn quality is weak.
I spend a lot of time blocking the lewd communities, it’s not good for my mental health
Also true. The lewd communities are numerous and botty and weak
I personally think it’s a ton better. The platform is a bit less mature, but the people are much nicer and the filtering/blocking is lightyears ahead
And you can say fuck without being auto banned or something. Not a big thing but sometimes it’s nice to not have to sugarcoat everything.
Fuck yeah!
I wanted to ironically say something mean to you, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it :(
I’m autistic, I would’ve thanked you for the compliment
I’m guessing that filtering helps make it nicer, I see way more nasty and extreme shit on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit. I want to like Lemmy, but I can’t recommend it to anyone I know because of how toxic the base experience has been.
May I ask what you filtered out to make it seem like “the people are much nicer” on a day to day basis? Genuine question, not sarcasm.
Same as I did when using reddit. I add a filter almost every time I see something that I feel like doesn’t belong on my feed. Comment sections are also filtered on the app I use.
I can screenshot and dm you my list of filters, if you’d like. I would prefer not posting them publicly
If you could that would help give me a place to start. My worry is how fast the content pool might shrink, can you DM me the worst offenders? The main thing that bugs me is the frequent calls for political violence from people I’m not sure have ever touched grass.
Yez I can, I’ll send you a few. My preemptive apologies for the delay, I have a busy day today
For me, I blocked the political subs and it helped a lot. But idk what content is bothering you. Are you looking at local to lemmy.ca? Idk anything about that instance. Lemmy.world seems pretty chill, it has the reputation of being the most mainstream instance
I typically browse All as Lemmy is pretty small and content feels limited. What surprised me the most was how often I see casual calls for violence and mass murder. Though as you mentioned, blocking political subs would probably help.
Yeah I remember getting in argument with someone who suggested violence/intimidation against everyone who committed the crime of…wait for it… driving a Cybertruck
I can’t fathom the mind of someone that cares that much about how someone else gets around…
We have less people, We have a better signal to noise ratio. So far we seem to have been spared the idiot community rules, like the moderators of r/music telling you that you need to go to tip of my tongue to crowdsource a list of songs with a certain theme, well they only accept a very narrow genre of music. Upvotes and down votes don’t absolutely sink or blow up a post, you can say something relatively controversial here and not have it get buried.
We have some discoverability problems that they’re working on. We’re lacking a lot of niche interests. You’re not going to find a sub here for every trade and game that exists. A significant amount of our traffic is just posts from other places with a minimum amount of discussion.
Upvotes and down votes aren’t magically universal across every node. Some of the smaller fringe nodes can end up with delays and receiving posts.I stopped reading Reddit At the very beginning of the API wars. It’s honestly so much more healthy here.
The strength of many reddit communities is in the people themselves, and unless you’re really into Linux or star trek, the people aren’t really here.
Okay but also… they aren’t there (Reddit) either, anymore. Who knows where they went - possibly nowhere, or switched to lurking (either here or there), or X, or Mastodon, or Bluesky, or just nowhere.
I almost dropped off of social media altogether myself, after making the mistake of replying to a comment in Chapotraphouse and another in lemmygrad.ml. Sometimes silence is significantly better than having to put up with toxicity.
Aka some of us choose the bear
And the rest are tired of moderating against those onslaughts.
As a tool for forming communities, Lemmy’s mechanics work just fine.
But the process of federation - combined with the prickly nature of certain administrators - means you can have a lively and robust community in (hypothetically) the far-left transgender tankie community that pioneered the application. But then that gets abruptly cut off and squelched in a more popular forum by some late adopters who hate their politics more than they enjoy their technical savvy.
Lemmy.world has a bunch of memes and political screeching because that’s the kind of user its admins choose to encourage. Other communities have more practical interests. But they don’t draw the same kind of crowd, so you won’t see them on the front page of this site, particularly if you only browse Local.
Lemmy.world has a bunch of memes and political screeching because that’s the kind of user its admins choose to encourage.
How are the admins encouraging these users specifically? I have not noticed this, but I have been blocking most politics and meme communities for a while.
tldr: they prove in real time that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter
longer: the biggest three reasons to me are:
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they look the other way when their users are clearly using automated means to down vote & brigade leftist viewpoints.
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they block entire instances with viewpoints they disagree with through defederation like a nanny state instead of letting you make the decision for yourself as a adult.
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they ignore comments personally attacking leftists users even though it’s against their own instance’s rules, but are hyper vigilant on known leftist commenters.
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The idea behind federation is great but in practice it’s splintered communities far too much to serve its purpose at a large scale.
They’re an idea that big forums are actually awful and you’re better off in smaller communities.
Mostly, it’s a pain because it can be hard to find some escoteric bit of knowledge or expertise when you don’t have a Reddit sized forum to troll through.
But that’s where spaces like Discord excel. Nice, tight communities of hobbyists and specialists who are routinely online and regularly churning out useful content.
Looking for information on Discord can be quite tedious
Finding the right Discord can be hard. But when you’re in a community where people are pinning things to channels and wiki-ing / linking them out, its a fantastic source for info.
