Setting aside Big Tech and surveillance capitalism for a minute — I wonder if fediverse microblogging apps like Mastodon aren’t fairly antisocial and inclined to individualism, while apps like Lemmy are more community and artefact/stuff-to-share centric.
People are complex, societies infinitely more so, but software can nudge us this way or that way too.
I’d be interested to hear what others here think.
The core function of lemmy, is following communities, either built around a topic, region, or anything else.
The core function of mastodon, is following people.
The only way to make microblogging tolerable, IMO is to follow “topic-based” accounts. I might be interested in what a person thinks about a topic, but I’m not interested in what food they ate that day.
There’s also the issue of overwhelming feeds: not everyone can be a celebrity, and there’s a limit to the number of people we can hold in our heads and follow, before our entire day is wrecked. I can’t use most microblogging because its just too overwhelming, and I don’t care about celebrities outside of a few writers or academics.