I love interacting with you all very much, and I know there’s a lot of important political issues in the world going on right now. I love my Linux Mint setup, I support Palestine and trans people, and I’ve blazed through all of OG Star Trek, TNG, Voyager, and am now on DS9.
But I also want to discuss Luka to the Lakers and Kendrick calling Drake a pedophile and getting 5 Grammy’s, a tour, and a Superbowl halftime show out of it, you know? I wanna talk about your country’s Eurovision entries. Am I just not in the right communities?
Gonna be honest, pop culture is the thing about Reddit I miss the least. I couldn’t care less what drama some rich people are getting into, unless that drama is their yachts being sunk by killer whales.
The place was truly dead when the front page became indistinguishable from supermarket tabloids.
Even when I was still on Reddit, I needed a friend to explain to me that Funko Pops don’t do anything - you just have them.
So really I think it’s just me.
Hahaha yeah Funko Pop collectors are so weird right hahahaha
-casually hides my Play Arts Kai Sephiroth and Cloud behind a curtain-
Yes and I love it.
DAE died a violent death on reddit years ago. I was there. I remember the backlash.
Let’s not revive it here. This place is special.
‘there is no posts related to my interests’ ‘go to domains specific to your interests!’ domain specific to your interests: last post is a reddit screenshot from 3 months ago, 0 comments
If !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works can do it, your interest can too
You can always create posts in appropriate communities to start conversations on topics you’re interested in. Be the change you wish to see in the world.
I don’t care much for most pop culture stuff and get enough by happenstance from other sources/people.
No. I make my own pop culture.
Go on asklemmy and ask what people think of the situation. Go on casualconversation and talk about your opinions.
OP, this is a pop culture reference. Your lemmy account will now be revoked. 🔫 Hand it over
I am nothing if not a contradiction.
*I’m nothin’ ifn’t a contradiction
I’m: A Contraction
It’s a bit of a mixed bag, and the real thing is that there are other people who want to talk about it here. Trust me, I run a Taylor Swift community here, and it is an uphill battle - but it’s worth it because there are people who care and enjoy the community.
If you’re up for it, choose one or two communities and then nurture them. When reddit imploded 2 years ago we came over and we had a ton of people open hundreds of communities and then abandon them, people just opened them left and right and then expected a large audience the next day. Instead expect it to follow the 90-9-1 rule. Out of a hundred people, 90 of them will lurk and never participate. 9 will comment, and one will post. You will need to be the one to post for a while - but it will grow over time.
Take care of the communities, let them know you’re here to stay, and that it’s a place where you can chat about it. We’re a lot of nerds here, but nerds can also like football, there’s !hiphopheads@sopuli.xyz that is usually pretty quiet but obviously people subscribed to it.
And if you’re a swiftie make sure to stop by !taylorswift@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
Hiphopheads community hosted on my home instance, and I had no idea it even existed. . Lemmy is never living down the poor community discoverability allegations.
Kudos on trying to keep the TS community alive here. I don’t really follow her outside of whatever hits the radio/wider pop culture news, but I remember when I moved to Lemmy your community would hit my front page and I was insanely jealous of everyone kee-keeing together in the comments. Maybe you’re right and I should start shitposting about my hobbies on Lemmy, but dang it’s hard going from a consumer to an active poster in any social media lol.
It really is, but I’ve found that a surprisingly large amount of people like what I like. I also mod !satisfactory@lemmy.world and honestly when I post there it’s mostly just screenshots. People then ask questions and it’s a good time, if news drops or a video drops I’ll just paste a link in there, something to get the discussion going. There’s also some other great members who do similar. That’s really all it takes to get a small community off the ground
I need to redload reddit or some frontend so I can steal interesting links from there to post, one day ill be bored and feel like growing some communities
When you want to, join us on !fedigrow@lemm.ee
I saw you commented several times on this thread, so just want to take the time here and thank you for all that you do to promote Lemmy communities and fedi in general, Blaze! You’re one of the people who’s efforts is what keeps me using Lemmy as my primary form of online engagement.
Thank you for your nice comment!
Lemmy is never living down the poor community discoverability allegations.
