Coming from Reddit, there were multiple car-related subs and they all saw some fairly heavy traffic with lots of posts and comments. Heck, even some of the model-specific ones seem to get more interaction than this sub does. What’s the deal?
I see the anti-car subscriptions getting much more traffic than pro-car subscriptions. It might just be the demographic here is less in to cars and more into city planning.
For sure, though I’ll note I know many people who dislike cars as the dominant form of transportation in a society but are also car enthusiasts from the hobbyist perspective (this would also include me).
Yep, this is me too. I absolutely hate car centric city infrastructure… But am also restoring a classic mini. They’re a cool piece of engineering, just a shit way to transport lots of people
Sounds like me. I love sport cars, but really think that we should use walking, bikes and public transports as as possible.
In my country, Switzerland, it’s clearly possible for people living in the city to have no car. I live on the countryside so it’s not my case, but people rely way too much on cars.
That doesn’t seem very practical. For example, I’ve owned several cars but no one has ever let me plan a city.
How do you get into city planning anyway? I’ve got some sweet plans for a rad city made for motorcycles only.
Well, just being the change you want to see. Being vocal about building less car-dependent cities leads to more people being aware a car isn’t necessarily critical to daily life which leads to people voting for people who share those same ideas. Sure it won’t be tomorrow but as someone who hates driving I’m definitely making an effort to drive as little as possible and voting for that lifestyle.
But to answer op’s question, Lemmy’s population as a whole is probably very techy/urbany and young. Very conducive to living in a major city where it’s possible to live without a car.
Personally I don’t want to ever live in a major city like that. Rural or small town life is where it’s at - I have multiple cars (paid off) and own my own house and land all for an affordable price on a middle class wage. Around these parts, you must have a car or be fit enough to walk long distances carrying stuff.
I’m curious to see how hot of a take this is on here. In my experience online it’s an insane viewpoint to hold apparently.
I think a lot of the “city people” are trapped in their City Life and they don’t realize it, and have probably never known anything else. When you get set up with your whole life in one area, and build your routines around that familiar infrastructure, you probably just think that’s how life is supposed to be.
I’ve spent enough time in several of America’s largest cities to know that it’s a massive pile of bullshit hassles. It’s nice to visit a big city for a few days or a week to see new things, and enjoy the expensive conveniences. But before long it’s enough of that, and I just want to be away from all the people and their bullshit systems and hierarchies and routines. Out here in Freedomland, I have room to breathe and I can do whatever I want.
I mean I think it’s just different strokes for different folks. There’s a reason 9 million people live in NYC and 4 million in LA. I was in the military for a while and being stationed in very rural places were you could buy a mansion for like 200k was just depressing for me. You had to drive 20 mins to get anywhere, nothing “big” was ever happening in town, food options were lacking. I don’t like guns or cars, which seemed like the biggest appeal for people to live out in the sticks. In the city I can walk 2 minutes to the grocery store, 5 mins to 10 different restaurants, 15 mins to downtown for big events. There’s always something happening and I like knowing if I ever feel like randomly going out there’s something random going on. And paradoxically I feel like living in the city you deal with people way less. No one talks to each other, everyone has something to do and we just ignore each other in pursuit of that. In small towns it was always a 10 minute exchange of pleasantries with the waiter before I could order a beer.
I’m glad options exist for everyone, I like to sample the culture of a big city but much prefer to avoid that rat race.
Back home, I could own more than an acre of land, not be told what I can and can’t build on it and pay less than what I bought my house for with .25 acre. I would have to drive an hour and 40 min to get to anything I’m personally interested in if I still lived there though which is why I moved to a city.
Growing up I was on a school bus for 45 min to 1hr each way and my parents drove 40+miles each way to work. Now my kid can walk to school or a park, we have non-white neighbors and it’s a short distance to so many experiences. The opportunities here heavily out weighed having more land but as I get more in to cars, I can’t help but wish we had a double lot for car storage
Same. I love racing, karts, formula1, I’m playing VR racing games and my first pc games were Need for Speed Carbon and Most Wanted. I like the engineering aspect behind them, the pistons, the clutches. I’m watching people fixing their cars on youtube etc.
I never owned a car, never will.
