Fediverse

The fundamental flaw with microblogging is that people follow other people. Those people then spew a bunch of random posts on all sorts of topics. Very few people are consistently interesting, leading to a timeline / feed of random crap with a few nuggets of goodness scattered through it. This is unavoidable because of the person-follows-person architecture.

There are other pernicious effects that come from centering the individual. The narcissism, defensiveness, dunking are all enflamed, rewarded and promoted. Mastodon avoids some of this by not using a recommendation algorithm but the fundamental mistake of centering of the individual remains.

Also short-form content tends to be brainrot that destroys attention spans and reduces complex issues to bite-sized hand grenades to lob at The Other.

Combine hand grenades with narcissism and news/politics and the result is kinda predictable in hindsight.

I have absolutely zero interest in participating in any kind of social media that isn't an "anonymous forum." I have no interest in following particular individuals; I'm really only interested in having discussions with random internet users that share common interests. I used PhpBB instances, IRC, and before that BBS systems, and I'm really just looking for the same kind of experience.

So I will never use Mastodon; I think it's a fantastic alternative to Xitter, but the format just doesn't interest me in the slightest.

Micro-blogging sucks because it fosters a 'community' of people who are only there to gain popularity/followers.

Reddit/lemmy style social media is more focused on sharing interesting things and having discussions.

Microblogging is mature now and I think it sucks as a communication medium. I think discussion focused sites are a much healthier experience.

the threadiverse is group discussion. the twitterverse is 'soapbox', or 'old man shouts into the void'

My biggest problem with microblogging sites is that I have never been able to get a good, interesting content feed out of them without also getting lots of noise. Following hashtags usually gives me a mountain of retweets (or whatever) and trying to follow groups of related people/subject matter experts gives me lots of irrelevant content. Community-style social media forces people to more strictly categorize their content, I think.

Before Lemmy, my first experience with fediverse was through Mastodon.

While I still have accounts across a few Mastodon instances, I'm not using them anymore. Here's why: it always felt like I was talking to myself and, well, this is something I'm already used to, I don't need a social network account to do what I already do IRL, talking to myself.

Sometimes I write poetry, short storytelling, reflective thoughts, etc. The majority of the instances have a limitation of 500 characters, which is not enough for fairly long poetry and storytelling. I found some open-for-registration instances allowing more than 500 characters, but it always felt like a personal echo chamber. I also tried other fediverse platforms, such as WriteFreely, Pleroma and Mitra, but I had the same feeling of isolation.

Lemmy, on the other hand, feels like I'm really socializing. On Lemmy, I can talk and hear back from humans. I can be known to different opinions and views. Lemmy seems to have more "engagement" than other fediverse platforms (I don't like the term "engagement", but I have no other term to describe what I'm intending to describe).

So I deleted everything on Mastodon (thanks for the "Automated Post Deletion" feature), except for the account, and focused my fediverse activity on Lemmy only.

Beyond fediverse, I'm also trying Geminispace which I recently discovered. So far, it's been like another personal echo chamber as well. I'm not sure how much of my time and effort I'll continue to invest there.

Individual user driven content where the focus in more on individual accounts I don't really like. Which is why stuff like Twitter, tiktok, shorts, Instagram hasn't strongly hooked me like forum based social media.

I prefer social media where it's more users all fading into the background with the attention given to the theme of discussion or showcasing as opposed to more influencer based social media.

Forums are for narrower topics or subject, while the world is your oyster when it comes to microblogging. I'd feel limited on a forum site, whereas here I can follow everything from gaming to dog posts.

I like mastodon a lot. I have basically found my hashtags, people and news sources to follow and so my feed is always filled with content to read. Engagement is fairly good on my instance, at least with popular topics.

But I only have 20 followers in 18 months of being on it so if that kind of thing is important to you then it can be something of a negative. Harder to build an audience without an algorithmic recommendation feature feeding your posts to strangers. I find that to be a positive though.

Having a larger and more culturally, ideologically and demographically diverse community plays HEAVILY into that side of the Fedivere's favor. I enjoy my time over there far more than over here. People here are extremely touchy and culty, while people over there seem pretty chill. I also think the frontends over there have matured better than the forum software, although we're starting to catch up, and third-party frontends here absolutely outclass the default.

It's like a light bulb reading these comments. I've barely touched social media, wondered why it's of no interest to me, but suddenly I grok it. I prefer the intelligent conversation (and stupid takes too, like mine) of a forum like Lemmy, where there's a much better IQ/batting average than 'social media'.

I personally don't value the microblogging format and never really gave it a shot. It's just personal preference. In my opinion, the site format mechanically encourages low-effort junk, and there's enough of that on sites like this. I only use microblogs as an inconvenient feed for specific niche news updates I can't get elsewhere, like I would an RSS-type feed.

With that said, I support people posting on fediverse microblogging sites rather than on xitter or bluesky. I have to jump through a lot of moving hoops to even view xitter feeds without an account.

Started a post with a topic in the same ballpark:

https://lemmy.ml/post/24189598