Feel free to join !communitypromo@lemmy.ca for regular recommendation threads
I maintain that we need to be funneling engagement into fewer communities. I mod !cad@lemmy.world but I probably shouldn’t. It should probably be co-located with a 3D printing community, but the name makes anybody doing subtractive or 2D feel excluded.
In a perfect world, maybe there’d be a “Makers” community that was, sure, 70% 3D printing, but the other 30% wouldn’t feel like they needed to leave and shout into a void, and people into 3D printing would get to see cool shit done with other tools.
The APIpocalypse resulted in a land grab followed immediately by “Wagons East!” back to Reddit by many of the new mods, leaving us with every named neighborhood we might want, yet feeling Balkanized because you feel like you should respect the communities’ boundaries, but there isn’t anyone there in the “perfect” one and likely won’t be for some time.
and unfortunately no good way to say “This community is closed, we are all over at othercommunity!”
Yeah, and it’s certainly not anything wrong that the users and mods did in creating the communities that did gain traction. Just one of the unique challenges of setting up shop here.
Dedicated comms should be popping off of more general ones like so many Mogwai spores, but things happened differently and it is what it is.
Well, there is: https://lemmy.world/post/24312613
In a perfect world, maybe there’d be a “Makers” community that was, sure, 70% 3D printing, but the other 30% wouldn’t feel like they needed to leave and shout into a void, and people into 3D printing would get to see cool shit done with other tools.
Have you tried reaching out to the mods of !3dprinting@lemmy.world ?
Also, I just created a thread to promote manual hobbies communities on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca , feel free to add yours!
I’ve seen a lot of communities shift instances and change names. At least that seems to work here, so I wouldn’t feel too bad about disrespecting the unmoderated ones.
Obviously the active ones I would stick with
Yeah, it’s just an administrative and “marketing” question. You would never want to harm a community that’s doing well. One just sort of wishes that the reddit refugees (myself included) had been a bit more thoughtful in how the Fediverse world work most efficiently at the size it is.
I like the analogy that it’s a small and slightly isolated town, but one where people are pretty friendly. There’s plenty of people to talk to, but the only issue is, say, if you wanna talk sports you may need to find the couple of folks at the coffee shop who actually like sports and hang out with them whether they’re talking about your favorite team or not. There’s the Linux factory in town, though, and most of us have at least a passing interest in the goings-on there. 🤣
Is there a “pop culture” comm somewhere? Something more specific than like, “usa” and more general than e.g. hiphopheads?
I have a pop music one at !popheads@poptalk.scrubbles.tech but don’t know of a more generic one
Personally I’m longing for more discussion about ideas and less about events and definitely less about people.
Would you be interested in my 4 000 word thinkpiece on how Kamala Harris’ campaign co-opting Charli XCX’s Brat Summer is a perfect encapsulation of the how the neoliberal mechanisms in the United States try to use cultural capital to mask their regressive politics? Trump appearing on Joe Rogan, and George Bush’s “drinking a beer with the little guy” will also make appearances.
subscribe
I hear you. I could go on about how pop culture is lame etc and not really answer your question but I think, the more the merrier. If I’m not interested in the Lakers, I can ignore it and scroll past it. Easy. It would be nice for people who want to discuss the Lakers to have a place to discuss the Lakers, though.
Honestly this place is starting to piss me off a little bit sometimes. Because it’s like the users here actually want ‘All’ to just be politics all the time and for there to be no variety to anything. You can talk about missing features from Reddit and think of ideas to make this place a little better and you’ll get responses like “No. Why would anyone want more features? I know that I don’t have to personally use them if I don’t like them but I prefer pretending it’s 1998, so no one can have them. And why would we want more users? I like empty communities with no activity. And then complaining about empty communities with no activity.”
So I dunno. It’s gonna be interesting to see if this place actually grows or if it just stagnates. I’m right there with you though. I’d be more than happy to see pop and sports and things I’m not really interested in because then there’s a bigger chance of things that I am actually interested in taking off here.
I hear you. I could go on about how pop culture is lame etc and not really answer your question but I think, the more the merrier. If I’m not interested in the Lakers, I can ignore it and scroll past it. Easy. It would be nice for people who want to discuss the Lakers to have a place to discuss the Lakers, though.
