Fediverse

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.

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.

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.

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 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.