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.
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I think Lemmy has it easier than Mastodon.
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.
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 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.
Same, same. If I follow 3 high-volume posters on mastodon or twitter, there goes my entire day.
I prefer to follow topics / communities, not people / celebrities.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, this micro-blog approach is so one-sided. Some people want engagement, but most people are only looking for agreement.
@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.
Agreed. I was never a twitter user so mastadon never made sense to me.
This just worked for me instantly.
That said I was just thinking about making a community for new users with like - tips and tricks. Or does that exist?
edit: nevermind found lemmytips, seems to have all the info I was thinking about adding.
Nice. It is comforting that the people running the platform are conscientious and have made a guide so the transition is as smooth as possible.
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
Stumble Upon was such a revelation when webrings went out of fashion. I could spend my entire day clicking to a random website and never get bored.
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.
Been doing internet since about 1990, gopher, nntp, pop3
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.
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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.
I for one am extremely excited to see what Lemmy’s first mainstream-news-tier controversy is going to be 🤣
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.
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.
Yeah, I don’t care to engage with low effort content.
How does the saying go? Interesting people talk about ideas, uninteresting people talk about other people.
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
That is it. Thank you for the citation.
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 think this kind of politics has been doing pretty alright before Twitter as well. They may have been lucky to have an entire platform dedicated to them in some way, but all it’s done is gather all the populists in one place to happily form echo chambers. It’s what Facebook has been for years, too.
We’re probably more aware of it than we used to be when this style was more spread out, but this bullshit has been doing well before, is doing well, and will do well with or without Twitter or any platform that forces short, clear-cut messages. People like this shit - this is the prime reason that counties living under dictatorship often have people praising their leaders for being “strong and effective”, i.e. if it sounds good, it must be good, with little firrheer analysis taking place; stickijg the the dictatorships example, you’ll often see the opposition followers falling very well for the same kind of populist talk or doing away with the past and punishing the dictator and their enablers.
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.
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.
Damn I really miss forums.
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.
You should take a look at this instance: https://fedibb.ml/
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.
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!).
This! I’m glad to see many tech-minded folks on Lemmy, but it doesn’t have the same neckbeard self-importance that Reddit seems to be known for
Power tripping in a niche on some corporate owned social media website will never be impressive.
