My experience with the Fediverse has only been through Mastodon, through which I struggled to find a community I really gelled with. Either it was supper overwhelming with meme posts or NSFW, or it was too chill to the point of nothing. Or, it was hyperfocused like FOSS/Linux and became uninteresting after awhile. May try again, but I think I will explore the other fedisites like Plemora or Calckey to see if I like it better.
I love the pace of a forum. I grew up primarily with GameFAQS and some lucid dreaming forum, and honestly it was very formative in teaching me how to write and use critical thinking skills, as well as how to respond to a variety of temperaments. I stopped participating in online forums awhile ago, and while I loved Reddit as a resource, I never felt inspired to participate. In the same way, there are an incredible number of forums dedicated to a certain topic, and are extremely valuable, it would be annoying to make an account for all the things I am interested in.
I like what lemmy is becoming. Glad to find system that makes interacting with people enjoyable.
Yeah same here, Reddit is my mindless scrolling app of choice, not Twitter, so when I tried to use Mastodon I just kinda stood there not knowing what to do
I love being able to read and immerse myself is specific communities and whatnot, and specifically I love Reddit for the discourse, people posting in a community, replying to posts, and replaying to those replies, and so on
So Lemmy has just become my jam, so happy that Reddit has an open source federated alternative now, even if they reverse their API debacle I'm still gonna keep using this app
I never understood why people were so into Twitter, from my perspective it's like a new media version of press releases - big name people harp about whatever they harp about and I read about it elsewhere if it's relevant to me.
It is not (just) for narcissism: it can fill a niche similar to RSS. When I was using Twitter, 90% of the posts I read were from companies or projects announcing news and updates. It also had a built in comments, so you have a single, shared discussion/q&a space in the same app.
Obviously, the biggest advantage it has over RSS (and Mastodon, so far) is critical mass. More creators have Twitter accounts than RSS feeds and for those that have both, the Twitter account is always more active.
And for me at least, Twitter is almost exclusively read-only for me. There are some people that tweet stuff that I like to keep up with, but trying to engage there is super toxic. Reddit/lemmy is way better for actually talking about stuff with people. There is toxicity but it's easier to ignore/downvote than Twitter, somehow.
Seriousl though, waking up I looked at Reddit, going to sleep I looked at Reddit. All day Reddit, and too often the same crap repeated but I was not willing to risk sorting by new, just hot, best of, or rising.
I use Inoreader to put in the Top Day or Top Week RSS feeds of various subreddits. (Just found out I can do the same here on Lemmy.) It helps keep my usage from getting addictive like I'm trying to squeeze blood from a rock, and it keeps me from seeing the same posts over and over again. I see all the important stuff. Once. I really enjoy it.
Forum-type things like Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker news, Reddit, etc. put the focus on the topic or community.
Micro-blog type things like Twitter, Mastodon put the focus on individuals.
If you want to see what your favourite author is posting about, or what your favourite musician is working on, or maybe behind the scenes pictures from a sporting event, microblogging platforms are great for that. Journalists also loved them because they could follow specific other journalists or other key people in the area they cared about, and get direct info from that source.
OTOH, if what you care about is a certain topic (F1 racing, beebop jazz, etc.) then forum-style platforms are better because the focus is the topic rather than the individuals.
I didn't like Twitter for that reason. Often I'd follow someone because I saw some posts they made about something I'm interested in. Then suddenly they're flooding my feed with stuff I don't care about and often being really annoying while they do it.
I rarely find someone who I like all their posts. So it's like do I just put up with the furry porn retweets because this person is a genius who occasionally posts about really interesting hacks?
That's why I rarely ever followed random people on the microblogging platforms. IMO what it's good for is following journalists, who treat the platform professionally and mostly only talk about things related to their work, or say famous authors who do some self-promotion, but also sometimes talk about their creative process.
This is an important distinction. I follow people on Twitter, while I follow topics on Reddit. It's also the main reason why Mastodon will never succeed until it reaches the people I want to follow.
Good breakdown! I realized how foolish it is to wish any service be like anything else.
The fediverse is diverse, and the comparison is immature. We should be grateful these alternatives exist at all, because not too long ago it felt like world wide web had been irreversibly overrun by corporations, and resistance was hopeless.
I never really liked Twitter as a concept. It feels like it's built on an "old man yells at cloud" concept where people just shout their thoughts and nobody gains anything from it.
