resisting enshitification through federation, and talking to humans instead of bots. not seeing covert ads on the front page. being able to talk about anti-hegemonic anti-billionaire topics openly without getting banned.

It’s a fairly clean slate. We’re establishing a new place for people but interested in corporate social media.

When people settle new territory, there’s nothing there. Everything you want, you either need to build it yourself or wait for someone else to get around to it when they have a chance. If you aren’t going to be a producer, you’re going to find slim pickings.

I came here expecting a little more than what is even here 3 years later. But I liked the tightness of the community and that when I posted something, it wasn’t instantly drowned out by a hundred other comments.

Superbowl was dead after the first couple of months, and I had really enjoyed it on Reddit and didn’t want it to die here. I started posting what photos I had from previous travels, and when I ran out, I looked for places in all 50 states where people could see owls in person. Then I started doing daily research. Eventually that wasn’t enough, and now I volunteer working with wild animals, including my beloved raptors.

Every day I enjoy talking to my fellow lemmings. I get enough comments and do enough posts to keep me occupied. There are some users I really love and I can remember personal details about them, and I notice when they aren’t around for a bit or I think about them if they’re going through personal stuff. I enjoy working at the animal rehab where I get hands on with amazing animals and work with some of the best folks anywhere.

If I would have sat there and let everyone else do the work, I would have given up here long ago. But I looked for a niche to make my own, and now people look forward to my posts and I look forward to their reactions. And developing that relationship helped me find something in my office life that I love and enjoy more than anything I’ve ever done before.

You’re barely a number at Reddit. Here you can be anything, it’s not like there’s much competition.

The actually good feed, on reddit OR on the fediverse, has always been the Subscribed feed. Not all or local. It’s worth the effort to curate a nice big follow list that actually delivers the niche content you want, that’s what I do

I like talking to real people. To me that’s a benefit.

Reddit also feels like it’s gotten less friendly to me as a woman. That’s just been my personal feeling.

There was a time when there was no content here, but people came because of what it stands for. Decentralisation, freedom from monetisation and corporate censorship, etc. The fact that that the content is now comparable to reddit is a huge achievement. And you can still visit your niche communities on reddit. No one’s going to ban you for using both.

I thought the main draw of the Fediverse was the idea of finding a community where you feel like you belong, that fits your interests, but the structure seems to work against that

The main draw is the federated core principles. The specialized community part is sort of a secondary effect.

If Reddit doesn’t like your community, your comments, or your account in general, you’re gone.

If Reddit wants to make more money off you by forcing ads into their pages and app, most users who don’t know how to use an alternate frontend are screwed.

And if Reddit decides they get a legal right to use all your content for AI training, sell your data to advertisers, and add a subscription fee on top, you don’t get a choice.

If a federated instance decides they want to cram ads in, the entire federated network of Lemmy/PieFed instances doesn’t get affected, and the content from that instance can still be viewed without ads.

Reddit is a monopoly, and thus carries monopoly power over how the platform and its communities operate. The fediverse is distributed, and no instance carries monopoly power over the others. This resists enshittification.

Now, it’s true there’s less activity here, but that’s not always a bad thing, nor is it unexpected. It makes moderation easier, karma farming isn’t really a thing, and a smaller platform is just naturally going to have less people engaging with it. But you’re here now, and there’s now 4 posts and 1 comment that otherwise would not exist had you not joined.

Every new user makes the fediverse more valuable for others. If there’s a community you want to exist, start it, and eventually other people will find it too if people who are interested in it join the fediverse.

I’m not here to tell you that this is perfect, or that it’s always better to have less people. Having more people means more opinions, niche communities, etc. But you don’t get there in a day, and the fediverse is only growing.

We have thematic instances, but as soon as you look at the “All” feed, it just flattens everything back into one generic Reddit clone. If you only look at your local instance to avoid that, you’re just isolating yourself, and at that point, you might as well just use a multireddit on Reddit without needing to make a new account.

