It’s really tough anymore to post positive content here. It feels like spitting on a fire to put it out.

I’m from the US, but I’ve always tried to include everyone in my posts, at the price of looking ignorant every now and then when I get things wrong, but it’s nice when I’ve had people from across the world remark how they’re pleasantly surprised to see something local to them being covered by a non-local. I’ve learned so much in return from just having brief interactions with users from other countries, just by showing some genuine interest in them, their languages, and their home countries. But outside of my own posts, it’s hard to find a place on Lemmy where there doesn’t seem to be things looking to drive a wedge between us.

I used to be able to jump into random posts, even if it was something I wasn’t very familiar with, to try to get conversations going, but so many news/political posts just feel rigged to get people riled up, and I’ll scroll through and not find anything to interact with a lot now.

Plenty of people tell me that I’m doing something important by doing positive stuff here. I really like the small community we’ve got of people that regularly interact. It’s hard to feel like I’m making any kind of difference though. I’m going to show up as long as people are talking to me, but there’s plenty of times I ask myself why I don’t just devote this time back into music or my volunteer work. I’ve dropped all my news and politics podcasts at this point because I’m sick of hearing it all. I censor myself on discussing animal rights issues because I don’t want to add to the pile of negative stuff to worry about. I’ll keep at it the best I can, but a lot of people here are sure making it an exhausting effort some days.

I get bummed that the political stuff has really taken over. I find myself spending more and more time just working on my own content and answering people’s comments than browsing the other communities. It’s draining scrolling past so much stuff to find the fun bits, but I don’t want to just block it and not see how our platform is developing as a whole.

A lot of communities have rules that posts need to be titled the same as the source article, which, while it prevents editorializing, it also brings all those ragebait headlines here. Plus I’d like to see Lemmy users’ opinions moreso than an article I could just read myself. I’d probably prefer more of the political post to be thoughts/feelings and then discussion is backed up by decent articles rather than an article being the post and comments are just all steered back to a single, often inflammatory article.

If half our content is just reposted mainstream media, why would one expect our comment sections to look any different than the comment sections of those mainstream sites?

OotY seems to have brought in a good number of new users and I’m also seeing some new names in the comments even now that it is over. It feels to have been an even better than average recruitment drive this year.

I did enjoy a bit of the advent calendar thing that tan_eggs had going on. The repetitive nature of OotY or the tan eggs event possibly gets non-regulars to show up more or get involved because it stays in your mind for a few days on end, even if you dont interact with it at first. I wish they had listed what the animals where. There’s no need to really do deep dives like I tend to do, but without saying what animal it was, it wasn’t easy to jump off into learning more, either on the community page or elsewhere.

I didn’t know you did an industrial music community. I saw the other night Lucia did a video for the upcoming KMFDM single and there was a brief appearance of a Burrowing Owl!

I get most of my stuff from Facebook. Since most of you refuse to go there, it really keeps my content fresh 😁

More seriously, since most of my stuff is from non-profits and photographers, it’s still the number one place these people share their stuff since it’s free, easy, and has a built in wide audience.

Other than that, I look for owls in the Google news page once a week, I look up old research papers or read books, I volunteered at a rehab clinic to learn more and get photos and stories, and I go to events and talk with people that work with owls.

I think the most important thing is that I’m genuinely interested in the subject, so even if social media vanished tomorrow, I would’ve stop doing anything I do to source content, I just wouldn’t be posting. I just post because I think you guys will like it and hopefully donate or volunteer yourselves.

This is the main resistance I see. I thought I’d be boring in the beginning. I didn’t know much about the subject I began to post about. But from continuing to interact, I learned more about the subject, and I learned what the people I was talking to liked more or liked less.

If you’re just being yourself and talking about things you’re interested in, you’re gonna be fine. People here are pretty chill, so if you’re not spouting outright lies or antagonizing people, there isn’t anything to worry about.

I don’t know how those people do it. Putting out stuff every day for one community keeps me as busy as I’d want to be.

Summit is peak!

My biggest gripe with the rise in violent talk is that it comes off like those commenters trying to get other people riled up into do that violence for them.

If you feel the justice system has failed and there is no other recourse, than that is one thing. But I keep seeing all these comments saying “why aren’t you out there doing anything about it?” and my first thought is always “well I haven’t seen your face on the news…” As far as I’ve seen it’s still all right wing nutters doing all the violence. If you aren’t out there doing something dangerous, why are you here telling others to go do that thing while you sit at home?

You’d call someone a hypocrite if they were on here every day telling other commenters they should feed the homeless, but you found out they don’t volunteer or donate or whatever. But I got to scroll past a bunch of keyboard warriors on every political or news thread throwing tantrums about why “nobody is doing what must be done.” Justified or not, if people start going after others, it’s going to go badly for both sides. If you won’t put your money where your mouth is, why are we all forced to read it?

If you’re serious, spouting off about it on a public forum is pretty stupid. If you’re not serious, you’re making the rest of us look stupid to anyone checking out this platform. I feel that’s a pretty fair assessment without judging your opinions or anyone else’s. We’re all wrestling internally with where our limits of tolerance are these days, but we can talk with each other productively about it, or we can rant and rave like a bunch of violent cavemen, but I know which one of those environments I’d rather be in.