By comparison forums are there to foster discussions and communities. I thought Mastodon would be better but I spent 5 minutes and it's exactly the same nonsense.
Thats my feel as well. The whole idea of small text blurbs that arent conversational and not grouped by topic never really worked for me. It also just feels too personality driven, where large accounts are what gets major precedence - I prefer when a small account or whatever can make a great post that gets a lot of attention.
I can already tell the Lemmy is going to fit me a lot better than Mastodon, even tho I did enjoy that for a few months
Yes! I remember A LOOONG time ago when Twitter was just beginning, and the articles about it were very confused about how to use it. It was described like a kind of social telepathy, where the sharing of thoughts brought about a quick intimacy with strangers. Now it is just a playground for corporations and narcissists. Well, I suppose it was always like that.
Agreed. I think a forum-like interface is much more apt to allow interesting and rewarding discussions. Never liked Twitter's interface either, I only think it's good to spread announcements and the likes, which benefit exactly from that "person yells at cloud" idea :P
I like Mastodon, but I like Lemmy more. That said, I liked Reddit a lot more than Twitter so it makes sense I'd prefer Lemmy. I'd rather follow topics than people, and Mastodon/Twitter are about following people (yes you can subscribe to hashtags on Mastodon, but it isn't the same).
I have tried so many times to use Twitter(before Musk) and it never clicked with me. I have been on Reddit for over a decade. I like the idea of the fediverse but will it be able to hit the critical mass needed to actually replace Twitter and Reddit?
Insert meme 'I like you both equally ... that means I like YOU much more' here...
IDK, I never used Twitter and never understood it: why would one ever want to share short messages? What can you express/explain with 160 characters? This is why I see no point in using Mastodon either...
I gel much better with forum format than microblog, mostly I don’t think I have anything worth saying on a microblog. I could see using it to follow people I’m interested in, but I can’t think of too many who fit that criteria. Also, they are all on TikTok. The only time I really used twitter was to get notifications when the ps5 was in stock somewhere.
I never liked the UI or design of Twitter. I grew up on image/text boards and migrated to reddit in the late 2000s as it started to take off. I like that the focus isn't on profile building, or as you said following users, but rather on tagging along with communities that interest and inform you.
Yeah in general, I like forums better than the format Twitter is in. I like topic-based discussions more than discussions spawned from short, potentially out-of-context messages.
Not to mention that the discussion is almost guaranteed to consist of similarly short (or even shorter) witty one-liners. Twitter format is just horrible, and its restrictions promote equally horrible behavior where you have to look for ways to convey ideas and feeling in a short manner, which almost never results in more polite and sophisticated conversations.
Never used Twitter for anything more serious than some announcements from the game devs I follow. Anything else is just plain stupid, which makes me really surprised over the wide-spread adoption of Twitter by officials and ministries and the like.
And raising the character limit is going to be even more absurd, because then it's going to be reminiscent of an actual forum, just less structured and sensible.
Twitter, as a format, is the worst option between messengers like Matrix and proper forums of any kind.
I'm even a little suspicious that Twitter style messaging has played a part in "gotcha" politics that seem very popular everywhere, where some populists manage to gather a large following mostly by just using slick one-liners with relatively little substance.
Now sure, these have always existed and will likely exist, but I seem to see more and more of them with ever bigger popularity.
I know it got me a bit, I used to browse subreddits dedicated to twitter owns, but realised that those were reeeally bad for me.
I'm on Jerboa now, and I think it's got good bones, but it still needs some work. Minor stuff tho, like how setting the overall font size affects pages slightly differently.
I also miss how RIF would open articles/media natively, instead of utilizing my default browser for everything. It's actually nice using reader view in firefox for some stuff, but the extra loading and app-swapping is a little clunky. I'm sure it's something I could get used to if I stick with it.
I also need to figure out what pages/instances to follow so I can curate what shows up on my home page. I'm on day 2 here, so a grain of salt is needed for my commentary on a project that I can nitpick, but could not build on my own.
Micro blogging like Mastodon I like more for following the personalities. I don't have a big attention seeking personality so I do not get a lot of followers on that type of social media. I am more of a reply guy so Lemmy style content aggregator with comments I am able to participate more in.
For sure there are cool people I liked to follow, and frankly miss. As much as I say that I really just care about topics and go deep into things and ideas, it is still other people providing that information. I ultimately care about people and their passions.
