Fediverse

I do too. Mastodon is great software, but I’ve never been much of a user of the micro blogging format. The Reddit/hacker news format has been my preference for many years.

Yeah same here, Reddit is my mindless scrolling app of choice, not Twitter, so when I tried to use Mastodon I just kinda stood there not knowing what to do

I love being able to read and immerse myself is specific communities and whatnot, and specifically I love Reddit for the discourse, people posting in a community, replying to posts, and replaying to those replies, and so on

So Lemmy has just become my jam, so happy that Reddit has an open source federated alternative now, even if they reverse their API debacle I'm still gonna keep using this app

I never really liked Twitter as a concept. It feels like it's built on an "old man yells at cloud" concept where people just shout their thoughts and nobody gains anything from it.

By comparison forums are there to foster discussions and communities. I thought Mastodon would be better but I spent 5 minutes and it's exactly the same nonsense.

Yep, Same here! When things went south with Twitter, I tried switching to Mastodon, but after several months, I haven't become fond of it. Its interface is so terrible and difficult to navigate. When I heard of Lemmy as an alternative to Reddit, the first thing that came to my mind was, 'Oh, please don't be like Mastodon...' and I'm glad that it is not! I like the fact that it is kinda' similar to Reddit (interface-wise), but at the same time, it is decentralized, which means it is (hopefully) going in the right direction.

I'd say this type of layout that focuses more on long form textual content is better for tech savvy people who are likely to stick with the fediverse than the twitter clone that Mastodon was.

I'm Gen Z and when I was little my parents were (rightfully) very careful with how much time I spent on the internet. Even so, I saw from a distance the old internet, where forums were a thing and you could find lots of cool websites that people made for reasons that weren't limited to promoting or selling something.

When I discovered Reddit it was like I could somehow experience that time, but for many the decline had already started.

I love interacting with people, asking and answering questions, discovering and making others discover new things, but I just can't stand feeling like everything and everyone is trying to sell me something anymore.

Now that I'm here, I feel like this could be the place, at least for a while.

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.

I'm gonna be honest Lemmy feels like a very chill place unlike Reddit or Facebook, it feels like defusing a bomb when talking on certain subreddits

Strongly agree. Mastodon is alright and I use it a little, but the twitter-type format never really worked for me. I feel like when I have to follow individual people I usually end up either following no one or being forced to follow people who post things that interest me sometimes but a lot of the time post things that really don't. Following particular topics or threads just seems much more natural to me; I can look at exactly what interests me and nothing more.

Lemmy and Reddit promote engagement, discourse and even arguments... ok, especially arguments.

Mastodon feels like a list of billboards that I am disconnected from.

"Oh, that's news"

But no one talks between eachother about anything. I almost feel like the nature of the layout of Twitter and it's alternatives are almost by design to make the users a little more self serving.

Mastodon has every user standing on a soapbox yelling at crowds, Lemmy is more of a public forum.

Yeah in general, I like forums better than the format Twitter is in. I like topic-based discussions more than discussions spawned from short, potentially out-of-context messages.

Yeah the twitter style of social media has always confused me, I feel like there's much more community and fun here than mastodon but I use both

Mastodon has big “this is the year of the Linux desktop” energy, just self-absorbed posting and no collaboration between users. Aside from a rare few exceptions, it’s a bunch of frumps. All the shitposters went to BlueSky.

Me too!

I think I will explore the other fedisites like Plemora or Calckey to see if I like it better.

Servers running these apps connect to the same fediverse Mastodon servers connect to. As does Lemmy. All these apps just give you different ways to view the same social network, so which software you use makes less difference to what you can see than which server you use. Because there is no global view of the network, what you'll find in hashtag searches or federated timelines in the micro-posting apps (Mastodon, Pler/Akkoma Miss/CalcKey) depends on which accounts are being followed from the server hosting your account.

I'm new to Lemmy's way of viewing the 'verse, so I'm not sure what the equivalent is here. But I think what @dave describes in this thread about Communities hosted on other Lemmy servers taking a while to show up in searches here is relevant: https://lemmy.nz/comment/28480

I kind of see Mastodon as a Twitter replacement and Lemmy as a Reddit replacement. Each has specific use cases. I can see both platforms having value in my online engagement.