I’m not interested in talking about people, and for the most part, I’m not interested in talking about events either. I want to talk about ideas—big and small. I’m trying to grow as a person and figure things out about the world. I don’t shy away from controversy, taboo topics, or debate as long as it’s done in good faith. I just feel so damn lost. I really, really struggle to find like-minded people to talk with.
Back in my Reddit days, there were at least a couple of subs where I could sometimes spend days debating the nuances of some niche philosophical topics. Even when discussing recent events, the quality of the discussions, due to the self-selected user base, was often unreasonably reasonable.
Even right now, on my highly curated Lemmy feed, the most interesting discussion on my front page is about how much oil is too much in a car engine. I’m not saying the discussions here are bad per-se, but for a large part they just don’t seem to be for me. Honestly, sometimes I feel rather similar about my friend groups as well. Is this what autism feels like?
I have the exact same frustration. Reddit has been a complete mess for years. Unfortunately, Lemmy is only slightly better, and still seems to be astroturfed and filled with overconfident, unintelligent people who spread misinformation. I shared the link above on one of the /c/reddit lemmy communities and it was heavily astroturfed and then deleted by a mod for a ridiculous reason.
I posted in various other communities about a completely different topic and the only intelligent response I received was a PM.
I’ve blocked close to a hundred “fluff” (low-quality) communities on Lemmy, so my feed is highly curated. But the fluff/low-quality communities vastly outnumber the high-quality ones. One of the problems may simply be that intelligent people are rare, and are not spending their time on sites like Lemmy.
People keep making threads about this, and speculating that Lemmy might be astroturfed by people who don’t want to see it succeed. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a viable solution. You would need extremely competent and active moderators, or we have to wait until AI becomes advanced enough to neutrally and accurately moderate.
This is one reason I opted to move my Reddit communities to a forum instead of Lemmy. The problem with that is small forums don’t show up on search engines. Some forum software teams are joining the fediverse though, so that should help. But not all forums have intelligent people either, so it’s definitely a struggle to find these days.