The organization of Mastodon just sucks. Still, the people on there are worth the jank.
It's in the name, mostly. It aggregates content. You can post links, text posts, images to specific communities and have them displayed in a feed of your communities of choice. That's what Digg was and Reddit is, and kind of what Lemmy is doing- except on the Fediverse.
I kind of see Mastodon as a Twitter replacement and Lemmy as a Reddit replacement. Each has specific use cases. I can see both platforms having value in my online engagement.
The possibility to follow hashtags in mastodon is a real progress : i just follow a few account but i like following hashtags on mastodon/pixelfed and may be tomorrow peertube. lemmy suffer from lack of contents. I hope it will improve in the comming months
I do too. Mastodon is great software, but I’ve never been much of a user of the micro blogging format. The Reddit/hacker news format has been my preference for many years.
Same for me and I have to say, I'm really liking it here so far! The community is of course smaller, but it's still large enough to be engaging and the users are nice so far.
People are very chill here. However, we are all going through the same thing.. we are trauma bonding over the loss of a loved one lol. As the site grows I am sure the vibe will change.
Yeah kinda, though I think the UX is indeed definitely better than modern reddit, focus on the relevant stuff, and do it well (fast, and simple design).
But unfortunately the richness of information of most subreddits is still kinda missing, but hopefully this will settle over time (and I hope that the sheer mass migration from reddit will not kill/ddos the main instances).
I had the greatest times in the internet 20 years ago in forums where you could be part of something that felt like a community built over years. Found some long lasting friendships on forums. Sadly then came myspace and facebook and caused every single forum I used to die.
Honestly the fediverse somewhat can replace that because the instances emulate that feeling of community a little bit.
It feels like the internet has gotten too big for forums. As if they can only support a certain population and then they get too crowded. I feel like the up/down vote system gives the internet a lot more space.
I disagree. The upvote system is prone to creating echochambers. You post bad news and people will downvote it. You post something controversial. People will downvote it. I mean I don't think it's a bad system. I just believe that ranking content visibility based on it has some downsides.
Agreed! I learned so much intellectually. Broadened my horizons, sharpened my views through long-form, slower paced conversations of Forums/Message Boards. They are few and far between now. Boards such as this are the closest thing I can find now.
I know! Once you found a forum you loved you were IN IT. Those usernames were real people you looked forward to talking to.
I think it has to do with the level of effort it takes for participation. The sparse, utilitarian all text design can be off putting. Some people just don't like to read, you know?
Often times it was not easy to make an account, you had to prove you were worthy of acceptance or get an invitation. It was work. MySpace and Facebook made it effortless, and it was appealing because you could immediately talk to friends instead of building rapport with strangers.
I think in the end it comes down to respect. Social media is very permissive by design, and people got away with talking garbage with no consequences. You can't just be hostile asshole around here.
Lemmy and Reddit promote engagement, discourse and even arguments... ok, especially arguments.
Mastodon feels like a list of billboards that I am disconnected from.
"Oh, that's news"
But no one talks between eachother about anything. I almost feel like the nature of the layout of Twitter and it's alternatives are almost by design to make the users a little more self serving.
Mastodon has every user standing on a soapbox yelling at crowds, Lemmy is more of a public forum.
@DidacticDumbass@BlinkerFluid Most of the Mastadon "toots" I engage with are multi-part threads. One one hand, that suggests that longer posts encourage engagement. On the other hand, they demonstrate that Mastadon is not entirely devoted to "micro" posts.
This does feel a lot like the reddit I missed, only better. I will also agree that I find myself more likely to engage here, versus reddit where I exclusively lurked.
Posting on here is more compelling than Reddit ever was.
I also think there is an early adopter effect going on. Reddit is so massive that unless you are posting in niche subreddits, it always felt like yelling into the void.
I used to engage on Reddit a lot, then towards the end of 2015, I left. Started a new account in the beginning of 2020 because Twitter became a hot mess and needed something different.
At first, when I returned, it seemed ok. Started to engage and wasn't pleased with the results. Been lurking for quite awhile now.
The last 2 days here have been a breath of fresh air. Feels like reddit 10+ years ago. I have found new communities with ease (using chrome on my phone vs an app) and finally am posting my first comment. I posted an article earlier this morning.
