The relief when I open up Lemmy or Mastodon. It feels like coming home to an experience I didn’t realise I was missing. Lemmy has grown enough now that I can look at my feed throughout the day and there will be interesting posts, all with engaging comments and conversations. It’s like the internet I grew up on, only better: it’s ran by the people, for the people.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean the fedi isn’t plagued with issues. But it feels fundamentally more culturally healthy than whatever the fuck is going on in big corpo social media.
Lemmy specifically feels like reddit circa 2017 to 2019 and I like it a lot. Its just people posting stuff that’s interesting. While reddit had a like, social hierarchy thing, especially with the reddit gold stuff, Lemmy is a lot better at feeling more community focused.
I think this is what I love. Whenever I open up Lemmy, it’s like a portal to 7 or 8+ years in the past. To when not everything was engagement driven slop (even tho it was well under way to becoming that back then).
Reddit is looking more and more like a video doom scroll website. Lemmy actually has a lot of text based posts and memes.
I don’t go to Reddit anymore, but I imagine it looks like how Facebook looks last time I saw somebody on Facebook, which is to say it’s like LinkedIn but with more bots, meaning a garbage fire being actively and perpetually painted.
I hardly find any interesting posts. It’s mostly memes and tech news.
Be the change you want to see!
I am doing my part . Still lemmy is mostly memes, politics and political tech reports
To be fair the architecture of this place is designed to mitigate centralization and subsequent censorship under centralized networks which is unfortunately inherently political right now, this place is not immune to manipulation but also looking up at the corporate social media world and seeing how much of a problematic dumpsterfire it is underscores why these things are so important and why the Fediverse can be a good vector for politics news.
I agree though, I want more stuff and more diversity of topics and people!
When someone is banned from an instance, the instance do not give them the opportunity to transfer their communities they created and have to restart from zero and those communities become modless. Right now even the promise of anti censorship and portability is not there
It is still definitely deeply flawed, I am not debating that.
Block that stuff if it doesn’t interest you.
what kind of posts do you want to see? as with any new network effect system we have to do the posting to seed it
Fediverse seems like a step in the right direction, but how do I make my feed less depressing ;_;
If you want people to be less depressed, that’s one thing. Maybe you could be the change you want to see in the world, or something.
If you want to just not see depressing things, go back to the matrix and live among them.
Your choice.
Tldr: You’re awoken to the horrors of reality. “Woke”, even. Welcome, Cypher.
how do I make my feed less depress
That’s the interesting part of the “old internet”, you curate your own feed.
Fediverse,Technology, and Privacy are chock full of all the news, and right now, there’s a lot of negative going around.
Start by noticing who’s posting in those forums and blocking the ones that are generally negative. We have a lot of bot posting that lays one way or the other. There’s a Monday morning US time bot that just floods with the most depressing stuff. If you can’t get it to sort out with that, start looking at other technology or news communities. Do the same thing there with blocking doom bots.
You can’t pull Artax out of the quicksand, but you can keep him from sinking so fast.
Post to communities that are less depressing and get more things going
I found this too initially. What I did was (and this may not work for you but it’s probably worth a whirl) only subscribe to easygoing / fun / quirky stuff for my “home” feed which I sort by “scaled” then bail into the top twelve hours of the “All” feed to keep up to date with what’s happening in the world.
A quieter, pleasant home feed is a good start to your day.
Problem I find is that the moment you sub to something popular it swamps everything else
That’s where the scaled thing comes in. It prioritises infrequently posted in communities which I like.
I struggle with this too.
At the moment I have a huge list of filtered keywords to exclude certain topics or words likely to appear in extreme content. It does cut out a lot of content that I don’t want to see, but doesn’t help with general negativity and doesn’t work with image posts.
I’m thinking of setting up my own filtering system with sentiment analysis, OCR and image classification so I can make my feed more balanced.
Unsubscribe from technology that alones changes your feed by a lot
Do you have a gun and some conviction?
The last remaining bastion of Web 1.0. The forums that had held out got absorbed by Reddit. Its fall seemed to crush all that was left.
What the Fediverse is building is over infrastructure that can last. It’s the first chance at something permanent.
there are still some traditional forums around, relevant, and pretty much the de-facto global community hub, e.g. boardgamegeek.com
To those interested, there’s !Forums@sh.itjust.works too =)
Fedi is where it is at!
I like it here. Got permabanned from reddit formoffering general safety advice to protestors in Minnesota in early 2025.
Starting an account with Lemmy has been The closest I’ve come to the glory days of Orange-Red vs Periwinkle, and knowing exactly when the narwhal bacons.
I suspect this site will remain largely unknown for a while, among people that don’t like reading words. I’ll stay a while.
