I’ve noticed that there seems to be an emphasis on being extremely serious at all times, as if every single comment is a PhD dissertation being evaluated or something. There’s like this weird, subtle one upmanship about every little thing and a lot of people are very nitpicky and judgmental. It kind of takes the fun out of being on here, TBH. Or am I the only one experiencing this?
I hear you about Mastodon. I want to use it and find “my people” there, but it’s unfortunately just eery quiet, and I don’t see a lot of conversation happening. Most posts just have zero replies, even.
I did get a shockingly nice set of welcomes from people when I used the “first post” hashtags or something. That was cool. It has the potential to be cozy!
It’s weird, because we’re naturally social creatures, so what part of the “culture” drives such a specific lack of engagement, I wonder?
But also the etiquette can be a bit confusing. I’m on a gamedev oriented instance, so they’re like “Hey keep it on topic please.”
…So I guess it’s not a place for my cat pictures or random life musings? And yeah thanks to the modern nature of the Internet, most people take “community” to mean “Networking opportunity to promote (or recruit for) My Thing.”
Even weirder, I notice engagement falling off here on Lemmy but…damnit I got thousands of comments racked up. It’s practically a writing exercise space for me at this point lol. But it feels less personal.