Remember that you can follow communities outside your instance, and that is your algorithm. Reddit figures out what you like, and shows you more of it. Lemmy/PieFed asks you what you like, and you have to tell it what to show you more of. I particularly enjoy PieFed because it has “feeds” that combine multiple communities into a larger bundle so it’s easy to follow many of them.

If you rely on the “All” feed, that’s no different than going to the homepage of Reddit and saying “show me the top posts for today”. If you follow communities you like, that’s like going to Reddit and saying “show me my personalized feed.” The only difference is that you are responsible for personalizing your feed, because there is no algorithm. It’s not the most user-friendly, but it also resists algorithmically-optimized retention, which I think we all know isn’t great for our attention spans.

The benefit you get from using the fediverse is not being reliant on a corporation’s algorithm to determine what you should see, and being on a network that inherently resists enshittification and routes around censorship. The goal is that it becomes large enough for these more niche communities to find an audience larger than just the few who started them.

You know what else I don’t see here? Ads.

To me, it’s the resistance against enshittification on the principle of interopability. Also, most servers are run by volunteers and donations, not corporations that will eventually squeeze profit from you.

Knowing there’s a lower reason to get data mined.

When we aren’t competing for top comments then there’s no pressure to post witty stuff.

The more people draw from reddit is like playing an MMO with a bunch of bots with tons of empty servers. Here it feels like a private server that’s more relaxed.

To be fair there’s a lack of niche that sometimes I go to reddit for. but when it gets too loud (politics, controversy). It’s best to look somewhere quiet. It’s kinda like option calls, on reddit your comment can spike overnight and you’ll get that reddit karma dopamine. But the lows can be harsh when people start getting combative.

Tldr lemmy is more slower paced and less addicting.

On the cool part of Lemmy, imperialists are first toyed with by the users like a cat batting around a bug, and are then promptly banned

The fact that it’s not reddit is a huge benefit. Also, the smaller overall community is an advantage for moderation and seems to result in a nicer experience.

The quality of discourse here is much higher and more varied in breadth of opinion than on any corporate platform I’ve experienced in years, even with the occasional asshole popping up here and there. At least on Lemmy the assholes are easier to avoid and predict (e.g. certain instances attract certain types).

What we lose in missing out on niche gaming discussion is worth what is gained, to me. Also, here it’s small enough that we can be the change we want to see, so if there’s something missing you can always just make a community and start posting about whatever it is, and people will probably find your posts pretty quickly.

Biggest for me is no promoted garbage. Second is that I can have more indepth conversations than on Reddit. Your replies can get seen if you post on “Hot” even if they’re not cheesy one-liners. Quality of discussion is far better than my last few years of using Reddit full time (until 2023).

Once in a while I glance at the Reddit website and there’s just so much short form video on the front page that it’s so annoying to know what’s going on.

Of course the more popular discussion topics (USA, tech, politics) are largely going to be the same as Reddit.

One advantage of this model is that moderation is more tailored to the instance topics of interest, without losing too much of the wider sphere. So .world can handle most of the popular general topics, but mander can handle moderation of topics from a more scientific lens, .dbzer0 can handle the intricacies around copyright law, .blahaj zone vehemently protects users right to call themselves whatever they wish, so on and so forth. With Reddit, if the site admins don’t like something you do, you get shut down no matter whether the community there accepts it or not. Here, if that happens and is unpopular, people can leave and go to another domain without leaving the federated network. Another is that servers hosted in countries outside the USA (feddit.de, lemmy.ca etc.) don’t necessarily have to follow USA law, while Reddit does.

Less of a bot problem, more influence over the features added, no ads, no dealing with mergers or shareholders or ceos, anyone can build software to interact with it, code is open source and auditable, if you don’t want to deal with moderators you can self host. A lot of people left reddit because reddit was acting like a bully.

I hope more people join so that niche communities can form but I’m happy to make do with less people for the time being.

The uncensored Charlie Kirk memes were pretty choice