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?
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.