Got permabanned from reddit formoffering general safety advice to protestors in Minnesota in early 2025.
Fucking fascist racist piece of shit spez. May his guards be the first ones to desert him during the apocalypse.
He only wants Nazis and bots to be left
I wonder what this “general safety advice” was that got you banned…
Its cozy. I feel we are still becoming a monoculture, but one built around one very specific type of nerdy person.
I’d say it’s closer to forming clusters instead. Sure some groups may seem more hegemonic for being more incisive, but I can notice some splits in vision.
you and me both! The existence of fediverse has been doing wonders to my mental health.
Lemmy: the Methadone of Reddit addiction!
That is an enormous compliment to the software. If we’re moving ppl even a tiny bit away from psychologically damaging and addictive behaviors that US tech sites cultivate, then we’re doing something right.
This is exactly how I feel. A step in the right direction, where one day casting my phone into the sea is seemingly unattainable perfection
i’m gonna post this on mastodon and give you credit lol
Link.
Hell yeah!
Reddit is supposedly worth $17 billion, and yet this place feels more alive by an order of magnitude to me so what does that say about the value of this place?
@dessalines@lemmy.ml, how do I get in on the series B funding round?
Angel investor: “This lemmy is absolutely my shit. It has so many comments. How much you want for it.”
Me: “No. Go make your own”
Not just in magnetude, but it feels more evenly spread out too. Even communities/subforums that by other standards would be absolutely silent, if you post something, you may still get a reaction, like a comment, a thumbs up, a boost or crosspost, etc.
Honestly yeah. I do have a Reddit account, but I get way more responses and quality interactions here than I do over there anymore. Every comment over there is just someone trying to make a joke these days.
I have a similar experience with mastodon/the microblog part of fediverse as well, so much more interesting than twitter/x.
Priceless
Groupthink here does sometimes hit reddit narwhal beckons levels sometimes, still much better than the modern internet elsewhere
The lack of global karma makes me care a lot less about that, though. Let 'em be mad. If a joke falls flat or the sarcasm wasn’t obvious, then I can just move on.
Some cases of group think, even mob mentality at times, are a culture of the instance/instances of those involved. So if the user spots something in that line, blocking either the instance, or at least the users if instance blocking isn’t available, can do wonders.
I miss Usenet. This is as close as there is.
I never heard of it untill recently, some say it is still around.
To be honest I never really understood what it is.
It was essentially a text-based, decentralized Lemmy/Reddit prior to the web. Different groups you could belong to, with various discussions.
It was more like email threads, in my opinion.
Don’t people still use Usenet?
It used to be something every ISP gave you access to. Now it’s all but gone. Google Groups sort of absorbed it, and then killed it.
Fediverse is great. Funnily though I’ll point out it hasn’t “survived” per se during the internet, it’s more so a new in the past few years right, which proves to me great things and the right idea can still be conceived and created no matter if the current environment is shit - we can always say no and build something better.
The only issue is how difficult it is to onboard. If you don’t spend time building a list of subscribed communities/people, your feed will be very stale.
I’d love to see something like Bluesky’s starter packs. One button to follow a bunch of people/communities.
Isn’t it the exact same with Reddit?
No. Reddit’s onboarding is quite good, because they have curated lists of subreddits they’ll push on new users. For obvious reason, Lemmy shouldn’t have an “official” list.
PieFed pretty much does that
I think people could simulate something with Mastodon’s import/export feature too, though then the user would need to accept files from strangers, and I think we all know where that ends.
Yep, Piefed does that and a bunch more.
it’s alright. there were a few BBS’s I swore I’d never stop connecting to. a few usenet groups… a few email lists… a few web rings, a few bloggers… a few social media sites … etc. etc etc etc
What is BBS? (Gen Z, I’m sorry)
Before internet access was common, and for a while after it did become common but still dialup, you could connect and log-in to a Bulletin Board System that people usually hosted out of their home. It would have a theme, usually, and host a mix of discussions, curated and moderated by the owner, plus file sharing, often piracy or a library of resource material.
It wasn’t unusual to belong to a few of them, and because you were dialing in via phone lines, they were usually in your city due to long distance charges, which meant you could meet up in meatspace.
There was an overlap period where they became internet connected, and a kind of federation developed, and similar internet-only services developed like Hotline that were quite popular for a while (small comeback under way for hotline servers btw).
old timey forums from the 80s and 90s.
bulletin board system
Bulletin Board System. They were online platforms that were local to your city, you connected directly to them through the phone wires. The Internet existed, but the world wide web format had not yet come into being to make it interesting for the majority of people, and it was more expensive, still the abode of academics, military, and a small community of hobbyists.
BBSs were forum-like, accommodated the sharing of small files, and filled with creative and technical people from your area. They peaked in the early nineties.