It is a bit numbing to let an indefinite amount of people have "access" to you. I get annoyed whenever I have anyone text me more than once at time. I am not interested in everyone who is aware of my existence, so I hate the attention. Nor am I necessarily interested in every inane thought a person my have even if I really like them.
Still, Mastodon is really good for making friend, so I don't think it benefits me to ignore it completely, but it is foolish to think I will ever find a balance. Like any relationship, strangers or lovers, it is paramount to set up boundaries.
Even then i think twitter works (or used to) because of the algorithm that kept you getting more content, which mastodon doesn't have (nor shouldn't) but with content agregators as long as you are subscribed to stuff that interests you you only need to hit a certain number of users for content to keep flowing.
It's the difference between subscribing to subjects rather than to people.
Yep, Same here! When things went south with Twitter, I tried switching to Mastodon, but after several months, I haven't become fond of it. Its interface is so terrible and difficult to navigate. When I heard of Lemmy as an alternative to Reddit, the first thing that came to my mind was, 'Oh, please don't be like Mastodon...' and I'm glad that it is not! I like the fact that it is kinda' similar to Reddit (interface-wise), but at the same time, it is decentralized, which means it is (hopefully) going in the right direction.
If your issue with Mastodon was mainly the interface, maybe you could try using a third party app like Tusky. Mastodon's own app isn't great, but when using Tusky it's quite nice.
I was never a fan of Twitter, but I use Mastodon quite a bit. Both for following news and projects as for just posting random crap. I never used Reddit much either, only read when it would come up on an online search. But Lemmy so far has been nice, if not a bit silent. I've got good hope for it.
I feel that. I thought it was just me, but it was so hard to just connect to any other instances outside of what flowed in the timeline. When I did it just took me to the website instead of integrating with the instance.
Trying to keep up with the Federated timeline was nauseating, but it also fruitless adding every person with an interesting post.
That's absolutely true. I mean we can't even search for a word on that platform. It's so ridiculous that only hashtags, usernames, or URLs can be looked up!
Similarly, I wish Matrix/Element would grow in popularity to compete with Discord, who will also eventually be pursuing and IPO and will allow enshittification to swallow them whole.
I have never liked Discord. It is like IRC with more steps, more surveillance, an excess of security features that doesn't actually make anything secure.
I should give Element another chance. I think I had it before, but I was confused on how to find rooms.
I rely hope it takes off like Mastodon did. Like everything worthwhile online, its the efforts of one person doing miracles to create something everyone can use, so if I want it to exist I will have to contribute to it somehow.
I felt kind of lost when looking for a Reddit alternative. Lemmy feels like the right alternative. It's not perfect but it's a better base than what we had with Reddit. I hope it picks up.
Yeah, I like Lemmy's organisation, but it lacks people. Now when Reddit is shitting om its users, I am hopeful that Lemmy will explode in user base soon.
the nice thing about the fediverse is that you can still interact with the other platforms if you so choose, so you aren't limited! I'm glad you found something that works for you and i hope you have a great time :)
@stefenauris below posted a more detailed answer, but it's a bit harder to interact with Mastodon from Lemmy. From kbin it has native operability for mods to define keywords or hashtags for their subs and brings that content in natively, so it's a little easier here.
sure! most of this functionality is in the search box. You can paste a URL and have it show up right in Lemmy. For example, you can post the URL to my profile, or search for my username and see my posts there (or you should be able to I thought, I just tested it and it doesn't show my posts but it does offer to send me a message)
Edit: This seems to work better between Friendica and Mastodon, but as development continues between platforms I'm sure it will work even better!
Edit 2: So I just tested it in reverse, I can see a feed of a Lemmy group in Mastodon. I think Lemmy just needs some more development time and love and it will be able to do the same :)
I think the main difference comes down to the sorting algorithms. In Lemmy we get the organic content sorting done by collective human appreciation or lack thereof of said content (↑, ↓). Generally better stuff rises to the top, and worse stuff sinks to the bottom. You can still see either if you like by changing the order. That coupled with sorting by community does a great job at sifting through the noise. In Mastodon you have hashtags that can serve as communities but there's no organic sorting within that. If you subscribe to #Linux, you'll get pretty much everything with #Linux, whether one or a thousand people found it valuable.
I think this is absolutely the case. I've noticed that after migrating mastodon instances and losing my hashtag follows that my home feed has improved significantly. Unfortunately this is extremely counter intuitive. I would love to be able to see a particular hashtag exclusively from the people I follow. This brings up another problem with mastodon and that is that development has been incredibly slow. I suspect threadiverse will not have this issue due to the popularity of tree-ed forums among programmers.
