The fact that you characterise natural ways of engaging in a discussion negatively doesn’t mean it’s not genuine,

It's natural to ask questions. It's natural to point out hypocrisy.

JAQing off and Whataboutism are not those things.

Edit: And frankly, having to explain that in regard to my comment above is precisely what I love not having to constantly do at Lemmy. (Because people both understand the difference, and don't pretend not to.)

it doesn’t mean you’re forced to look at it if it’s available.

The case being made here is that this is a left wing echo chamber, and that I am not interested in genuine discussion if I either don't think it is, or don't care that it is.

I have provided examples of trolling, toxic behavior.

I do not want trolling, toxic behavior here. It is not welcome by me in the community, whether I'm forced to look at it or not.

I'm also not supporting (and nor am I aware of any such thing existing) some kind of a blanket ban on conservatives. They are the folks always telling people to man up, grab themselves by their bootstraps, have the courage of their convictions, etc etc. Guess they need to take some of their own advice if it's a little rough sometimes trying to push authoritarianism and bigotry in some spaces. And if they get banned because they have forgotten how to talk to people who don't already agree with them, I can't find it in me to care.

I will not be shamed into allowing toxicity into my life, on social media or otherwise, in the name of “avoiding an echo chamber.”

Yeah, I am on... two forums. I think the issue is that it's not where the people are any more.

I actually think the problem with voting is that the way it's used to promote threads instead of doing it on a time basis. It's part of a way of engaging with a site which punishes long-running conversations.

The issue with echo chambers is that they reinforce people’s existing beliefs instead of challenging them. That often comes with extreme hostility toward anyone who doesn’t share those beliefs. If the left in the US wants to win elections they need people to vote for them who might have voted right in the past. In order to achieve this, minds needs to be changed, and that doesn't happen in echo chambers. I’m sure you can see the value in a left-leaning person going to a place like Truth Social and, in a calm and respectful way, arguing against the claims they disagree with. Well, in my view, Lemmy could use something similar.

I also don’t think right-wingers are the only ones to blame when it comes to the breakdown of polite discussion. If you put someone who feels just as strongly about the left as people here feel about the right, it’s no surprise it turns into a mudslinging match. It takes two to tango.

The lack of content compared to reddit. If you look at [email protected] for example, there is only one post this week, and 4 posts this month. How is it that, with all the web developers and AI vibe coding shit, no one is actually asking questions?

When I was on reddit, I had to hide posts because there were 10 or 20 interesting questions every day.

slightly niche

Sports is like the most mainstream of interests, and lemmy still doesn't have a critical mass of sports discussion in general, much less specific sports/leagues, specific teams, specific games/matches, or specific players.

So I keep my reddit sports account.

I also keep an account for my local city subreddit, and one for my career field, because Lemmy doesn't have those either.

I think the main problem is that there isn't much besides politics and memes. Most communities that aren't politics seem to devolve into meme communities.

JAQing off and Whataboutism are not those things.

Yeah, but if you go in saying that this is the inevitable result of having conservatives discuss politics here, I am suspicious that your threshold for those terms is waaayy lower than mine.

The person I replied to originally wasn't talking about trolling or toxic behaviour, they were talking about conservative viewpoints (likening them to cannibalism, I might add) so, if you want to chip in that trolling isn't welcome then I'll certainly agree with that, but there's a reason I'm not really talking about that.

Duplicate communities posting the same content over and over again.

Communities are tied to an instance. How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down? There is a slightly mad rush to migrate communities already.

Lemmy should have used usent style naming for communities.

Issues that would be solved by time/gaining more users

• Not nearly enough people to cover all the niche interest communities that Reddit does. At Reddit you find an expert on almost any topic to help you with your problems and you'll find information on pretty much anything. Lemmy isn't there yet.
• Not nearly enough history. A lot of content is still good and informative after many years. Lemmy doesn't have a library of old-but-still-relevant content to search.