Way too expensive. I’ve taken my bike to work for the past four years. Over 20.000 thousand miles. I’ve only spent £1000. That’s £250 a year for work commute.
Porque no los dos? I have loved cars my whole life, have driven and worked on many different cars and am currently in the market for something 20 years old that’s a little too fast, but I still like my cities walkable and wish driving wasn’t the only option in most places here in the US.
Probably true.
Agreed. I’m a car guy, have been working on them for decades, owned a shop at one point and worked at a racing component manufacturer for a good bit.
Car enthusiasts come in a lot of stripes and a super broad community may not gain as much focus right away as communities around a single topic, such as weird cars, etc. I’m subscribed to a weird car community here and there’s a bunch of cool stuff being posted.
I’d say just keep the faith and keep posting great content and car subs on Lemmy will evolve to a point that attracts plenty of subscribers. I’m personally subscribing to every such community I come across…
You can’t just talk about this weird cars sub without mentioning the name of it for others to join.
Also if you know of a classic car one, post that as well. I searched the communities and I think I found one and it had so few posts on it. This is especially sad coming from Reddit where the classic car sub would get at least a couple of posts a day. Even if they were of some random dude posting a picture or two, that’s still nice to see.
Haven’t linked to another community before so I’ll probably get this wrong, but it’s here:
https://lemmy.world/c/weirdwheels
Hopefully there’s a bot or helpful admin that can reply with the correct way to do this. The link should get you there though.
And don’t be shy! Start a community for classic cars yourself and add some build posts or show coverage! I’ve probably got some content I can toss in there…!
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: !weirdwheels@lemmy.world
Hey hey! There it is. Good bot! Will use this as an example going forward.
Well Lemmy is still mostly populated by left leaning tech enthusiasts and for people like this, cars are just a tool or even something that should be banned at all cost.
Bit harsh your opinion touched a nerve apparently to get downvoted. I think you expressed yourself politely and sincerely and you may also be right. Reddit had years to cultivate subs by and for people who are not terminally online, and those are the people who will be slowest to adopt complicated fediverse tech.
I’m a left leaning tech enthusiast and I’m also a hard-core car guy. I
I don’t really see those two groups being mutually exclusive.
:/ the overlap is minimal. Try to find a republican in the fuckcars community.
Overlap between Republicans and c/fuckcars might be minimal, but overlap between car enthusiasts and c/fuckcars is surprisingly large. It turns out that a bunch of folks who love the machines and the driving and the car culture are, in fact, capable of understanding that those experiences can get diminished when you force a bunch of normies to do it and clog up the roads.
Besides, in my case at least, the fact that I can use my bicycle to get around town means that all my cars can be project cars, instead of having to own something boring and reliable.
If I had more time and money I’d be into it more too. The real problem is reddit is more popular. I remember when something with hit 1k up votes and I was blown away. Now it’s significantly more. Lemmy is kinda like that right now.
i’ll be honest, you’re not wrong. cars are fucking lame. My dad was a mechanic, but over the years I discovered that I REALLY hate cars. Buying a car carries all the thrill and excitement of buying a used refrigerator. I do not understand the appeal or why people fetishize them like they do. they’re too expensive, they make our cities suck, and the people that want the “cool car” are always the worst kind of douchebag. I just don’t get it I guess.
When is buying anything exciting? Most people who are into cars like driving them, not buying them.
Generally the excitement comes from the anticipation of having a thing that you really want. Since I only buy cars out of necessity, and I don’t enjoy driving or owning them, It get’s really hard to look forward to it with anything other than dread. If I didn’t have to drive places occasionally I’d roll that thing into a lake and let the fish make their homes inside.
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Meh, it was a good rant. No worries!
There’s also just fewer people in general here.
We are all busy working on our cars :)
I would quite like a project car sub, This one doesn’t feel very focused. That’s my thought anyway.
EDIT: I just added my 3 project cars, I have literally thousands of pictures of the work, I may try and compile a cross section post of the work I have done on each at some point if people might like that.
I like cars… but what do you want me to post about?
I dont like posting pictures of cars nobody can afford and there aint much point in posting a picture of a toyota aygo…
We have all seen a ferrari or whatever.
Posting upcoming 2024 models?
Honestly I like seeing any random daily driver that is well cared for by its owner. Knowing the goods and bads of that car.