I don't mind a community having low amount of content. It's easy to just join multiple and hop around. I don't mind a UI not entirely matching my preference, that stuff is "matter of time".
But Mastodon made it VERY hard to find the little content their communities did have. They have an anti-Trending philosophy, and that drove me, and most people I know, away. When I joined, they didn't even have proper tag searching, and to this day, the activity in a tag is still reported wrongly. When asked, I got aggressively told off that Text Search is evil and I'm evil for asking and no, I didn't even talk about twitter but I'm evil for even daring to make requests even lightly resembling a Twitter user's UX preferences (Aka: Discoverability and UX). I just wanted to hear a "oh that's broken and being worked on" but no, it was always a "no, we don't like that" instead.
No such thing here. I wanted to find the gaming subs, I found the gaming subs. I wanted to find a desolate abandoned community for Dota 2, bam, I found the desolate abandoned community for dota 2. Within 2 minutes I was on grounds with /c/PatientGamers.
It got slightly better. But won't ever fully fix itself. To me, and to a couple colleagues, Mastodon was a bad website, with bad gatekeepers and a bad advert for the Fediverse. I don't care about it and I hope Rhynodon some day comes, implements text search and steals all their users.
That sucks. If asking for a feature ends up with hostility from the developers, it is not worth your time and attention.
People share a lot of useful information that can absolutely make life better if it was shared, so it is insane anyone would be against search. Search is the most important technology on the internet, every large website needs it.
I'm from Mastodon and trying Lemmy to explore more of the fediverse, liking it so far too 😃. My Mastodon feed is almost all politics so I'm liking the different content on here.
Ug. Yes. Politics is important and inevitable but ultimately exhausting to look at. Just impotent yelling across the ether.
An analogy that I have been using is that politics is like linguistics. It is useful to study language in a granular way from morphemes to phonetics to syntax to discourse analyses, and everything in between. The structure of a language is fascinating, it helps to discover its relationship to other languages, and it can reveal profound things about the cultures that would otherwise be lost.
Yet, studying linguistics does not make anyone better at learning to speak, read, write, and understand other language. It does nothing for fluency. Nobody learns a language to only talk about the language, they do it to connect to other people or to experience art and media in its original form.
Political discussion is not action, by itself it does nothing to improve the world, it only serves to bias us and disort reality.A person can only hope to be inspirational and change the minds of the prejudiced.
... sorry for rant there. I have way too many opinion about politics for someone who does not care to see it either.
Ehh, i mean it definitely does do that, but political discussion is also important to guide action. We can see plenty of political action that gets nowhere and does nothing, because the people instigating it do not have a solid theory of how political change is accomplished. Political discussions are how that understanding emerges.
That being said the internet, especially platforms like mastodon that encourage short posts, is rarely the best place for productive political discussion.
Personally I find Kbin more usable (while still being reddit-like) as it also has functionality letting you follow on normal microblogging content from Mastodon and other places, making it more intertwined with the whole fediverse.
Just checked out Kbin from this comment (and signed up) - the functionality definitely feels better. I love that I jumped straight into this same thread immediately from the Kbin homepage. Federated content is awesome.
And if it helps, you can see and interact with posts on Mastodon, Calckey, etc from within kbin. Each 'magazine' has a mod set list of words/hashtags it looks for, so it's not everything all at once.
I will check that out! One of my confusions with the fediverse is that I thought having one account would allow me to access all the services, and the account acted as a kind of "base" through which I did everything. I now understand that federation basically happens at the application level, or really at the administration level, and how many services the community provides for any given account.
What I wanted was to avoid having to create so many accounts for everything the fediverse offers, but I guess it is not possible, and honestly is no different than having separate accounts for any other online thing I participate in.
Yeah, that seems to be a common misconception. But it's more that your Twitter account can interact with FB, IG, YT, etc, not that your Twitter account lets you log into all the different services.
I ended up with probably a dozen as I was exploring the fediverse, but ended up with 3 more or less but only primarily use two of them (kbin and Calckey… I have a Pixelfed, but use it as much as I used IG, which is rarely).
Yeah, it's really the opposite of that. One account let's you access all oftthe content (or most of it, not everything is totally interoperable, and admins do block other sites sometimes), but now there's 10,000 separate, totally independent websites.
