I avoided forums growing up because from what I’ve witnessed there was a lot of verbal abuse and so on, but I was into “communities” (basically closed social network long before I heard of myspace or facebook).

For example, I listened to a lot of hip-hop as a teenager. there was no meta algorithm feeding me garbage, but there was a hip hop community website :) It felt more intimate or homegrown if you will.

I’m also from that era of the Internet and you’re so right about smaller communities being better. One great example was Wil Wheaton’s phpBB forum. Probably a hundred active users including Wil and we all got along and more or less policed ourselves.

(Plus I helped him out with some car trouble. Let me repeat that: I helped Wesley Crusher with an engineering problem. One of my proudest moments.)

One of the interesting decisions that they do is that rulebreaking posts are rarely ever deleted. If a person is probated (temp ban) or banned, their comment stays up with a “(User was Probated/Banned for this post)” edited into the post so you can see, and hopefully learn, from the bad behavior. In addition, there’s a ‘Wall of Shame’ section where you can see everyone who’s been actioned against, who the moderator was and the moderation reason.

That’s a really great feature.

I also grew up with forums, but I always hated them tbh. Small communities aren’t inherently better, back in the day there were so many horrible forums for smaller stuff. Every forum had a different culture and most of them were frankly disgusting. Absolutely rampant racism, sexism and homophobia that would put even the worst subreddits (or even fucking 4chan) to shame. Also mods and admins who wouldn’t allow any views opposing their own, to a degree much, much worse than on reddit seen today.
Smaller subforums on one big platform are the solution imo. A sub with millions of people is gonna suck, an isolated forum with ten thousand people is also gonna suck, while a sub with that number could be an amazing place on a website with millions of users. That’s how it is on reddit right now. There are plenty, they’re just drowned out by all the garbage.
Personally, I also don’t want that “community” feel you speak so highly of. I just want to be informed about the things I like and discuss it openly while remaining anonymous. I have communities irl if I want to connect with people, I don’t need or want that online.

Lemmy was the first Fediverse that actually worked for me, because I don’t like Twitter and don’t care to follow randos I’ve never heard of. I like anonymous forums.

Having more people does help, but only to a certain extent. At some point, it just becomes difficult to moderate and having a higher number of casual users that don’t give a shit about the rules.

The thing that I am still struggling to wrap my smooth brain around, is that I have an account on a widely federated lemmy instance. Allegedly, I should also see content from mastadon and other federated services. How do I do that? How would I even phrase the question so that a search engine could provide useful results?

actually, imma ask chat gpt. if it spits out anything usefull, i’ll report back.

This is the most often cited reason that celebrities, reporters etc. say that keeps them from using Mastodon.

People ignore the needs of the vast majority of the userbase to the peril of us all. Mastodon could have worked to reach out to those content creators to give them what they demanded as a deal breaker, but instead now we’ve lost them to Bluesky and will in all likelihood have to wait for enshittification of that platform to ever have another chance at that.

Likewise the Threadiverse works for us who use Arch Linux btw, and to have conversations with internet randos (we are downright kind here, or at least we can be, although that’s virtually gone over on Reddit, outside of tiny niche subs with barely any content, much as we have here:-), but I don’t know how we can attract the content creators, especially when the audience for their content is not enough for them to bother with (AND it’s “too complex to use” - I mean it’s not, except… isn’t it though? Like where’s the modmail? or a notification if your comment gets removed/locked? why does viewing it from different instances show different sets of comments, and also different upvotes/downvotes?!? why does join-lemmy website want to send me to Lemmy.ml, and why oh why didn’t someone tell me that I can’t criticize Russia, China, or North Korea there!? It would have been nice if that had been WRITTEN DOWN SOMEWHERE!?!? maybe the side-bar would have been a good place to put it, like the “Rules” section?!?).

The experience on Lemmy (unlike Linux, no /s here) is objectively terrible, it’s just that we here prioritize different factors and are willing to put up with its many (Many MANY) inconveniences in order to use a FOSS platform. But others have their own priorities, and that’s okay - everyone should be free to use what they want. The downside to that is that outside of Linux and generic content like memes and news, there is very little content available here, especially for niche interests. Hence why the content creators remain on Reddit bc that’s where their audience is (except the ones who simply unplugged from social media entirely). i.e. fuck spez, but… also, he was right. He really can treat his users poorly, and enough of them will remain to keep it afloat, rather than come here where it’s “difficult to use”, and Lemmy moves very slowly to address those needs (e.g. to allow for account migration, where e.g. messages sent to the old place will be forwarded to the new).

“Portable identities” is a major feature of Mastodon and ActivityPub platforms in general. It’ll be on Lemmy one day too.

Your past comments are still available even if you switch to a new account

The infrastructure is there, and most of the features are there, but the content comes from content creators and they’re not here yet.

For example, we have grimdank, but we don’t have vezimira and emmawatnot. We have users who repost their content, but they’re not posting here directly.

That’s the spirit. Reddit and all other social media died for me during the exodus 1 1/2 years ago. Since then i go to lemmy and I’m fine. Tbh I’m not really sure if more user will not also pull commercial interests into the fediverse and if that is something I’m looking forward to, but for now, everything seems like reddit around 2010, not too big but big enough to not being out of content after scrolling for 10 mins.

