PlzGivHugs

Is there any communities dedicated to helping Canadians prep? IE, content like guides on getting your PAL, information on firearms, and just general independence and (realistic) prepping advice?

Isolated as in only used by a specific region or culture. So in Weibo's case, only in China with little connection to other countries. Another example would be 2Go, which was quite popular in Africa for years, but unlikely be to be known from anyone outside the region.

Stuff like Weibo are what I was refering to when I was saying more isolated platforms. A lot of regions have their own smaller social media platforms dominated by one or two cultures. As for Instagram and Facebook, those two are largely world-wide but often (again, massive generalization) less ubiquitous compared to social media in the west.

Social media in general (as we think of it) is much more popular in western nations. Thats not to say those outside the west don't use social media, but it tends to be much more dominated by group-chats (IE WhatsApp, Telegram) and by more isolated platforms or sections of platforms. Of the social media platforms we'll be familiar with, it tends to be mostly just the most popular and established ones like Instagram, Facebook, and now Tiktok, rather than something still relatively niche and nerdy like Reddit (nonetheless Lemmy).

All that said, again, this is a massive oversimplification talking broadly about trends. We're talking about thousands of different cultures in entirely different countries and enviroments.

I think this would go a long way to helping. It won't necessary hold users, but will at least keep them from bouncing off of it so violently as this Reddit user did. Imo, its a combination of this with the lack of other content that prevents more significant growth on Lemmy. The rough, often politically focused onboarding, scares people, and then when they go to try and find their favorite communities, they see no activity, leaving the impression that the site is nothing but politics.

At time of writing this comment, CS2 is most active on Steam, Dota is second, and War Thunder is 16th. Even if you write CS2 off for having too many bots, (which is fair,) the other two are still very active and very popular.

Its a rough estimate, yes, but I don't think its an unreasonable one. I mean, one of the biggest Lemmy instances (.ml) is named for a political ideology. Unless you're defederating from all of the biggest instances, politics will make up a majority of the active content available.

Regardless, thats besides the point. The point is the lack of non-politics content. I can't find content for Counter-Strike, or War Thunder, or Dota. Even Minecraft gets almost nothing, and its likely the most played game in the world. I know there is some other niches out there, but I'm using those as examples because they're all massive, multiplayer focused games, with content that lends itself to discussion or sharing, that I regularly have to go back to Reddit for to follow. Lemmy is lucky to get a post a week from all of them combined. If users can't find discussion on things they're interested in, at best they'll end up looking at broad-appeal communities from top or active (like politics) and at worst, they'll just leave.

Edit: I just did a quick check on my instance's active feed. Of the top 20 results, 10 were undeniably political, and two more were debatably so. So for a more tame instance, around 55% of content being politics is a realistic estimate. I also checked Lemmy.ml, since its one of the main instances new users are directed to, and it was 14 political to 6 not, so 70% there.

While I think he's overreacting a bit, I could absolutely see how he'd come away with that opinion. I mostly agree with him, as a broad assessment of Lemmy.

In terms of content, 90% of whats active is politics. That leaves like, 10% of the already small content pool for users who aren't interested in it. At the same time, this lack of content (and lack of users) centralizes content in just a few, broader communities.

In terms of his assessment of users, I could definately see this too - esspecially in the bigger communities he was likely pushed towards (by the lack of content). Lemmy does have an elitism problem, both on the tech side and esspecially on the politics side. Making it even worse, there's a pretty good chance he ended up on .ml or one of the worse tankie instances, or at the very least, was frequently interacting with them due to their size and activity. If he didn't immediately block the tankie instances, I'd be more suprised if he didn't come away with a negative impression.

In terms of mods, it'd depend a lot on which communities he tried to participate in, but again, I could easily see how he'd end up having this experience. Even ignoring the massive presence of totalitarian bootlickers on Lemmy, as I previously said, the lack of content causes things to centralize. In theory, you can split off to your own communities, but in practice, its nearly impossible unless a mod simultaneously pisses off the whole community at once as happened with 196. Even then, the community needs to be quite large to jump-start the competing community. Until Lemmy gets large enough to have multiple communities running in parallel or for new communities to quickly and easily grow, mods will continue to be a potential problem.

All that said, I'm still here. I think, despite its issues, Lemmy has a much stronger foundation. Unfortunately its still missing most of the rest of the structure (or rather, content) needed to compete with other platforms.

The main thing is post more. Lack of content is the main reason people don't use Lemmy more, and the only way to fix this is to share/produce more.

Its a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think even (transparent, community-relevant) bots are a good idea at this point, given that 99% of interests have little to no activity currently. For example, if we had bots that post game update changelogs to their relevant communities, it would at least provide a baseline amount of content and make it easier to discuss for fans of those games.

So you're asking how to encourage them to avoid you? Mostly, as you implied, you don't want to suprise them. When you're in the area, try and stay in the open, and if you can, make a bit of noise like whistling or that. They'll naturally want to stay away where possible.

Honestly, I'm not a big fan of the current previews. In particular, the reflections feel too extreme (esspecially off the grass) and the colour feels a bit off. That said, Mojang has been shifting towards more customizability and if this is included in that, I'm sure modders and artists will do great work with the tech.