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 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
Yes, neither is better than the other, they both fill the voids left by the failures of big companies.
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.
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.
The irony of people downvoting this because they disagree with you 😅 Does Reddiquette still apply here?
Then you search controversial topics and find interesting stuff
I think the upvote/downvote system just allows for a larger community before it becomes too big to be a good community
You should take a look at this instance: https://fedibb.ml/
Ah yeah. That has the fascade that I applaud.
Thank you. I will make an account when I get the time (I prefer not to make major decisons on my phone!).
I know that feeling! Like there’s not enough space to properly contextualize what you’re doing!
I think that instance is more a proof of concept, but you might be able to sign up still. The person behind it has made it available for anyone to use and I’m pretty sure if you’re on an instance that uses it then all of lemmy will be in the same style!
edit: If you’re interested in more info https://c.im/@youronlyone/110519684986917117
Thank you.
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.
I miss the predecessors to forums. I loved when it all was not web based. Majordomo and nntp.
I’m gonna be honest Lemmy feels like a very chill place unlike Reddit or Facebook, it feels like defusing a bomb when talking on certain subreddits
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 🤣
someone “actually famous” is gonna join in and will inevitably get bullied off. i’d throw a RemindMe! here but i don’t think anyone has set up a bot for that here yet
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I mean commie hating (targeted on the main devs) will certainly be part of it in right-wing-media ^^
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).
lol, yeah! I hated posting an even slightly unpopular opinion on reddit. Just downvotes and insults returned.
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.
It does get awkward trying to follow a thread, especially when it branches out to islands of discussion.
The problem feels a lot more topological, like the micro posts are fine, but the view is bad. Reading the discussions takes more effort than it should, they need s different organizational structure than the collapsed vertical representation.
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 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.
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.
They’re different kinds of experiences.
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.
Thank you for helping evolve my perspective!
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.
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 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’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.
I’ve had the exact same experience as you lol.
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
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.
@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 never thought about it that way, but yeah it feels like we’re in the future 🤯
I keep saying that it’s wild living in the future!
…usually related to something amazing happening in space travel or AI but I suppose the fediverse can join that list
High Five from across the universe!
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.
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
Yeah, so far I fucking love lemmy! Open source software for the fucking win!
Fuck yeah!
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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That’s a great way of looking at it! (First post ever)
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.
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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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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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.
