I’ve only made two posts so far, but everyone has given legitimate and intelligent responses to both. It’s made me realize how not used to that I had become. It’s an overwhelming positive feeling to not be nervous about sharing with this community. Thank you to all of you
@Calvinball I’m not on Lemmy, but I can say that my Fediverse experience was above expectations as well 😁 when I first joined, I thought it would be either a deserted place that I would access whenever I remember (like on XMPP and Tumblr, pretty much) or ridden with alt-right people - the way Gab and other “alternative” freeze-peach networks of such kind are. On the contrary, I actually met the coolest alternatives yet.
The nice part about Federation is that if an instance has problematic people they can just be blocked, exploding-heads.com is an alt right cesspool but most of the big instances on Lemmy block them, and I block them on my own (idk if you’ll see this on Mastodon or wherever you are so hope you do)
And vice versa, if someone’s on Lemmy and I’m on kbin, we’re using the same shared content pool as long as we’re federated and thus we don’t have to worry about sites “dying.” I can’t browse reddit without going to reddit, but I can browse lemmy instances with whatever fediverse instance I please.
I last looked at mastodon years ago, and got bored pretty quickly. It was a nice idea, but lacked…. Something. I came back as a Reddit refugee and found a hashtag for every occasion, a substantially expanded fediverse, and a couple of attempts to offer a Reddit like user experience.
I think that missing something was actually two things: 1. A forum where people can organize around moderated communities 2. (And more importantly) A critical mass of users to generate the content that satiates lurkers
@RoyRogersMcFreely Mastodon is really lacking and it tries to emulate the experience of Twitter - which I also find lacking. If you want the best microblog experience, try Calckey or other Misskey forks.
I don’t know if we want something like 1., as it would risk leading to a form of centralization and influence. But 2. is really important. I’m usually also a lurker, yet I try posting stuff whenever and wherever I can.