Issues independent of user count

• Search sucks. Reddit's search does too, but reddit is easily searchable via Google. Lemmy isn't.
• Onboarding is difficult, because you have to choose an instance, which is hugely important, but a newcomer has no idea what makes/is a good community to join

Issues that get worse with more users (aka, the potentially deal-breaking issues)

• Lemmy scales terribly. Every larger instance needs to retain a copy of pretty much all other content out there, and each comment/like/delete/update/... needs to be propagated to every other major instance out there. Adding more instances thus increases complexity and cost instead of decreasing it. Running a major lemmy instance is already prohibitively expensive now, with just about 50k monthly active users. If Lemmy was to scale to Reddit numbers (1.1 billion monthly active users, roughly 22 000x the number of users), everything would just break down.
• Moderation work scales just as terribly. Not only does an admin need to make sure the communities on their instance are moderated, but they also need to moderate all other communities on all other instances.
• Related to the last point, there's some legal issues as well if an admin doesn't moderate all other instances. Since content is copied from other instances to your instance, illegal content (e.g. illegal pornography, copyrighted works, ...) are also copied to your own server without your active participation. That makes it legally mandatory to moderate all other communities.
• Legal pitfalls in general. If lemmy becomes sizeable enough, all sorts of laws in regards to social media platforms will apply. That's one thing if the social media platform is run by a huge corporation with a legal department, but it's an entirely different story for a tiny group of non-profit idealists running the social media platform.

It’s too difficult to block huge swaths of things you’re not interested in. Like sports, or memes, or music. You block one community and 99 more about the same subject appear in your feed.

Adding some sort of Usenet-style organization or sublemmy tagging might help.

for me, no option to follow posts / comments, mostly to see new comments / replies and create proper aggregation of responses, any opinion dynamics and so on — this makes everything very temporary / short lived

Trying to be a Reddit clone.

Reddit was shit to begin with. It was a dumbed down forum site for people who found sites like Plastic or Kuro5hin too intimidating or complicated(!).

Slashdot-style upvoting would instantly solve a lot of "Reddit"-type problems, because instead of just good/bad, or like/dislike, the reason for the vote is noted, such as "insightful", "funny", etc., and you can then filter and sort comments much easier. Just filtering out "funny" comments saved soooooooo much time.

Another thing: Why don't creators of threads have the option to admin their own threads? It's their thread! It wouldn't be appropriate for discussion threads (for obvious reasons), but for interpersonal posts and questions, it makes perfect sense for the creator to be able to have control over what appears in the thread to keep it on topic and the trolls at bay. It's pretty rare to see a post where someone asks a question that doesn't quickly devolve into an offtopic mess, and the creator is usually attacked for trying to bring it back on topic. This has made Reddit useless for question-answering (and besides, the most upvoted answer is almost always wrong.)

Is the purpose of these forums to enable authentic conversation, or just to farm content regardless of quality (to be sold to AI companies, presumably)?

Reddit is useless for questions. If you're a subject-matter expert in something, find the subreddit for it and prepare to be horrified.

I'm the main poster on [email protected]. Most popular post on the planet.

I guess people on Lemmy just don't like sports.

It’s just as much a left-wing echo chamber as Truth Social is a right-wing one - and that’s a problem in both cases. Some might say it’s fine because we’re on the right side of history and they’re not, or something along those lines - but the people on Truth Social think the exact same thing. No one’s views ever change that way.

Hell even [email protected] (as far as I can tell, the biggest one on the platform) only has like 10k subs, like a dozen posts today, and basically all of the posts were people just advertising music. Zero discussion.

Even for things i would think are big, the communities here are still vanishingly small. I joined reddit in like 2014 and even back then it was more popular than Lemmy is now

Two different instance admins banned me from couple of community without telling me for which post or comment of mine were they banning me for, haven't responded when I asked them why, and because of that I can't see images posted by users from those instances.

Edit: This is what I see

This is exactly why I don't use Reddit on the side. When I run out of content on Lemmy, there's no choice but to do something productive instead. Had to go 100% cold turkey on Reddit to make that work though.

You're misquoting him - that's bad faith. Whether or not you believe him is a separate issue. When you criticize someone for what they said, you should address their actual words - not your interpretation of them.