But it's absolutely what basically everyone thinks at first, because most people hear about it from people that don't really explain things very well.
I'm not quite sure how exactly everything works but it seems like a lot of things on kbin get thrown to /m/random, does anyone know what's up with that? A lot of communities from lemmy show up as a 404 and posts end up there.
To me, it seems to be the most "reddit-like" of the options out there. It pulls from across the fediverse so it has content from Mastodon, Lemmy, and whatever gets posted locally on kbin itself. While not perfect, it is being actively worked on so I'm really hoping it'll get even better.
I literally just posted that in r/RedditAlternatives to answer the question, "Where would you go?" lol
Strongly agree. Mastodon is alright and I use it a little, but the twitter-type format never really worked for me. I feel like when I have to follow individual people I usually end up either following no one or being forced to follow people who post things that interest me sometimes but a lot of the time post things that really don't. Following particular topics or threads just seems much more natural to me; I can look at exactly what interests me and nothing more.
Interesting people are not interesting all of the time, and following people usually just results in your feed loading up with complaints, gossip and drama.
I want to talk about things and ideas, not people.
It’s quite interesting as I think the twitter migration put the focus on mastodon for a while and this place became quieter and then Reddit didn’t want to be left out so the spotlight is now here and kbin. If only Instagram could join the fun pixelfed would get a bump.
The number of companies owned by Metaface is so stupid. People really do give up their privacy for money, or in the case of Instagram, to quench their thirstiness.
It sucks that the draw of Facebook is still such a primal one, connecting with people and getting that gossip. None of that is worth its continued existence.
Real friends are in your contacts list, not on a website.
Either it was supper overwhelming with meme posts or NSFW, or it was too chill to the point of nothing. Or, it was hyperfocused like FOSS/Linux and became uninteresting after awhile.
I’ve never been able to find the meme posts on mastodon, therein lies part of its core issues, federation makes discoverability iffy at best. It hasn’t yet reached mass yet.
I've been following hashtags on Mastodon, and that has worked pretty well for me. Still, it's not the forum layout that I enjoy, but it's still useful.
Oh god yeah, I’ve never ventured outside the mas.to local timeline (and a few hashtags and people in the replies). I assume there are vastly more funny local timelines with a few of the more shitposty or lgbt focused ones. Eh oh well.
I'm Gen Z and when I was little my parents were (rightfully) very careful with how much time I spent on the internet. Even so, I saw from a distance the old internet, where forums were a thing and you could find lots of cool websites that people made for reasons that weren't limited to promoting or selling something.
When I discovered Reddit it was like I could somehow experience that time, but for many the decline had already started.
I love interacting with people, asking and answering questions, discovering and making others discover new things, but I just can't stand feeling like everything and everyone is trying to sell me something anymore.
Now that I'm here, I feel like this could be the place, at least for a while.
Your instincts are correct! The internet I loved was a library or a coffee shop, not some corprate franchised mega store trying to take your money at every opportunity.
Websites used to be art, exploration was like fringe theater, where you and the author complete the performance.
I hate getting advertized to, even if it is something I want and have been searching for.
I am glad you caught the best of what the internet used to be, and have not been indoctrinated to the worst behaviors, or become too jaded to seek out something that does not disrepect you.
I think that the death of stumble upon reflects this very well. I used to spend hours on it, finding website that were about specific niche topics, art, or were interactive experiences of every kind. Now websites don't really exist in that shape anymore, or at least don't have the same resonance. If Internet was the real world, it would be a cyberpunk dystopia
This all still reminds me of Usenet, nntp before it was ruined by spam. I would love an nntp client like thing for this. I can bring the data to me once per day. Efficient, I don’t need to linger more than necessary.
@DidacticDumbass I love liking this from Mastodon and the fact that you are more comfortable with a different platform interoperable with the rest of the Fediverse
I love how cool this is. Imagine being able to read and comment on a Reddit thread from twitter and Facebook and have it all work seamlessly and visible to all parties. That's literally what this is and that feels amazing to me
I agree with you mastodon is to much like Twitter and Twitter sucks reddit has always been much more fun to me so I'm hoping lemmy can get some traffic going
The bird app is mostly about following specific individuals, so the masses will go to where said individuals go.
