I’m wondering: do people just like memes or are they being forced to use them to talk about relevant topics?
Wouldn’t it be better to have more serious threads and less memes that hint at political/news arguments?
by default Lemmy’s home page displays what people are sharing (the ‘All’ option). That’s why my own Lemmy home page only display the content I’m subscribed to (no meme, or barely any)
As for the other part of your question why and how would people be forced to use memes? Memes are very low-effort, it’s to be expected they gather more traction than more demanding type of contents.
Memes are very low-effort
Funny you should say that, I’ve spent like 4-5 hours revising a kinda niche vampires meme for posting soon. But yeah, most memes are a lot lower effort.
As for the other part of your question why and how would people be forced to use memes?
To me lemmy frontpage much resemble reddit frontpage where most likely political and serious discussions are censored resulting in memes being more popular and the only tool people have to bring up certain arguments.
lemmy is not reddit, people simply share what they want to share.
This is why it’s important to learn how to filer content you don’t care to see. Like I told you I barely see any meme, if at all, because my home page is only showing content from communities I’m subscribed to and those are not focusing on memes.
Probably because they’re easy to make, so there’s a lot of traffic there.
I think the real question is “why does the content I see not reflect what I want to see”, and I’d guess that that’s most-likely because you’re browsing “All”, which combines all traffic from all communities on any instances that anyone on your home instance, mander.xyz, subscribes to. This is, for any given person, unlikely to be specifically what they are interested in.
I’d generally suggest finding a list of communities that you are interested in, subscribing to them, and then having your webpage/client/whatever set to show “Subscribed” rather than “All”.
If you want a convenient way to browse a list of communities on all instances (even ones that nobody on your home instance has subscribed to yet — you can be the first one!), I recommend https://lemmyverse.net/ and clicking on “Communities”. If you see one you like, say, !strategy_games@piefed.world, then just search for it on your home instance (like, the text
!strategy_games@piefed.world), and if your home instance doesn’t know about it yet, it’ll tell your home instance about it. Then subscribe to it, and traffic there will show up when you browse “Subscribed”.EDIT: Note that Mbin and PieFed communities are, somewhat-unintuitively, shown in their own lists, probably because the three software packages don’t provide the same pieces of information about communities and lemmyverse.net wants to let you be able to search using all available search criteria, rather than just the least-common-denominator stuff. If you want to search for communities on Mbin or PieFed, select those from the menu in the upper left.
Probably because they’re easy to make, so there’s a lot of traffic there.
It’s easier to create a meme than writing a title?
“why does the content I see not reflect what I want to see”
Lemmy all frontpage is filled with memes and shitpost, it’s a fact you can check for yourself. I’m asking why is it filled with this content, are you saying that this is what most people want to see here?
The only memes I see are from meme communities, and I see a bunch of communities dedicated to thoughtful discussion, because I’m subscribed to them. I never look at the frontpage, I only look at my subscribed communities, and I’m only subbed to a minimal amount of meme communities. If I unsubbed from them, I wouldn’t see memes at all.
Also, the world is fucking dark and shitty. Sometimes people would rather make jokes about it than talk deeply about it because they’re trying to not go crazy and end up suicidal from facing too much darkness. Humor is often used as a release valve for painful subjects. Why not let the people who don’t have it in them to get into lengthy discussions just handle it in whatever way works for them.
The only memes I see are from meme communities
Meme communities predates the frontpage
Look, people have explained it to you several times in here and at this point you’re being purposefully obtuse. Go subscribe to non-meme communities, only look at your subscriptions, and maybe stop bothering people demanding they cater to how you want to communicate. Your life and experiences aren’t a universal experience, let other people be.
It’s easier to create a meme than writing a title?
It’s easier to create a meme than it is many other sorts of content.
I’m asking why is it filled with this content, are you saying that this is what most people want to see here?
The All feed will reflect what people want to post, as it all shows up there (well, all the stuff in communities that at least one user on your home instance subscribes to).
That’s why I’m saying that you’re probably going to be happier whitelisting the content that you are interested in, rather than complaining that people on the Threadiverse as a whole aren’t posting what you want. There are many different takes on what people want to see, so no one person is going to be happy with traffic as an aggregate. There are a bunch of furries here, who are happy with furry content. One of the first threads I ran into when I first joined — Kbin sent people to random posts to try to help them discover new communities — was a post talking about technology issues. Another user there, who also appeared to be a new user sent there randomly by Kbin, was upset that there was so many furries there and complaining about the fact. It was in a community on pawb.social, which is a furry instance. There’s no reasonable way to make the guy who didn’t want to see furry content and the people who do want to see furry content simultaneously happy with any one single collection of content. Gotta produce user-specific feeds for that.
EDIT: There are also some people who prefer to blacklist rather than whitelist. Like, browse All, but then just keep blocking every community that they don’t want to see. I think that this doesn’t scale well — I mean, there are tens of thousands of communities out there. Some people can create shit-tons of communities, and I suspect that sooner or later someone is very probably going to set up an instance that has auto-generated communities for one reason or another. Maybe to mirror RSS feeds somewhere or something, who knows. There’s already one that mirrors Reddit subreddits, lemmit.online. Then it’s going to flood the feeds of the blacklisters. But, well, that’s another way to curate content.
You ask ‘wouldn’t it be better’ if there were less memes
The community, through it’s posting, voting, and reposting, has chosen Memes regardless of whether it’d be better.
A lot of answers in here say “that’s how the fediverse works, people post what they want and engage with what they want, what they don’t want they can unsubscribe or block to curate their own feed, to avoid seeing parts of what the collective is sharing/talking about when using memes”.
What you’re describing requires unilateral control over what content various communities will engage in. It doesn’t matter if that’s what people like, so much as it’s what people continue to choose. If they like it, great. If they don’t, they’ll either curat their feed and not have a clue what you’re talking about regarding memes on the Frontpage, or they aren’t bothered or even like the memes on the Frontpage and aren’t looking to seek out more nuanced discussions and serious threads.
