Big Tech designed their platforms to keep you trapped.
YouTube, X, Instagram, and TikTok aren't neutral spaces. They're businesses built on capturing your attention and data. Their algorithms, notification systems, and content policies all serve one purpose: keeping you engaged on their terms. And their terms alone. There's no freedom
Niche communities are awesome ! Sadly reddit is still the king in this aspect.
Maybe in a few years lemmy will reach that level or even surpass it… One can dream.
Another thing is google results. When I want a recommendation for anything I will add “Reddit” to my query. This is because I know it will return great recommendations and conversations that help me decide. Hopefully I will eventually be able to just use Lemmy for this.
In case you didn’t know, You can get lemmy posts by adding the following to a search query -
site:lemmy.worldYou can replace with the lemmy instance url of your choosing (or any url for that matter).
It is interesting that forums had less people but felt very active and didn’t need the millions of people that places like modern day social media do.
And I think big part of it is the presentation of material with threads that get bumped up when people comment and can keep going on for years.
In reddit type social media a thread is considered dead after like a day or less, so needing a new one even if it is the same topic to start up conversation again. Even more the case for one off comment type social media like mastodon.
Oh yeah forums are pretty cool. It’s like a massive treasure chest you can sort through. I still enjoy using a few forums like Gamerfaqs and XDA developers.
I used to spend tons of time on forums 20 or so years ago. Social media killed many of those off, but there’s no reason that something else can’t do the same thing - be it Lemmy communities or something else.