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?

  • brandon@lemmy.zipEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    There’s definitely a sweet spot in terms of size for online communities. When I think about the subreddits I enjoyed engaging with the most, they were usually on the small-medium end of the spectrum.

    I feel more engaged with the fediverse because the communities all feel a lot smaller right now. Even when/if things get bigger, it’ll be possible to run smaller communities that can coexist within the same larger system. It’s a pretty novel idea, especially with how (relatively) simple it is to implement.