The R app is all about communities and topics, so people will be more inclined to try it out. Personally I couldn't care less about who or how many people use Lemmy, as long as I got my Zelda memes.
That tracks. I think bird app started out as a great resource of experts sharing all the cool things they know, but it quickly became a game of who can get the most followers, which is the most banal and pointless thing a person can do with an account.
R app was always more idealistic, but somehow contained all the bad parts of bird app like it getting flooded people by people trying to sell you themselves or their crap.
Yeah, I think I will subscribe to Zelda memes too.
Can you point me to the FOSS/Linux community? I'm actually looking for that too.
I'm also new here and I love it! I stopped really interacting with anyone or making content on reddit a few years ago. Federated instances are so much fun. I am inspired again.
I think I will explore the other fedisites like Plemora or Calckey to see if I like it better.
Servers running these apps connect to the same fediverse Mastodon servers connect to. As does Lemmy. All these apps just give you different ways to view the same social network, so which software you use makes less difference to what you can see than which server you use. Because there is no global view of the network, what you'll find in hashtag searches or federated timelines in the micro-posting apps (Mastodon, Pler/Akkoma Miss/CalcKey) depends on which accounts are being followed from the server hosting your account.
I'm new to Lemmy's way of viewing the 'verse, so I'm not sure what the equivalent is here. But I think what @dave describes in this thread about Communities hosted on other Lemmy servers taking a while to show up in searches here is relevant: https://lemmy.nz/comment/28480
mastodon servers usually subscribe to a generic block list, and have sensitive moderators that are even worse than the ones you find on reddit. it creates a boring feed that scares off new users and kills any differing opinions. its annoying that something with so much potential is stomped on like that. im glad i found a good pleroma server. still like the mastodon software better though.
Mastodon would be okay if it weren't for about 17 very vocal gatekeepers who spend their lives lecturing everyone on how it wasn't like twitter and we should feel bad for wanting something that was.
Mastodon, like Twitter, suffers from the cult of personality. A few people get all the attention and think they get to dictate how things should work.
Mastodon does not need to be like Twitter, and it is a good thing the creators are not programming in all the faults like thought-shaping algorithms and automated censorship. These entitled idiots need to cool it or build their own program that works like they want.
Reddit to me felt like I'd found a home. My score shot up into the thousands and I felt it was somewhere that was mine. I was on Twitter but never got into it, left when the orange babboon was allowed back on, and don't miss it.
It really sucks. Using a service run by a bad actor is tantamount to supporting and condoning the actions and viewpoints of those people, even though people don't actually think that way.
Anyways, I did feel like Reddit was something special, even with all the dumb changes. I am hope Lemmy becomes a new, better home for you.
I'd say this type of layout that focuses more on long form textual content is better for tech savvy people who are likely to stick with the fediverse than the twitter clone that Mastodon was.
Mastodon has benefitted from news articles and the sheer novelty of an alternative to Twitter, even before Elon Musk bought it out.
Lemmy probably won't have the same fanfare, especially given the stigma Reddit has, like it was a secret to have an account, or talking about it betrayed you as some weirdo or pervert. Whatever, Reddit never seemed to have the same social acceptance as Twitter or anything Facebook owns.
I think it is good to have a community that is self-filtering. Let's keep the IQ high on this one (with the exception of me, of course!).
Mastodon has big “this is the year of the Linux desktop” energy, just self-absorbed posting and no collaboration between users. Aside from a rare few exceptions, it’s a bunch of frumps. All the shitposters went to BlueSky.
I've said before, there's a preference for filtering of normies from primarily Mastodon servers that i don't see on other fediverse servers like Lemmy and i hope that means we'll be able to effectively capture the Digg moment.
It would be amazing to see a pro-user regression from the progressing venture capitalist changes to Reddit
I'm with you. Once i saw someone on Mastodon bemoan that wearing masks is no longer a firm requirement for just about everywhere, I knew I'd stumbled into somehwere bad, where people found commonality in the pandemic mentally breaking them.
That is not me diminishing the impact of the pandemic at all. We're going to feel the effects of that for a long, long time, in a myriad of ways! I'm just pointing out that it's not only in terms of physical or economic health. Some folks are, mentally speaking, extremely different from who they used to be. And in some pockets of the internet, those folks are stuck in 2020.