I’ve been feeling a bit negatively lately. I know I’ve stated a lot of times over the last year that I feel I’m getting less traffic, but it usually stabilized after a week or so. But now I feel the weekends into Monday are super dead for me, and I’m having trouble getting posts to the like-count that I used to, and most importantly, I feel there are less people talking and asking questions in comments.

There are some great users who have been here forever now, and I’m extremely grateful for what they do add to the comments, but I don’t think I’m getting as many questions asked, and I’ve been trying to share more varied content, but it doesn’t move the needle all that much.

I’ve started reducing the amounts of things I share from 5 a day to 3-4 now. The lower interest has me spending time I’d be making posts on other things instead, so I haven’t been preparing as much work or doing any deep dives into things like I was.

I’m still here all the time reading things and responding to the comments I do get, but like the comments on this thread from Captain Patrick, this place hasn’t quite been what it was 2 years ago. So much angry and violent talk. Many obvious cases of people responding from emotion from headlines and not actually reading articles. More infighting in comments. Less debate and dialog, just arguing. There’s still a ton of great content, but it’s being eclipsed by so much negativity.

I still think I am doing something significant here, but I can’t make people happy or to participate. If I look at my upvotes, I still see other old regulars here and upvoting content, but with them being quiet I either feel their interest is waning, or that they aren’t in a good enough mood to just say some little comment on things now and then. I get incentivized by seeing you all have a good time, but if it’s just me and 3 people talking every day, that only takes me so far.

Hah, I figure I do bother some people with my block of posts, but 1) I put all my posts up and breakfast so people have all day to ask me questions and I have all my down time at work to answer them so you get quick replies before you forget you even asked something, and 2) if seeing 3-5 owl photos is a row is that big a deal, congrats on having no real problems! 😜

I really do feel that way I do it is an advantage for anyone who develops a real interest in the content. It works for me in a way that it isn’t a burden to do it every day, and you get my mostly undivided attention to reply to you.

Glad you enjoy all the different owls!

I did join up with the local rehab center this year. After promoting it every day, it didn’t feel right if I did not participate directly myself. Last year I also had another commenter tell me the community got them to join their rehab center, so we’re making a small positive change in the world.

I’ve been learning a lot there and get to see many adorable animals up close. Here is our newest owl patient:

I do look to have made it to your feed now! It deleted my 3 posts that were photos with short blurbs and kept my news article that is mostly text.

We rarely get the meme type posts, but if your setup is looking at anything like text:photo ratio, that could be doing it.

I have most meme communities block myself, so I understand how overtaking they can be to a feed. 😁

I’m interested in what you’re doing because I am interested in news and politics, but it would be nice to get rid of most of the garbage US news and the dupe posts, and let a better variety of news come in. I’ve gone to keyword blocking, but while I have “Trump” blocked, I’d still like to see things from other countries about their responses to his actions., for example.

I was curious what would happen to the ratio of political posts, specifically Trump/Elon, to other communities, but it feels >= the amount as All on lemmy.world.

None of my superb owls look to have made it through, but I didn’t see them removed in the mod log. We’re a pretty large community, so I’d have thought some would have gotten through. I don’t recall if I saw stuff from any of the animal comms.

Actual Source Data (UNODC)

One murder reported in 2008 and one in 2009. None before it after going up to 2018 which is the end of the data. That’s a rare of just under 16 per 100k. I was unable to find any reports of the 2 murders.

I did find a new article about a murder-suicide in 2015 that did not make this data.

Apparently, this was also where the only American execution by guillotine took place!

I had never heard of those places, and I googled St Pierre murder and got nothing.

Maps had it in the border of Newfoundland, but the font did make it look like a separate territory.

Edit: Detective work mostly completed.

Image Source (Reddit)

TIL Canada sends all its murderers to a tiny island off Newfoundland.

I seriously worry about coming off creepy or insincere, or else I would shower you with praise more constantly! Your app has made my experience here so much better, and I’m grateful for the things you’ve added to it, sometimes I’m sure, just for me.

You’ve always been really friendly and helpful and lightning fast fixing any issues, and you obviously put a lot of time and work into developing and maintaining the app, and you don’t ask for money or have ads or anything.

None of the other apps are bad or anything, but I still think yours offers the most and the best for me, and how I don’t see Summit near the top of every best Lemmy app posts is crazy to me.

Fair enough reasons. If you’re doing custom ublock filters and such, you’re likely able to tweak a lot to how you want it without any outside help from an app.

I see in you rother comment to someone you haven’t tried Voyager in a year. I haven’t tried that one recently, but I will say even over the last 6-8 months, so many of these apps have really matured from where they were a year or so ago. Very significantly so IMO. I think Summit is really the sleeper champ of the apps for my use case, and the dev is super helpful and responsive.

To each their own though. I love we have such great variety in UI here. At this point, there should be a couple viable options for near anyone.

I’ve tried almost every Android app for Lemmy, and holy heck, do I love Summit the most. It does everything I need it to and more. It looks great. It’s responsive. And the dev is amazing. They respond to bugs, issues, and feature requests lightning fast. No ads. Not FOSS, which is the only thing I’ve seen anyone gripe about.

Been using it almost exclusively for a year or so now, and I can’t praise it enough.

What is wrong with apps? I get a lot of great features from the one I use that I don’t get with the web client.

• multi-communities
• user tagging
• drafts
• keyword blocking
• themes
• customizeable ui
• etc