Why is Lemmy not a place for thoughts and observations, rather than just links, questions, and memes? And could it be?
Does it have something to do with the rise of smartphones and no one typing on real keyboards? (Maybe why blogs died.)
Is it a consequence of voting, which blogs didn’t have?
What happens to your thoughts? Do you turn them all in the form of a question? Do you tear them down into a Mastodon one-liner and hope a popular person notices it?
If Lemmy had more of ourselves in this way, maybe it would be a healthier place.
Being idle until the media put out an article on something for us to talk about gives them too much power over us.
There’s an actual_discussion community, which isn’t exactly lively. There’s a casualconversation community, and even that’s all in the form of a question.
I don't know (or, frankly, care much) about the "why", and I like Lemmy the way it is, but if your looking for deeper discussion and longer posts I do recommend Tildes, if you can get an invite: https://tildes.net/
It's not open to the public, so the post volume is quite low, but most responses are well thought out, longer and often thought-provoking. I don't post much there, but enjoy reading it a lot.
I did see tildes when exploring around, and it did seem intriguing, although I didn’t really look down into what was getting posted. I never get invites to anything because I don’t know people. It’s like at times I’ll feel a little interested in lobste.rs but don’t know any of them.
They used to have invite threads on Reddit - that's how I got mine when the API changes were announced. I think it was in Reddit alternatives subreddit? Not sure, haven't been back since. If there's still a thread (and if the subreddit even exists still), asking there might work.