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.
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.
Indeed. Most of the subreddits I liked the most were ones with relatively small subscriber counts.
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.
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.