Usually a lurker on most platforms. Never really been into social media. Even in the Msn, Myspace and early Facebook days, something just didn’t click with me. Been using Reddit for years, but lately, its beginning to feel more and more like any other social media. Asked Claude for alternatives, landed here. I don’t know why I immediately felt a sense of calmness that I can only remember feeling back in early 2000s internet days. If this site is so similar to Reddit (or at least what it used to be), why does it feel so different?
Welcome! I hope you like it here.
Here’s a bit of Lemmy lore: we have an instance called lemmy.ml. If you see a community or user from there, they’re the insane ones. For some reason they get a kick out of bootlicking Mao, Stalin, and in general China and Russia. Now as it’s the election season in the US, you often see users from there advocating for not voting.
I was banned from their meme community for trying to correct a historically very inaccurate meme, and once a user from there let me know that 60% North Koreans actually think it’s the best country on earth or some other stupid bullshit (sincerely trying to argue in favor of dictatorships).
But otherwise it’s great here, and hating on .ml kind of nicely brings us all together. I’d like to see a bit more niche communities become more active, but I’m sure we’ll get there eventually.
What I like about the fediverse that no matter how deranged anyone here is it’s all kinda cute compared to other social media. Regardless of whether it’s another user, a moderator, an admin, or even a platform developer, the power dynamics are fundamentally impossible to get anywhere close to the level of imbalance as the centralised social media have. Not to mention that most of fedi platforms and tools around them like third party clients are open source which reinforces things even further.
Another cool thing is that one could just start working on a new platform, hook into existing userbase, and focus on innovating instead of trying to get users onto it to justify the effort.