Elevator7009

Anger can cause a dopamine response too—I assume this is why it’s so easy to doomscroll on political content even if you yourself aren’t fighting. I specifically went and cut out all the online fighting by only using Subscribed and being very strict about what I subscribe to—not just the obvious “delete if you don’t want to fight” places like Politics, but also many meme communities where a political meme or “haha I’m so depressed” meme will be posted, and then anger-filled analyses of what’s causing the bad politics or depression (which ends up looping back into politics) in the comments. (My first cut was leaving Reddit for Lemmy once I realized they auto-sorted my homepage by Controversial and I couldn’t stop it.)

I also try not to downvote unless someone is just being plain rude and mean to others. I know I’m commenting late here, but wnated you to know you’re not alone and you have one more agree-er.

Real life is picking up, but I did find some time to post enough to keep my communities out of the “no posts in a month” box :)

• One of my only other posters on [email protected] seems to be a bit inactive just looking at the communities we share, but hey, I also wasn’t on that much for a few weeks, so no problem, so long as I come back enough to tend my posts and make some more.
• [email protected] would probably manage without me as there are a few regular posters besides myself, which is really nice.
• Delighted someone else posted on [email protected]. If you check my pinned thread in that community that shows video game suggestion posts from other communities, people have been asking for video game suggestions a decent amount on Lemmy but few of the posts actually make it over to that community.

I certainly hope the comments stay wholesome too. Too many times I have seen posts in communities meant to be uplifting that talk about a bad thing getting stopped or repealed or what have you (fitting), and then the comments being super negative by talking about how the bad thing will just start again, or going super into how the bad thing got passed and in less of an informative tone than a doomer one (unfitting). They might be factually correct so I never downvote that unless positivity is actually in the rules, but it’s still disheartening and counter to what I believe (but the rules don’t say, so I don’t report or downvote) is the purpose of the community, so I end up not participating.

Although I understand “then why not go make your own,” I don’t because I mod several communities already, don’t want to go all Reddit powermod by adding even more (though I do think it would be a bit more forgivable on this newer social media where someone has to start the thing in the first place), and I’ve had less time for Lemmy as life picks up so adding even more Lemmy responsibilities doesn’t seem smart for me.

Also more of a commenter than a poster. Making myself post, but I really feel all my posts are way less high-quality than my comments usually are.

As a gamer who mostly has no idea about the relative popularity of different genres it is interesting to learn this from your comment on Fedigrow.

What do you mean by this?

I do sometimes see a link post on Lemmy (often on some general community like !games) and copy it to (usually more-specific, like gaming genres: think copying from !games to !rpgs) communities I am active in (or sometimes ones I am not but am aware of: if I see a strategy game post I’ll put it in all the relevant strategy game communities I know of), and figure it is alright because I always see a little “cross-posted to:” and the community I got it from, so I figure that is good enough for credit. Probably obvious I got it somewhere else, and easily clickable to find out where. (Or sometimes the little communities are just the communities I myself already posted it to.) Is this a bad assumption and I should stop?

I do it because I want conversation in the specific communities, and for things that could go in more specific communities to not only get talked about in one giant umbrella when the smaller niches already exist on Lemmy. Especially because I think there is a valid reason to not be on !games. Maybe you are not interested in most posts there, just some subgenres, or like me, you are sick of the ragebait-but-also-probably-true-news-so-not-off-topic-and-allowed posts.

I am fine stopping though, less work for me, and as life gets busier I have less time for Lemmy anyways.

I admit I exclude .ml from my crossposting bonanza because of all the political drama I hear about but never bothered to look into, because I feel I’ll end up drawn into a political slapfight. Just look at all the comments here about .ml, whether justified or not (not sure and not about to try to figure out). I do not sub to anything on .ml and mostly look at Subscribed though, so I know I am not taking any of their content and copying it elsewhere, unless it was first copied from .ml to something I do look at. I also don’t really look at the instance someone is commenting from unless I suspect trolling or we interact a lot though, so I am not being nasty to .ml users for just being on .ml, either. I know a lot of people who do not have anything to do with the political drama are there too because it is recommended as the Lemmy dev’s instance, and I do not expect everyone to litmus test every social media for political drama before joining it.

I am insanely guilty of the content dump, figuring it’ll prove a community active, but aside from “awww!” comments on [email protected] where there just is not much to build off of, I also reply to almost every comment I get because I also want to have conversations.