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 think it’s less filtered and can definitely be more abrasive. Partly because like another user said, many ended up here because they are jaded from years of enshittifying platforms. So you have a lot more cynicism, and a lot less filtering.
There is good and bad to that. If you take anything too seriously you can definitely get your feelings hurt by it. And if you want genuine thoughtful and amicable discussion, that’s much easier to find here than some other places.
Some sub communities and some instances have more provocateurs or agenda shills or (the ones that confuse me the most) people who expect you to not interact with them and their comments because you don’t align with their world view (They won’t block you, they just send some weird cryptic passive aggressive nonsense about not talking to them. I don’t really get why they think that’s a good solution.)
There are a lot of VERY informed and intelligent people on here though. I’ve had some great explanations from people on things I didn’t understand and wanted to ask questions to. Along with those great discussions I’d sometimes get some insulting mouth breather chiming in. Ask .ml users an honest question regarding their thoughts or opinions on something and it’s 50/50 on whether they hold a discussion or turn into a dipshit shrieker. I’ve had both lol.
Which communities and instances you are around will have major impacts on your experiences with Lemmy though. You’ll see many users around multiple places and will get a feel for how they are and who they are. Community hop through the lemmyverse and I’m sure you’ll start finding things that work better for you.
Sorry that was waaaay more than I intended on saying when I hit reply. It’s a good place, just has some weird lumps and rough edges.
I haven’t seen this. Seems like a desperate bid for attention/validation? Trying to ‘leave the door open’.
Reminds me of exes who would break up with you and text you a month or two later asking you why you didn’t come back or ‘fight’ for them…
wait do you have any examples of the weird cryptic passive aggressive nonsense about not talking to them?
i haven’t seen anything like that and I’ve been here a while, I’m intrigued.
I dug through the replies I’ve gotten. They’ve either deleted their account/comment or I can’t find it. It was weird though. Iirc it was called something like voluntary no contact but I’m sure I’m getting the name wrong. It was really entitled sounding. Basically boiled down to, “I’m not going to block you but I want you to make effort to remember my user name and not talk to me (or my son) ever again.”
I use the Voyager app and it allows me to tag user names so that I can avoid blocking the borderline cases. I don’t mind people who are having a bad day or are just cranky, or maybe have attitudes I find annoying but not fully disturbing. I will of course block extremist authoritarians and such.
Since it’s a smallish social media community, I don’t really want to block all the discomfort away.
If I know what to expect from someone’s posts, it’s more entertaining than jarring when someone is being abrasive, and it helps me interject if things get out of hand.
I like that Lemmy/piefed is topic oriented, and not nearly as emotional as a microblogging space like mastodon, which is full of personal branding and ego and frequent annoyance at discussion when all someone wanted to do was make a posturing statement without friction or the jostle of other egos.
wow that’s weird! there are a couple prolific posters on here that I very seriously suspect have some flavor of schizo-effective something or other (IANAD etc but the paranoid barely coherent rants are familiar having known a handful of people with it) I wonder if you might have come across one of them
Oh I wouldn’t doubt it. I’ve come across several people that are morbidly fascinating. The screws aren’t just loose, they are missing and bailng wire is being applied.
It’s been a minute since I ran into them I’ll have to see if I can dog through my comment history and find them. They aren’t common in most areas I’m in.