this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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I hate big tech controlling social media. I desperately want social media to be federated.

I really love community-driven social media like Reddit. Lemmy feels… too small. I really loved that Reddit let me jump into any niche hobby, and instantly I had a community. Lemmy, you’ll be lucky if that community even exists, and if it does, chances are nobody has posted in ages.

On the other hand, Lemmy is full of political content lately. I’ve basically been doom scrolling everything US election-related, and it’s really starting to take a toll on my mental health.

I know I can filter content. I know I can post and be the change I seek. Yet, it feels like an uphill battle.

Not sure what the point of this is, or if it’s even the right community to vent about this. I just really want to replace Reddit, but I find myself going back more and more (e.g. r/homekit is very active compared to Lemmy version).

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 minutes ago* (last edited 2 minutes ago)

From small seeds... I had noticed a huge improvement regarding lemmy posts and threads, before the US election, and then it all kind of went backwards.

But if you have any questions about anything - niche or otherwise, you should post them on lemmy, helping it to grow faster. Even if the answers can already be found in other community forums.
You should get specific replies to your question anyway, but also anyone coming behind you won't have to go to reddit or any other place for the answer. It requires everyone to help, but questions are the fastest way to grow in most cases. Not including the likes of subs that can post original content, A TON of reposts on them too, but some OC. But mainly asking for help with anything should get people with knowledge on the subject replying. With the idea that eventually many answers can be found here without having to go elsewhere. Start 'spamming' your genuine questions now..

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 minutes ago

Lurk on Reddit. Post on Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 35 minutes ago

I like lemmy because I can't doomscroll

[–] [email protected] 3 points 38 minutes ago (1 children)

Well you should come hang out with us at Out of Context Comics! Not a lot of politics but a lot of gay innuendo. A lot.

https://lemmy.world/c/outofcontextcomics

[–] [email protected] 2 points 35 minutes ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 31 minutes ago

Welcome aboard!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 50 minutes ago

i would also like to like lemmy.

Unfortunately it's userbase seems to have a fairly significant infection of stupidity. (also the lemmy platform is just, underbaked, in general)

But i'm starting to think my standards of not being completely uneducated and spouting literal bullshit on things, is too high for most of the population...

I think i just have a problem with all of humanity, to be honest.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

The timing of it all just didn't add up. Reddit started small, too. By the time Reddit failed, Fediverse was still in its infancy, and the communities either stayed in corporate hell or found somewhere else.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

It's all I have for proper threading. I won't forgive Reddit for how they treated me and my communities. But, if you are willing to use Reddit, I'm sure it's going the have user advantage (and because of that niche interest advantage) for quite a while. I hope it serves your needs and brings you joy.

You might try building a community here, but that is the "slow boring of hard wood" and it can be difficult to find joy in, especially at first.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Well Lemmy is a possible replacement for Reddit but, putting aside my strong biais for Lemmy, it doesn't have to be a Reddit replacement for everyone and it is still building itself up. Here is a few tips to improve your time in hope you'll find on the fediverse the space you look for :

  • Try write post on dead looking community. Follower counts have a hard time synchronizing btw instances. A lot of people may be waiting for some activity to happened.
  • Try opening niche community in their original instance. The posts wrote on a distance community before the first lemming of your instance opens it are invisible and must be added one by one (by entering it URL in your instance search function). You might found interesting content you missed.
  • Try reposting content you see on Reddit on Lemmy. Copy-Paste it and add something like "R*eddit content - OP : @[email protected]" somewhere in the post. You might not have as much response as OP but it can stir up interesting conversation.
  • Try to make an account on the twittoverse (Mastodon, *key...). The community on the microblogging side of the fediverse is much bigger and diverse. You will be able to boost your lemmy content and link it to hashtag so more people may see it. Answer to the original post will even show up on Lemmy. But second level comments will not fediverse well.
  • Try to post articles, general question or to do anything to bring some animation to your niche community. Regularity in low engagement content will still bring people that will sooner or later start to engage.
  • Don't hesitate to crosspost any related post to your favorite community. Community are silos, instances are silos and the lemming populating is very fragmented. By linking communities together, you'll bring people with the same hobbies than you to the community they did not find out yet. -Don't hesitate to answer at old post. Us lemmings don't have enough activity to complain about people writing back months later, especially in niche community.