Yep, dont really use mastodon or even bluesky, my twitter groupchat is still my hs friends and I like it when they arent talking about sports. I do post there more than I do on X, I miss twitter I used to tweet so much, before the changes. (Stopped seing friends likes on my feed, I followed funny ppl and without that it was over)

I have to disagree with you there, small niche communities for your interests free of outside influences are always nice as a safe harbor. Sure occasionally it gets taken over by assholes, but you can always find another. Reddit being a central area for communication leaves it way to open for abuse by power hungry people or people pushing a political / social agenda no matter what side of the spectrum they’re on.

I’m the type to beat my head against a wall until the wall breaks. Then through that hole, I lead my friends. Fewer and fewer of my friends follow me through such holes. Last time I did such, I brought all my friends to discord (and now I regret it). It is hard as fuck to convince normies to adopt a new platform. If they’re not already invested, it will take a serious investment for them to give half a shit. I was able to get some people on discord by promising them that I was running a dnd campaign (I was at the time, but it fell apart shortly therefafter), and those people haven’t been on discord since.

How do I convince them that lemmy is the future? I don’t think I can. Fundamentally, lemmy is objectively better than reddit (not for features, but because lemmy won’t ban you for mentioning green mario and other similar administrative bullshits). I wasn’t able to convince them to use reddit back when reddit was good!

I jumped over here a couple weeks ago at the request of another redditor and it’s like a breath of fresh air.

I still check out reddit for a couple subs that just don’t have enough interaction over here “yet”.

I’ve mentioned lemmy a couple times over there and got replies like " it’s just too complicated " etc. and now that I think about it they were most likely bots 🤔

Ima go back to the cesspool and investigate

Exactly! That’s how people usually argue against the Fediverse. People have literally been indoctrinated into believing the internet is centralised.

Refugee here. Think I’d agree. A subconscious bias / misunderstanding we bought into

I don’t think it’s too complicated, but it is noticeably more complicated than joining traditional social media. People often get immediately freaked out by the whole concept of instances. I know everybody keeps trying to use the email comparison, but that just is not working. People cannot connect the dots between email and something like Instagram.

I lately have a saying:
“If it’s not FOSS, it’s not worth your time”

Personally, I prefer an intellectual barrier to entry. It’s one of the things that made the internet of the early days so much better than today.

Well said indeed

I would argue it is closer to 60 years.

I love the user level control. block urls, instances, communities, users. I really would love like trust cafe where you can rank things from 0-100 where 0 is block and 100 is subscribe and your feed will prioritize posts from things you rank higher for the in between values.

on taking control of moderating the contents. We can stop fascists posts

.ml tankies and right-wingers: “Wouldn’t that be…CeNsOrsHiP”

There are a lot of people who prioritize convenience above all else. Why go shop at a butcher, baker, green grocer, and a liquor store when you can go to one place and get it all? Doesn’t matter that the separate entities are specialized and therefore more knowledgeable about the product vs. Walmart where asking an employee is the most useless thing ever.

Same with social media or things like Google. People are lazy. Why shop around when Facebook gives you everything? Why learn how to use the address bar when Google will do the work for you.

So the fediverse goes against that in that it asks users to actually think for a moment about things and requires them to shop around… which, that’s just too much work for the average person.

It’s more like supporting “open to all” maker spaces. Many contribute to what’s there and its existence itself.

I’m actually a fan, but I get what you mean. I feel like she just writes what’s on her mind, when she’s writing for her named website. Her writing for The Index is a bit more by the books internet journalism.

And yeah I agree sharing this on here is a bit of a circle jerk, but articles like this get shared around in the mainstream and show people still captured by the big platforms another way. I’ve definitely emailed a couple of her articles around to friends, and I can’t be the only one.

I hate the idea that everything should be monetised, that only gives us loong videos with laughing heads and so on “to keep you engaged”.

We’re here without all that crap and well the fediverse is definitely less active but it’s content made by people because they like it, they believe in it. Not to shake the money tree.

There are a million and one great reasons to be here on Lemmy, but using it to get cash from fellow users wallets is not one of them.

I’d rather have one unix surrealism than a thousand influencers with lots of followers. These days, I want to be among people who interact as equals, who share ideas, who cooperate in a genuine way. If we try a shortcut to more users through money, what is the point?

I feel like this is comparing the mall to the park.

They both attract people, but not always the same people, or for the same reasons. And that’s OK.

I get what you’re saying though, because I’ve felt this way when trying to come up with reasons for people (sole proprietors) to get with the fedi, but maybe this place is just not for influencers - not like the corp platforms, anyway. I think the fediverse will attract more and more people with its network effects, but probably never all of the people all of the time.

My modest hope is that the fedi bleeds the big platforms just enough to put them in their place and keep from enshittifying to infinity.

That’s just like, your opinion man.

You navigate from your local instance. So like you just use hyperlinks (like here on lemmy, I’m clicking around, but my URL still shows slrpnk.net/... - yours probably shows sh.itjust.works/...), or if you try to do something like follow/reply/boost/etc on another instance, it’ll prompt you to connect from your own.

So like here I’m looking at a post on mastodon.social, which I don’t have an account on. If I just type in my home instance in the pop-up modal there, then it’ll complete the action from my home instance. If you’re already signed in on home instance with a cookie then it’ll to it automatically.