I contribute, quite a lot actually (possibly too much for the tastes of some?:-P no seriously, I do halfway mean that) - but usually as comments rather than posts.

I try to liven up the Fediverse by including graphics, to make scrolling through comments more fun and less just walls of dry text. Though I also add long walls of dry text myself from time to time as well - we gotta have variety!:-)

I tend to not judge well when to actually do a post though. Btw, do you know why I am able to see both up- and down-vote counts from a mobile webpage view, but not from a desktop one? That is so odd…

Anyway, here is one example, where the video literally received critical acclaim (as being in the top 50 videos fighting against misinformation on the internet), yet that community gave it only 7 upvotes and 5 downvotes total. I also crossposted it to a larger community, which gave it 15 upvotes and 9 downvotes. In both cases, the only comments were negative. Mind you, I actually appreciated the feedback - and thanked the people who offered it, even when saying “…title is garbage, and so I have to downvote”, b/c at least it offered an explanation as to why people were downvoting, and I genuinely enjoyed being corrected by them (rather than merely wondering internally what happened).

Similarly I offered some videos from Adam Connover criticizing Trump - I remember he had some cool stuff in the past, like explaining the broken system of tax software in the US, so I don’t know if he’s still considered “good”, but I offered. It got 3 downvotes… and zero upvotes (beyond my own added by the Lemmy software by default, so one total).

I offered another video on viruses, which got 7 upvotes and 4 downvotes. Oopsie someone else had just posted it like an hour before me, but that does not explain the poor reception b/c theirs received the same treatment.

I offered another one that I saw on imgur which I thought was REALLY cool, someone offering an explanation on indigenous peoples’ belief structures surrounding dancing, it was short (<1 minute), and had nice calming music in the background. Though I was not sure how to link to it directly, so people would have to scroll down past 4 other images/videos to find it using the link. It got 5 upvotes and 2 downvotes.

Mind you, there is no point in me “complaining” (whinging) here - that’s not what this is about. When someone continually offers what is not desired to be received, words like “insensitive” or even “stalker” come to mind. Sorting the posts to those communities by popularity, most seem to relate to Technology especially Linux. While in contrast, Adam Connover seems to not be popular.:-) In fact, if I sort by Controversial, most of my absolute favorite content appears there, having been HEAVILY down-voted - e.g. Innuendo Studios’ Alt-Right Playbook.

From this I can conclude that there are some slight technical barriers to posting - and to assessing after-the-fact how posts are received - but mainly people need to offer posts that MATCH what the community desires. And some, like [email protected], barely get any posts (that one ~1 per day, the vast majority of the time from a single poster, [email protected]), but that can be okay b/c a small, niche community is not necessarily “bad”… HOWEVER, small communities are SIGNIFICANTLY harder to find. You personally have been doing heroic efforts to both get the word out about those, and create them in the first place, and guide people to where they are. But there are limitations in the software that are difficult to get around.

Like… what is this “eye” icon that I see in 0.19.5? Was it there in 0.19.3? When I click it, it doesn’t seem to do anything? Except on a desktop it takes me to the top of the page, thus hindering (slightly) my efforts to figure it out. I do recall somewhere an announcement that Lemmy would offer an option to only show posts that I haven’t seen before - but if that is what this is supposed to do, then it is buggy as hell b/c it definitely shows things (either way) that I have visited before, not only by expanding the image but the title is literally greyed out so the browser knows that I’ve seen it, it’s just Lemmy that seems to not know. And as we both know, documentation for how to use Lemmy - especially the web UI rather than an app - is virtually nonexistent, despite both of our efforts asking various instance admins to put e.g. [email protected] into the right-hand sidebar or mention it in the welcoming posts for an instance meta/admin community. Btw this eye icon thing would be a fantastic post to put into [email protected], except I for one have no clue what this feature is even about, and anyway the right-hand bar says that there’s only 2 visitors per week (which I suspect are both me, from here + from my alt on startrek.website).

This is long, but I did not want you think that I was ignoring you. “Just post” is far too simple a solution - there are reason why I, and by extension others (though surely for other reasons - well, some are likely shared in common while others are likely to be distinct) do not do it more often than we do currently. Most notably: it is simply not fun, if people do not wish to hear what we have to say. Though I tend to do better in comments - often I am literally the only person to have offered a comment at all, or perhaps one of like 3-5, and I am glad to (try to) help make the Fediverse a moar welcoming place for people to post to!:-)