Without mentioning tech or politics, what would it take for Lemmy to be a joyous place?

Not being able to downvote without responding, and unproductive comments (like pure ad hominems) being removed

If the shitpost community people learned how to meme, it would make me happier.

It’s pretty good as it is. But the advantage with Reddit is that there are more niche communities, and those are the only reason I use big social media like Reddit. I’m subscribed to >50 subreddits and never comment. I have access to good information and expert opinion if I can be assed to look for it. Lemmy is more “stochastic” as in there are less people and less communities on here.

Reddit had r/massivecock. The degenerate community here is suprisingly small.

More active hobby communities.

Everything is political.

I guess the one thing I can think of is mods achieving nirvana and stopping preferential treatment.

Let frustrated people comments happen without banning. Let us be ourselves, be legendary.

it already is

Far more AI generated image posts, AI written blogs, and comments from AI bots.

I kid. I kid!

A joyous place? That’s a tall order. I don’t think I can name any joyous places. Anywhere. Ever.

They probably exist, I just don’t know of any. As a result, I don’t know what would make this place like those unknown places.

I struggle to remember the last time I considered any corner of the Internet to be a “joyous place”. At least pre-2020.

Without discussing food, digestion, or hunger: describe the process of eating a grape.

Copious amounts of drugs? No way to get all these divergent views to come to joy without chemical enforcement.

Gotta have a requirement for people to upload an avatar when they make an account (and make the avatars a little bit bigger). Something about old forums seemed like a little village/community because you don’t have to rely on “nametags” (i.e. reading people’s username), but rather, you just know people by their avatars. I can still vividly remember people’s usernames and avatars from an old forum I’d go on when I was a kid. (yes, I know I don’t have an avatar. I’ll do it eventually lol)

I do think lemmy, at least on my instance and the communities I have subscribed to, seems pretty joyous already. It’s not fake-happy like instagram and it isn’t doomer-posting ragebait like reddit. For years, I felt stuck in a social monoculture I didn’t really feel comfortable inside of. There’s a struggle here and some people put a LOT of effort into their messages to more clearly explain their side. I’ve probably “saved” more messages here than I ever did on reddit just so I can look things up when I get a chance or use for reference later. It’s pretty amazing! It’s the first time I’ve felt hopeful about a social forum in a long time.

[now’s the part where I do the thing you said not to mention]

To make lemmy as a whole joyous instead of individually joyous servers that all despise each other, there must be a solution to the political conflicts between the servers. People who lived in the USSR would reminisce about how kind people were to each other back then and I think that probably would follow the same logic in online communities. To make lemmy truly joyous, we have to have a global revolution for the working class.

Imma go with “not mentioning tech or politics.”

Hexbear.net is pretty joyous most of the time