Ask Lemmy

I specifically came here because I was uninterested in the pop culture chat that I was seeing in my socials. I want to talk to more people in less mainstream nerd culture

Hmm.. maybe? But I'm ok with it. All those things in your second paragraph are things I'd never care about anyways.

Anything black/“urban” generally gets heavily downvoted on Lemmy. Haven’t figured out why. With all the other heavy virtue signaling you’d think it would also be pushed.

It’s one of the many things that aggravates me about my experience here. I went back to Reddit after over a year of only spending it here.

It has gotten better though.

Not really. I find that most "pop culture" still gets talked about, it just doesn't get pushed into everyone's face by an algorithm.

If I drift away from my subscribed feed and look at the all feed, it doesn't take long for something or another about pop culture to pop up. And then if I'm interested, I go to the particular community that's talking about it and subscribe. The more I do that, the more interests start to show up in my subscribed feed.

For the most part, these communities all exist, there's just no algorithm saying "hey...you'll probably like this". And so you have to find them yourself.

Ooooh, we do need a Eurovision community if we don't have one already.

Edit: there's one at [email protected]. I'll see you there!

I wonder if there should be a more generic pop-culture discussion thread to get it started. I know I enjoy a few aspects of pop-culture and would like to discuss. If you start it people will join

I’ve been way out of pop culture loop even before I started using Lemmy.

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 [email protected] that is usually pretty quiet but obviously people subscribed to it.

And if you're a swiftie make sure to stop by [email protected]

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.

We did have a Luka to the Lakers over on [email protected]

Just saying.

I’m exclusively on the fediverse, I don’t feel disconnected from pop culture at all. There is a lot of politics and meta discussion, I’ll give you that

I feel it, but to me it's kind of positive.

Like, I can belong to a social group without being bombarded with nonsense that is just noise meant to distract.

It's the same kind of liberation and control I felt when switching to Linux (since you mentioned it) - one decision, and the entirety of Windows drama is no longer relevant to me. I'm part of a much smaller, much more concentrated group of real people, in a sort of blissful silence to which I only admit the information and people I find worth my attention.