You know, I'm not sure about this whole fediverse thing
You know, I'm not sure about this whole fediverse thing
This might not be the right place for this, but it seemed appropriate to me.
I'm not sure about the fediverse in general. I've been interacting with it here and there for a while, and of course, since the strangeness on Reddit, I've been interacting with it more. But something seems... strange. What do I mean? Well, I'm not sure exactly, but let's see if I can put it into words.
I think the idea of the fediverse is excellent and truly better than a centralized approach. But, to me, much of the content on the fediverse seems different than the content on other centralized networks. Maybe Reddit content is more relevant and engaging to me because there is just more to choose from. Maybe that's just what you get when you have some algorithmic influence. I can hop on Reddit and find something interesting and enjoyable to engage with very quickly. But to me, it's just not the same on the fediverse. My guess is that my experience would be better with a far larger user base--maybe some critical mass of users needs to be achieved or something.
I suppose the lack of users could be an appeal rather than a drawback--a community could form that's tighter and more engaged. But what's the point, then? Is it simply meaningful human connection? For some, might it be to have intellectual stimulation that we can't get with the people around us? But this just shows what I mean: the experience in the fediverse, to me, is an altogether different one than on the centralized platforms we are running away from.
My purpose for going to Reddit wasn't a sense of community or anything like that. Maybe it was for some of you! I just wanted to find and engage with interesting stuff, and that's definitely more challenging for me in the fediverse. For now.
What are your thoughts? It could just be me!
I'm just confused by how I'm supposed to track communities from different instances. I know you can subscribe, but it's a lot of work to look for all the communities you might be interested in across different instances.
Am I missing something?
Finding communities is a bit easier with tools like the Lemmy Community-Browser, but there's definitely some friction. After some initial time of subscribing to stuff, it's not so bad.
For me the problem is the content and the general feel of the platform itself. Free? Sure. Less toxic? Mostly. But certainly not all that engaging.
Right now Lemmy and the fediverse in general is suffering from an acute influx of new users, especially users who aren’t accustomed to how things are currently laid out.
I’d say be patient, give it a little time, and communities will probably settle into “de facto” leaders so that things are easier to find. It’s happened on Reddit before where subreddits merge or split as it makes sense.
I’m sure the same will happen with various communities or magazines in order to make usage a,d finding things easier.
Lemmy seems fairly clean-cut and to the point to me, but it also feels a bit unfamiliar at the same time.
Do you mean using Lemmy or the content that comes from Lemmy?
I think some of both, as the people here are also a bit more on-the-nose and less dramatic. But there is something that is different here from Reddit, both in terms of culture and in terms of which posts you see. I like it, but I can easily see why someone might find this hard to switch to full-time over Reddit. As for myself, I'm bouncing between the two. I think that if some of the communities here (on NCL) become more active, which things seem to be moving in that direction, I'll spend more time here anyway. If Infinity for Reddit stops working at the end of this month, Lemmy will be the only thing I'm using while I'm away from my PC.
I'm still dipping my toes into the fediverse so I'm not too familiar with how it works, but I do agree that at a glance it feels different from reddit user-experience-wise. That being said I believe one of the core goals of the fediverse is facilitating discovery of communities and interesting topics, just not in the same way that it's done on reddit, so perhaps it'll require some guidance...
The algorithm is something with positives and negatives. It'll try to show you stuff you're interested in, and so it can be more time effective and interesting, but it's also insidious.
Fediverse software isn't addictive in a skinner box sense. It just kinda shows what people have posted, maybe with some weighting for votes on Lemmy. That's probably healthier in the long run
I don't know--I wouldn't call my use of Reddit unhealthy. It was always easy to use and it always had a place for me that never got out of hand. Now YouTube on the other hand... that gets out of hand real quick.
I'm mostly speaking of my own experience. Getting out of the algorithmic world was really nice. I saw a lot more stuff, and realized I didn't really care about a lot of it and that was an important lesson too.