Cheers!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 45 minutes ago

Thank you for taking the time to write a thorough and actionable response! Great tips!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 hours ago

You're right in one sense; the community is small and can have an echo chamber effect like any "small village." But you can also try other instances, or other Fediverse things or start your own. It goes like this; Reddit had success because they served you interesting things on a silver platter, using extensive venture capital to make it as slick and addictive and popular as possible. Lemmy is not built on capital, at least not on the same scale as Reddit; it is built on labor. You gotta decide what your ideal is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Cath 22 ? If you cant be ass'd moving why would others, you're just enabling the enshitifcation to continue

Community is what you make it.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

It's still a tiny echo chamber like it was a couple months ago when I cut back on Lemmy use. It can get pretty repetitive and boring to read. I came back to Reddit because the user base was larger and there were more perspectives I could hear from.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago

I am still using both. I have never been a big poster, but I like to think I can engage in discussion on just about anything,except Linux, and I really try (but fail) to avoid political shit, and so I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.

But I'll keep coming back, I'll hopefully contribute in some mental way to the growth, and perhaps niche subs can grow in popularity. One of my personal favorite subs on Reddit is homeimprovement, and it's simply a matter of quantity as far as getting it just as good here.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Reading the comments here made me realize something.

It’s nice to have good content for niche communities that you enjoy but that’s always been a tall order. As in, a lot of things have to go right to get that organic community feeling and I’ve honestly always thought of it as a privilege and not a right.

I’ve seen plenty of communities die for various reasons or just been in a position where I didn’t have passion to go and talk about my niche interests.

So what’s my point? Niche communities are the icing on the cake of a good platform. When we mostly have for profit platforms and little main stream interest in standardized alternatives, you got to be more realistic.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah I want to get off Reddit but this place is small and is very political. It's a tiny echo chamber. A very very small one.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 hours ago

Imagine taking the technical and stubborn creme of the crop redditors and that's who's mostly on lemmy. It used to be those who wanted an open source community, but it got it's user bumps during the reddit exodus. I would have never heard of lemmy if it wasn't for the fact I used reddit exclusively through the redditsync app. And when that shut down I came here naturally on the backbone of the developer going here.

I've been here since. The community isn't bad. I still get responses on niche things like gardening and fish tank related issues I had. It's just 3 comments vs 30. But somehow it's better. Because on reddit I can't even get a post posted half the time, and the other half I find out I'm banned from that sub because of a comment I made years ago on a completely unrelated post on a sub I don't even know.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 13 hours ago

Unfortunately, there's no easy way around it. Fediverse is small, and while we should always encourage people's migration, it will probably remain small for the time being.

And freedom to express everything combined with people learning their behavior on algorithmic content will be an issue until a strong Fediverse culture is established. The times of pioneers are over, the times of "truly a place for everyone" are not yet there, and in between, we have a very weird mixture, sometimes bringing out the worst of many people.

I hope Fediverse will survive through this phase, and if yes, bright times will be ahead. But it will take a lot of work. Many non-political communities have already started blocking political content, and for the time being, I believe that's for the better. People need a place to chill and have a corner of their own, not face what they ran away from in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Use one of the apps so you can filter out content. "Trump, Trump's, Republicans, Musk" seems to take care of the problem so far.I think I have some communities blocked and maybe a user or two aswell.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

I don't want another app. I use lemmy exclusively in the browser, and that feature is missing :(

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago

Try using one of the PWA's, like Voyager. Just go to vger.app in your browser. It's still a browser-based front end, but it has more features than the default interface

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago

You should check out something like Tesserect, it's a 3rd party front end for Lemmy that includes a lot of quality of life features, including word filtering. The demo is here: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/

If you like it, you could petition lemmy.world to offer it as an option directly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

Yeah, I withheld using an app until very recently for that exact feature. I miss the browser for other features though, not sure what to do. I'm using connect, maybe I'll try a couple others or some other solution.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 14 hours ago

I know I can filter content. I know I can post and be the change I seek. Yet, it feels like an uphill battle.

It doesn't look like you mentioned subscriptions, which gets you out of the 'all' / 'filtering' side of things entirely. But just as with Reddit, you'll need to spend time building your personal feed over time and tweaking it.

The good news is that there's no limit to your subscriptions (unlike Reddit's cap of 50 displayed at any one time), but that you'll need to use the right tools to search the Fediverse to find those communities you want to subscribe to.

The main tool I typically use seems to have a bug right now (based on the recent software upgrade?) but I suspect will be back up in a few days. You might take a look at this, tho, plus other resources.

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