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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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
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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.
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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.
That’s a great way of looking at it! (First post ever)
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.
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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.
Neato! That is probably a lot healthier than checking in every 30 minutes looking to see if something changed.
I will try it. Thank you!
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.
the upvotes/downvotes also filter out a lot of noise, mastodon doesn’t have that
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
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
Yeah, and I don’t like Twitter threads with their character limit and using multiple post to make 1 message. It looks stupid imo.
The real discussions are really limited by this concept, and it makes reading those a chore.
They removed the character limit recently, I think.
Only if you pay up, of course
Better late than never i guess.
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.
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at some point in the past I created an account on twitter but it seemed pointless to me. Then it got bigger and was always getting mentioned/quoted and I gave it another shot thinking maybe I was just doing it wrong. Nope, still sucked.
That said, I do have a mastodon account, but I don’t like a lot of things about it. When I’m looking at my timeline, I never know if something is a top level post or a reply to someone else unless I click on it.
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Hell yeah! You got a great person on your side. I hope you never have to experience that shit again.
I feel like Twitter is just one of those sites where it’s best consumed filtered through other people posting the good bits elsewhere
Ironically Reddit was the best place to look at Twitter posts.
I wonder is Lemmy will get meme style discussions about Mastodon posts?
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lol, yeah! I hated posting an even slightly unpopular opinion on reddit. Just downvotes and insults returned.
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 🤣
I mean commie hating (targeted on the main devs) will certainly be part of it in right-wing-media ^^
someone “actually famous” is gonna join in and will inevitably get bullied off. that’s the textbook Fediverse Experience™
i’d throw a RemindMe! here but i don’t think anyone has set up a bot for that here yet
How does one make bots for lemmy?
Edit: looks like there are libraries to help with that. E.g. https://github.com/SleeplessOne1917/lemmy-bot
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).
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.
Big same here man big same
I’ve been thinking that it is probably easier to move a community from a platform like Reddit to the Fediverse than it is from Twitter. I have used both Twitter and Reddit a lot, but have moved off Twitter and now use Mastodon. Mastodon works pretty well for me, but it’s taken a lot of work to get there, and there are parts of the communities (mostly related to my work) I want to connect with that just don’t exist on Mastodon.
But the big difference between Reddit/Lemmy and Twitter/Mastodon is that on Reddit/Lemmy I am interested in communities for topics that are mostly hobbies/entertainment etc. for me, so I don’t really care about who I’m interacting with… I can’t really name more than a handful of regular users or mods on the Reddit subs I’ve been using for more than a decade. But it’s not really important for interacting there, because it’s about interacting with people who have an interest in a particular topic no matter who they are. On Twitter/Mastodon (at least how I use it), the specific people I’m interacting with are more important.
So it seems the “lock in” of Reddit is weaker than Twitter, and I think it’ll be quicker to establish communities here. A community on Lemmy with a few hundred people contributing (posts/comments) is already pretty successful and enjoyable. It doesn’t matter that the equivalent community on Reddit has over a million people (and in fact it’s often better if it’s smaller!).
That weaker lock in and the fact that Reddit seems to be massively undervaluing the contribution mods and third-party app devs make to the platform make me think Reddit is going to quickly regret this whole fiasco.
True, I also think lemmy is the main star of fediverse (peertube too) because they don’t need network effect qnd milions of users.
Problem with reddit is it got too big l, similar like youtube, it always recommending me videos with milions of views and I don’t like them - they are professionally done and trying to sell me something.
I just want to watch random people sharing their thoughts and hobbies.
Right now we don’t have that part of the internet, but looks like it is comming back.
I think some of that is your YouTube profile, because I regularly reject recommended content on YouTube that has 250 subs or 1000 views. Mostly because it’s someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing in terms of making an engaging video so I get super bored quick. I don’t know how to tell you to change it, I do get stuff I ignore in the newpipe default list thats huge and completely uninteresting to me. But that may just be a default link, and I never go to just YouTube.com without just using it to search for a channel I like. I also don’t like or subscribe as I don’t really want another indicator of the channels I might watch. They can figure it out from what I load anyway.
Indeed. Most of the subreddits I liked the most were ones with relatively small subscriber counts.
Mastodon needs to absorb a critical mass of the users who drive content on Twitter in order to be a viable replacement. A Lemmy community only needs enough members to keep itself fairly active.
For sure the main appeal with Twitter was the direct communication with celebrities and other notable people, or at least some fascimile of interaction. It did a lot to close the gap between the famous and their fans/denouncers.
Reddit had some cool AMAs, but otherwise it was just regular people dedicated to their interests and passionate about sharing it.
What really disgusted me was how easily a few people could hijack a sub and make it their business platform to sell products.
It is important to have spaces that are completely insulated from advertisement and all the facets of capitalism.
Yeah the twitter style of social media has always confused me, I feel like there’s much more community and fun here than mastodon but I use both
I have tried to go back to Mastodon, but I have not found an instance that makes me care enough.
I think Lemmy has it easier than Mastodon.
The bird app is mostly about following specific individuals, so the masses will go the 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.
@DidacticDumbass reading (and commenting) this from mastodon and I should say: great!
Use the experience you like better!
I never to figure out how to navigate the fediverse from here!
High Five from across the 'verse!
