missingno

I’m here, not planning on leaving any time soon. But I’m also acknowledging that Lemmy can’t fully be everything Reddit was, not without a Reddit-size userbase.

I’m saying that when the problem is a low userbase, responding with “you’re spoiled for even wanting niche hobby spaces, and it’s your fault for not putting in an excessive amount of energy that isn’t even likely to pay off (because the userbase isn’t there)” isn’t productive.

I never said I don’t want to be on Lemmy. But when people talk about the downsides of this platform’s still niche userbase, it isn’t productive to jump in and admonish them for just not trying hard enough to manifest a critical mass of users through sheer willpower.

Okay, now you literally are saying I didn’t try hard enough.

This is not my first account (it’s also not anywhere close to a year old, not sure where you got that idea). I’d tried to start a few communities over on kbin.social, but that’s gone now.

I don’t have the energy to spend several hours a day flooding threads nobody will engage with, just in the hopes that if I keep it up forever eventually one of them might get a reply or two. It’s not that easy, and it’s patronizing to act like that’s such a simple solution I should’ve thought of.

Fighting games and Riichi Mahjong. !fgc@lemmy.world and !mahjong@lemmy.nerdcore.social exist, but are pretty barren. I’d also previously tried to start communities for them on kbin.social, but that’s gone now.

Also arcade-style versus puzzle games, but those are so dead these days that even on Reddit they didn’t have an active sub.

Not overnight, that’s for sure. It’s going to take a long time to ever get that kind of critical mass.

I’ve tried, believe me I’ve tried. Posting a bunch of threads out into the void doesn’t suddenly manifest a like-minded community to reply to and engage with those threads. It won’t truly be viable until there’s a much larger userbase to begin with.

And honestly, it just comes across as patronizing to say the only reason my hobbies don’t have traction here must be because I didn’t try hard enough.

Pardon me for wanting to have a place where I can discuss my hobbies, I guess.

It calls itself federated, but it’s false advertising.

I can’t stop thinking about how in 2016, my conservative grandmother watched the primary debates and told me she actually thought Bernie made a lot of good points.

And then she went on to vote for Donald Trump in November.

This, I think, is the disconnect the DNC keeps failing to recognize.

We just keep nominating milquetoast centrists whose message is little more than “maintain the status quo”, when nobody is happy with the status quo.

But we have to run centrist candidates, they say, or else we’ll lose all the voters in the center!

If that’s how it works, then why is the GOP winning by doing the exact opposite?

In a world where rent keeps going up but wages stay the same, people are scared and frustrated, and they don’t feel like their frustrations are heard.

Along comes a smooth-talking con man who tells them, “I know you’re angry at the world, and I’m going to give you a scapegoat to blame it on. It’s the immigrants’ fault. It’s trans people’s fault. It’s the woke left’s fault. It’s whatever target I tell you to hate next’s fault. And if you elect me, I will stick it to these people in order to Make America Great Again!”

Meanwhile, the best we can do is “Vote for me because everything that other guy said is horrifying.” That’s it. That’s the only real sales pitch we have for Harris. But no matter how terrible the other guy is, it reflects horribly on us that we can’t even talk about our own candidate’s merits at all.

We need to run a candidate who can say, “I too know you’re angry at the world. And I’m here to offer real solutions, not snake oil, and more importantly, not the status quo either.”

The difference between the right and left here is that the right actually likes their guy. And if not even we like our candidates, why should voters?

Alas, we learned nothing in 2016 and I suspect the DNC will continue to learn nothing now.