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.
Fediverse
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;
- What is the fediverse?
- Fediverse Platforms
- How to run your own community
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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'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 🤣
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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
Good perspective. Everyone is happy in an echochamber, but nobody really grows without some kind of adversity, and even inane differences in opinion can be healthy.
But, people tend to focuse too much on differences. The world is enormous, people should be excited to learn something new, not threatened by it.
@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