@DidacticDumbass just a late response as this just appeared in my time line: https://youtu.be/SXUDs0ee_w0
Yes! I keep hearing about how people post from across platforms, but I finally see an example of how to do it. Nice!
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.
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’ve had the exact same experience as you lol.
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.
I tried Mastadon too, it didn’t gel with me. Turns out I don’t care to follow people. I follow topics.
Is this so hard for big tech to understand?
You can follow hashtags on Mastodon. You can also follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon! Search
@<community>@<instance>(ie@fediverse@lemmy.ml)Every celebrity is an agenda. The agenda is always to make money.
Another Reddit refugee here: lemmy makes much more sense to my brain than mastodon ever did. So far, this has huge promise.
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.
@President_Pyrus @SmugBedBug It is not necessary that everyone who uses #Lemmy has to be a Lemmy user. Thanks to the #Fediverse , everyone from Mastodon, Misskey, etc. can also participate in Lemmy content (also post in communities, just don’t create your own communities). For example, I am currently replying from Friendica. The circle of people is much, much larger, so it’s not a problem if Lemmy lacks people.
@caos @President_Pyrus @SmugBedBug
And I am reading your exchange and replying from Mastodon ;)And I’m here from kbin. The beauty of the Fediverse!
I still have a lot to learn from the fediverse. I didn’t even know that that was possible. My mind is a little blown at the moment. Gonna have to go do some reading.
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 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.
What are about Mastodon, that you like, that Pleroma lacks?
looks cool. not much different i just like the ui
Pleroma supports the Mastodon UI btw.
The biggest surprise for many is that Pleroma includes the Mastodon UI, too. As the Mastodon UI is mostly just another API client, it will run fine on Pleroma. As you can see in the screenshot, you can use it quite well on any Pleroma instance. We bundle it with Pleroma, so you don’t need to install anything new.
i am aware. mastodon-fe on top of pleroma is buggy and unnecessary.
Ah ok. Yeah, I just found out about Pleroma today so I thought it might be good to know.
Okay, this is a lot different than my previous understanding of the Fediverse. I know it all connects, but it is more profound than I realized.
I have a lot to learn! I need to learn how to audit a server to know if I want to be part if it.
I like the idea of each service being a unique lens over the same information spread across the network.
It feels a lot like the internet promised in Lain Serial Experiments than what we ended up getting.
Wait, the fediverse Isabel to cross the platforms? I had not picked up on that. I thought the fediverse was an IAM thing. Is it more of an ESB?
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.
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.
It sucks. I just don’t like the Twitter format.
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!
Yeah, it is limited in surprising ways. It is just not fun to use. I do hope it keeps evolving and overcomes these annoyances. Still, I am grateful something that matches my speed exists.
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 think Mastodon’s community isn’t really up to par with what most Twitter ditchers were expecting.
The Reddit-Lemmy exodus however, is far more exaggerated because of the tremendous number of users on third-party apps that were being killed.
This probably led to a lot more content generation and activity which makes it a lot more welcoming than Mastodon was.
I guess the problem is mainly, as someone mentioned, Twitter is for following, Reddit for interacting.
The fact that you have to look for people to follow or you’ll have an empty timeline together with the fact that many famous people aren’t on Mastodon makes the switch more difficult for Average Joe than Reddit to Lemmy, as this kind of SNS doesn’t require specific people, just people.
I wasn’t using Twitter for anything but customer care, so as long as I could find some interesting instances and tags I’m fine there. I didn’t switch, just joined, so nothing to miss that I had before.
I guess in that way, Meta has been smart to give their Mastodon-based SNS first to populair influencers before releasing it to the public. Altrough I can imagine Meta’s version possibly getting blocked everywhere due to privacy concerns tho.
Thanks! I will give Tusky a try then.
I would also try fedilab. Though I never used Twitter and Mastodon seems to me like a slightly odd rss feed of pictures and news, and a bunch of stuff in languages I don’t speak.
Mastodon is so confusing to use, and almost none of the people I know use it. Even a few who joined after my recommendation have stopped using it. I’m not sure what type of user Mastodon is targeting, but they have certainly failed to attract long-time Twitter users like myself. On the other hand, Lemmy has the potential to become a refuge for ex-Redditors, especially after today’s AMAs by Reddit’s CEO.
Yea, I found Mastodon useful for news, albeit completely random non focused news. It gets updates (I assume by bots) way more than the news subreddit did in the last few years, and now I can just post one of those links into lemmy if I want to talk about it.
I also see pictures on there a lot, but I’m not super interested in a lot of them. I have no idea what the commenting is useful for there - it’s seems like yelling into a void, though maybe that’s the fedilab problem? IDK.
Agree completely. I think people just like this format better also. Some link to discuss and gather around.
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.
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.
it only serves to bias us and disort reality.
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.
I admit I am being closed minded here. I just cannot see having a beneficial discussion of politica with all the hair triggered reactions and noise.
Fuck, it used to be that the anonimity of the internet empowered people to be piss-stained jerks. Seeing all the hate and ignorance put to faces is overwhelming. People think free speech means they are entitled to others people’s attention and personal lives. I do not need to participate in that shit, and I definitely never want to look at it.
Personally, I need to be more informed about political theory. There does appear to be an optimal way to things for effective action. I want to be useful in making the world a better place.