I also like to be happy and be positive when necessary. Not everything we watch or play or consume is perfect and great and wonderful, but at the same time, it's not steaming hot garbage either. Going back to this decentralized community at least allows us the chance to be heard in saying "Yeah, the new Pokemon games? They have both upsides and downsides to them, it's not entirely hot trash!" and not be shunned into oblivion.
True. A space like Lemmy (or Reddit) is always valuable because of the sheer amount of information that gets shared. I am really loving the thread on FOSS recommendations; there are some awesome projects I had never seen but definitely want to use.
I hope the cross-service-integration will get better. Think about the many embedded tweets within reddit. Now think how nice a seamless discussion of all participating on either mastodon or Lemmy will be.
I think one of the best things about the fediverse is that it allows for a diverse set of paradigms.
A "twitter-like" experience isn't for everyone and it's great to have variety. I have friends who mostly use bookwyrm—a fediverse "goodreads" alternative—and it's awesome that I can still follow and interact with them even though I picked a different fediverse option.
I recently connected my Mastodon.social and lemmy.ml monikers by following/subscribing myself. It is not the experience I would like but a learnable limitation.
That said, we will see better cross-verse integration in the future.IMHO what we need most is a way to migrate accounts from one instance to another. Ultimately this has to be a feature of ActivityPub itself. Lacking this feature people will hesitate to move instances, which is a requirement for a healthy fediverse ecosystem.
I tried a Mastodon instance and couldn’t get into it. Maybe it’s my ADHD talking but I prefer the slower pace of a forum. It lets me take my time and really think about how I want to phrase things.
I agree. I absolutely hate any feelings of urgency. Social media, all media, should be completely voluntary. I do not like being rushed, and I want to establish my own expectations of me.
How much misunderstanding and thus violent argument has been produced due to low effort responses?
I've noticed that after migrating mastodon instances and losing my hashtag follows that my home feed has improved significantly. Unfortunately this is extremely counter intuitive. I would love to be able to see a particular hashtag exclusively from the people I follow. This brings up another problem with mastodon and that is that development has been incredibly slow. I suspect threadiverse will not have this issue due to the popularity of tree-ed forums among programmers.
I will check it out! I am familiar with Stux, or just their name I guess. I initially thought that I would be happy in a smaller community, but that is just means less active people to talk to. Thank you.
The problem with mastodon is the same problem as twitter. Its just not a good social experience. I have said this before. Twitter/Mastodon are for individuals with a high follower count to get their message out. Its not for the other 99.99% that want to engage each other and discuss topics o interest.
For me the decentralized nature of Lemmy / Kbin, (the only two reddit clones i know right now), is what’s really bringing me in.
I’ve been on Reddit for over a decade and seen communities completely close and go private because either a lack of moderation or infestation of bots. With how Lemmy and Kbin are set up, if one group of people don’t agree with another, they can set up shop on a different server.
This really gives users power over communities instead of having to do different naming such as r/animemes vs r/goodanimemes.
You are right, it is brilliant. The hegemony over a word or phrase is ridiculous, and it made discovery a pain in the ass. I love how federation naturally resolves the name clashing issue, letting multiple communities live side by side.
There is no competition, just different levels of participation.
So, how does the Fediverse work? Not the tech specs, but in use cases? I have a Mastodon account that I signed up for, but never really used. @[email protected] I can theoretically use it to view posts in a Lemmy instance. However, the interaction between Mastodon is quite different from Lemmy. Mastodon works for toots, but it didn't seem to be a good interface for browsing the communities in a Lemmy instance. So, I created an account on this server.
Should we stick to just logging in to a single server? Is it bad manners to have separate accounts on different Fediverse instances?
reddit was great for discoverability. it centralized everything so you could find a group for even the most niche topics. Using Lemmy is almost going back to the days of having the a lot of different message board sites. One good feature of the Fediverse is that you only have to log in to one site, instead of needing a separate log in for each one. But will the federated system still fracture our communities? [email protected] is separate from [email protected] right? So, you would need to view and post to each one to see everything?
Maybe! A professional networking to connect people with similar principles would do a lot to improve the working world.
I remember going to my university's career center, hoping to get guidance on what kind of jobs to look for after graduating.
All the guy did was show me how to follow people on LinkedIn who graduated in the same field. None of them have advice, none of them know anything. All they can offer are tips on how to look "more professional," they have no idea how to help ohers craft a career.
We can't let corporations control our lives, and as much as we try to escape it through technology and our buying choices, there is no easy way to escape it with our jobs.