It seems like any platform that features link aggregation is soon overrun by bots and self-promoters trying to drive traffic, and pages and pages of link posts versus pages and pages of people talking.
Are there any lemmy instances or other defederated networks that focus on Q&A, niche communities, and people conversing, instead?
For hobbies, depends, but there is the general pinned post in !knitting@lemmy.world which list a lot of crafting communities: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/842186
For parenting: !parenting@lemmy.world
Politics, you should be able to find a lot by searching that word into https://lemmyverse.net/
Finance? !finance@lemmy.ml
The thing is that people tend to post links as you can’t really force people to post if they don’t want to (or if they critical mass isn’t there). I’m guilty of that in the !parenting@lemmy.world for instance, as I don’t have kids yet, I can only but post articles.
Maybe the instance I’m on is wonky, because I can’t even find those communities - I just get the “top”/”default” type communities ala reddit: technology, news, etc, which are all linked mass media articles.
You might have to click the link twice, sometimes the first time the community isn’t found because you are the first one on your instance to search for it
One link that works: https://lemmy.radio/c/personalfinance@lemmy.ml
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !personalfinance@lemmy.ml
Now I think my client (Memmy) is wonky too, because it can’t follow any of these links! Will try the web UI.
Did you manage to figure out what the problem is?
The saying is “code is law”. I.e. if the Lemmy software architecture makes it natural to post threads starting with links, then that’s what people will do. Design the software differently and it will be used differently.