Also cars differ from country to country so it’s nice seeing what others get
Personally I find automotive news to be more interesting than any one specific model. Upcoming releases, especially ones within the realm of possibility for mere mortals, or industry trends and sales figures are just the kind of stuff I get interested in.
I made one post already, i just feel like I’d be spamming if I kept posting with so few other members. Maybe that’s just in my head, because I’m sure i could post some interesting content lol
Nah, prolific not-spam posting of good content would just make me want to follow your account if there is such a thing on Lemmy. Post away!
I’ve posted a similar thought other places, but coming from reddit–where you are as good as anonymous on all but the most niche subs–it’s tough to get back into the mindset of posting to build community. It feels like coming full circle back to the topic-specific forums where you recognized a good 25%-50% of the people commonly posting and you didn’t have to worry about your voice getting drowned out by random chatter and bots.
All that to say, I personally think posting semi-relevant or memey material, just for the sake of spurring conversation and getting to know other members is fine and probably a good thing while things are getting rolling.
Reddit didn’t start with a huge amount of car subreddits, it built over time.
Part of the problem I’m seeing is that people are expecting the new communities here to have an instant following but really things should be posted to a single larger community until it’s big enough to splinter off.
There are magnitudes more users on the “Fuck Cars” community. You guys might wanna watch yourselves. lol
Fuckcars communities are more of a “we hate the societal effects of car dependency” and less of a “we hate cars everywhere”.
Many users there don’t seem to be capable of differentiating those two things.
This was very much the case on Reddit from what I’ve seen.
I love cars, especially the old restored ones, or reading about people tinkering and troubleshooting. But I subscribe to fuckcars because I fucken hate literal vans being used in my city and clogging up the streets designed for less and smaller traffic. Those Chelsea tractors, as they call them in the UK can fuck right off. Fine em, tax em, whatever you need to do, sabotage their tyres, whatever. Fuck em.
I see cars as tools. I’m a fuckcars person because I believe cities should not be built to appease roads and cars. Though I do find old cars cool and fascinating, I just want good people-friendly infrastructure in the world.
Believe it or not, some of us “fuck cars” people are also car enthusiasts.
It’s kind of like how there are a bunch of people who like riding horses, but probably wouldn’t want them to be everybody’s primary mode of transportation.
I am definitely a car fan, I have 0 money to work on cars or build them, and I have almost 0 technical knowledge about them except specific cars. So, with that said I would love to see more but it’s hard for me to contribute.
I currently drive an EV and we all know what car enthusiasts feel about EVs… I personally have grown to be fascinated with em
There’s a lot of internet-style weirdos on the site.
Just wanted to share my enthusiasm about finding out about Super Formula. Currently watching all the races and qualifying of this year and really impressed by the quality of racing and broadcast
Super Formula is great. Check out !indycar@lemmy.world too if you’re not already familiar with it. Lots of great racing series out there that don’t have an over dramaticised netflix series
I’ve always just used car specific forums for car stuff. Though I gotta say the newer my cars get the shittier the forums are. Like damn man you put a K&N filter in it? That’s some CrAzY mods bro
Can always start a flame war about oil that’ll get some clicks
I think Facebook killed forums. With rare exception, they’re all a ghost town. I’m excited about the idea of the fediverse, and the threadiverse specifically, bringing back forums. I think we should work toward that goal.
Though I gotta say the newer my cars get the shittier the forums are.
My theory is that the older a car gets, the percentage of owners who are enthusiasts increases. Some new cars get bought by enthusiasts, but a lot get bought by folks who want something new/fast/high-tech/whatever, but don’t actually care that much and are happy to use it until it’s no longer the new hotness and then get rid of it. In contrast, folks who own old cars (and join forums about them) are doing so because they really like that particular car for whatever reason.
For me, a category as broad as this one is unappealing. I love all sorts of cars but rarely what’s posted in a car such as this. “Air-cooled VWs”, “off-roading” or “vintage and patina” is right up my alley but there’s a bunch that’s not.
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The problem with that is there are even fewer users in those types of groups
But if a broad category as “cars” gets little traffic, I can’t even imagine how dead a sub that’s focused on “pink VW 7 window buses from Wyoming” would get.
