I know it is probably a bit delusional, but I am hoping it will prompt a lot of people to question why they are actually using these services and whether they really want carbon copies or something different. All of these services are designed to pull our attention and consume our time, and when you are used to spending hours a day scrolling content it can feel like a loss not having it, but I don’t think it is actually what we want or need.

Services like Twitter and Reddit have trained people to be mostly passive consumers of fairly shallow content. We are constantly looking for fast moving and new content, even though that is not where the valule is. A large portion of users “lurk” instead of participating, and I believe that has largely been trained into us by using platforms where priority is given to “new” content (most of which is actually reposts and repeats of what has been said before) and where big is seen as better.

My belief is that the real value is in deeper discussions that can occur over time, and in smaller groups with engaged users who know each other. I’m not on Lemmy because I hope it will eventually become more like Reddit, I’m here because I hope it won’t.