Thank you for this! I got a few comments being like “Why would you want to, pop culture is vapid” and like…I know T_T, but that doesn’t make ME vapid. Some people go on COD or whatever to blow off steam after work, I just want to go on my non-corporate social media to discuss how the Lakers traded away their future for AD and somehow STILL CAME OUT ON TOP (I have been praying for their downfall my entire life and it continues to not work).
“Why would you want to, pop culture is vapid”
A lot of these people think they’re better than you for having more s o p h i s t i c a t e d and mature, adult-like interests.
I won’t challenge them directly, I guess, because it’s the entire thread and that would be aggressive, but it is rooted in insecurity.
Honestly this place is starting to piss me off a little bit sometimes.
What you describe is a vocal minority. It’s pretty obvious that most of the users wouldn’t wind getting the place getting at least twice as active.
Not sure if I mentioned it to you, but you are aware of !communitypromo@lemmy.ca ? I’m going to start daily threads there to promote non-political communities
You are a shining light in this place when it comes to promoting growth. So just so we’re clear, because I’ve discussed features and stuff with you a couple of times now, I was not picturing you when I made my comment here. You’re more or less carrying this place on your back as far as guiding and encouraging new users goes. So also thank you, you rock.
And yup. I’ve seen you promoting this community lol and I’m already subscribed!
Thank you for your nice comment!
Politics flood All because that is what most people post and upvote here.
Building a new community requires yelling into the void for a few months and heavy cross promoting to get any traction.
a few months
Depends on the community. We started !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com a few days ago and reached 1000 users.
You can have users, but they need to participate.
For something as mainstream as popculture, it shouldn’t be that much of an issue.
But indeed, I agree with you for a niche topic.
I think this is a problem with the Fediverse in general.
Search Kendrick Lamar on BlueSky and it’s filled with people celebrating it, breaking down different aspects of the show, and making memes. Search the same on Mastodon and you get news articles about the show and the occasional personal post. A majority of the posts have 0 engagement on most of the posts.
There’s indeed only one post on !hiphopheads@sopuli.xyz with 25 votes and 0 comments
I think that’s more mastodon’s flawed search than anything. Cause it’ll only look for the specific term, so if someone don’t use Kendrick’s full name, it’s not gonna show up. Or if you look by tag, you won’t see much anything cause no one tags half their stuff
That definitely hinders discoverability. My feed is basically a depressing mix of climate change and politics.
I’m of multiple minds on it, but the short of it is, I don’t feel out of the pop culture loop, I know I’m out of it being around here.
On one hand I don’t mind that, as I’m frustrated by pop culture essentially being mass market culture. It’s not typically something that arises from people interacting and creating together from shared passions, it’s produced and pushed by big businesses. Nothing novel about this observation or frustration, but it’s a vibe I resonate with.
On the other I know if ever you want people to shift into a popular culture produced in the alternative manner mentioned, you gotta accept the transitional situation of entertaining the mass market culture alongside what you’re trying to cultivate. It’s too jarring for many to switch over entirely, and frankly there’s not enough contemporary non-commercial culture to keep people’s interest to justify any attempts at a complete switch.
So in a way, yeah, but also I’m more bummed that it’s so difficult to create an alternative non-commercial pop culture.
obligatory
'cause capitalism trying to monopolize everybody’s time and make everyone feel they gotta make everything make money
This comment resonated with me a lot. I think I am in the same boat as you, and one of the reasons I am happy to use Lemmy as my primary method of social media/online engagement/whatever is that I am SO SICK of having algorithms pushing what I should like or be discussing. But also, people who are engaged enough to think like this are sometimes a bit too serious and (sorry to use a potentially dated term) I miss the normies a little bit, lol.
So in a way, yeah, but also I’m more bummed that it’s so difficult to create an alternative non-commercial pop culture.
This is so real. Unironically, I miss BBS communities where you had threads/subcategories for whatever niches you had, and then when something big happened it would get pinned to the top and EVERYONE would swarm to it. Discord tries to do that, but it’s remotely not the same.
…should we go back to BBS?
Piefed has Topics, e.g.: https://piefed.social/topic/sports-fitness
They will probably improve that in the future
I’ve been way out of pop culture loop even before I started using Lemmy.
