aasatru

I think lemmy.ca would be a great home for it!

My first thought for an alternative was Mander.xyz, but they seem focused on natural sciences exclusively, and I wouldn’t want to bother them with the discussion on whether history is a science.

I think the biggest challenge of running your own instance is not the challenge of setting it up, but to remain dedicated to running it for a long time and set up a management so that it can keep running even after you one day let it go of it. If it gains a user base but disappears after two years, it might do more harm than good compared to a community hosted at for example Lemmy.ca.

That said, I would love to see it happen!

The admins, @QuentinCallaghan@sopuli.xyz and @Moxvallix@sopuli.xyz, might have something to contribute to this discussion!

You could PM the mods on Reddit, tell them you’re worried about the direction of the platform, and ask if they want to join the effort/let them know the door is open. That way there would probably be little drama. :)

As for moderation, I don’t think it would be a huge challenge. The biggest hurdle is in producing content to get the community going and to stick with it, which would honestly be too much work for me personally.

Regarding Bluesky: On Mbin (successor of Kbin) these days it’s possible to post “microblogs” directly into communities, and have them appear organically in Bluesky as well. I have tested this a bit, but never posted anything interesting this way. Should try with an image post to a community.

Yeah, I also started out on Kbin, which might explain my handle. ;)

I think one of the best things about this place is being able to stay with old interfaces. Sometimes what we’re used to is what’s best. I would have loved it if the old phpBB forums I used to frequent stuck around long enough to federate rather than disappear!

And we have plenty of tech nerds weighing in with their five cents, so at this point I’m more interested in hearing from “normal” users.

If you start posting history museum content I will be interested in following it for sure!

I lately stumbled over a discussion of Lemmy on Reddit (linked from !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com, I guess), and some of the people in the discussion seemed to genuinely believe that Lemmy had completely died off following the first few days of interest from the Reddit community, similar to Tildes and whatever other services popped out through the years.

It’s pretty fascinating, as I wouldn’t think it takes that much to double check and realize the community on here is pretty vibrant.

I think part of the reason this happens is that the front page on Lemmy is less sensationalist and appears more slow moving, and there are of course fewer votes as we are not millions of users.

Which is where I spiral into checking what this comparison looks like in reality, and this comment becomes truly off-topic:

This is top five on the front page of Lemmy.world at the moment, not signed in:

• 1 day ago, 1.67 k upvotes: “Used to consume not produce”. A meme about the kids not knowing what a C drive is.
• 13 hours ago, 570 upvotes: “Democracy is when the White House boasts about its king”. Screenshot of white house tweet stating that Trump is now king.
• 2 days ago, 758 upvotes: “Europe preps huge defense package in boost to Ukraine: ‘Never been seen’”. An article about European aid to Ukraine
• 1 day ago, 469 upvotes: “So, is the USA screwed?”. No stupid questions.
• 2 days ago, 868 upvotes: “Joe Rogan dethroned by anti-Trump podcast in the charts”. Newsweek article.

Meanwhile, on Reddit, also not signed in and incognito for good measure:

• 2 hours ago, 15k upvotes: “The shower in the apartment I moved into self-destructs”. A video of a shower that has been assembled wrong.
• 4 hours ago, 20k upvotes: “Thursday’s front page of the British Daily Star. Putin’s Poodle”. The front page of a British tabloid.
• 20 hours ago, 18k upvotes: “What will Americans do if Social Security is reduced or done away with?”. Ask reddit.
• 19 hours ago, 9k upvotes: “Trump finally calls out the Ukraine scam”. Fascist propaganda from the conservative subreddit.
• 8 hours ago, 40k upvotes: “Trump can’t end birthright citizenship, appeals court says, setting up Supreme Court showdown”. CNN article.

So of course, if you’re used to the pace of Reddit, the Lemmy frontpage will appear slow, as if the site is half dead. Meanwhile, seen from Lemmy, the Reddit frontpage looks like it’s a dangerous fucking tool made and controlled by capitalists to pacify and brainwash the masses, spewing out bullshit at an alarming pace.

But yeah, point is, no wonder they think we’re dead, there’s an article from two days ago on the front page.

Anyway, glad to have you back!

It changes from server to server and community to community. It’s important to keep in mind that a world news community is not only a world news community; it’s a world news community hosted at a specific instance. Some of them will be run better than others, and if one gets the feeling one community attracts the wrong audience one might be better off avoiding it and checking if someone has already started an alternative community somewhere else.

That, and blocking people who make no valuable contribution.

Everything boils down to preferences, but Lemmy defaults is not necessarily keeping up with the trends. Small thumbnails were more useful back when internet traffic was slow and/or expensive, today it’s more of an acquired taste.

I wish different instances dared to have more different defaults, so that one instance would look significantly different from another beyond just colour scheme. I still haven’t seen a single instance run something like Alexandrite or Photon by default, and while I guess there are good reasons for that I think it would have been a welcome addition.

deleted by creator

In the case of Mastodon, I think an even bigger problem might have to do with age. Whenever I see an age poll on Mastodon it seems most of the user base there is older than the internet itself. It’s hardly surprising that they are not very up to date on pop culture. That it’s largely white and male of course adds to the problem.

It’s fascinating that when a social media is created without algorithmic boosting of content, pop culture suffers.

I guess it’s the kind of content we are very happy to consume, but we don’t care much about spreading. Had I seen a video of Lamar from the Superbowl boosted by one of the people I follow on Mastodon I would probably have watched it, but I wouldn’t have boosted it. I imagine some people would leave comments if they saw it, but that doesn’t affect visibility in Mastodon. The entertainment industry is geared towards a passive spreading of content, and that’s not what is happening on the Fediverse.

That might be a problem, it might be a good thing. But it’s at least not very surprising that the Fediverse looks very different during the super bowl.

Lemmy devs tend not to be very proactive when implementing interoperability with other fediverse services. I would expect support to pop up in Mbin and/or PieFed first, and possibly Lemmy later.

That said, I would be surprised if they were not aware of the possibility, I just doubt it’s a priority at the moment.

No doubt they’re taking their sweet time with it. Then again, knowing the Mastodon user base, whenever it is implemented people will probably go crazy and think it’s the biggest invasion of privacy since the gestapo.

By the way, here’s from Monday’s development update:

The team also made significant progress on the specification for Quote Posts. It needs a few minor changes, but we expect to publish it for comment in February, and start implementation right away. The current plan is to publish Mastodon 4.4 with support for displaying Quote Posts, and then add authoring in Mastodon 4.5.

Mastodon users can post to the Threadiverse by tagging a community, but since we don’t have “quoted boosts”/quote posts, there’s no way of including an existing thread or post when doing so.

For sure! But considering Mastodon has most of the content that would be quote posted this way and most of the users who would be subject to it, and they are working on it (at their own pace), I think it would be tactile to see how it is implemented in Mastodon first and then proceed from that.

It could for example be that Mastodon users will be able to opt out of quote posts in general or in specific posts. If so, this should be respected in other implementations as well. And in general, it’s just nice to have things consistent, and when it’s taking the Mastodon team so long to implement I suspect it’s because they’re devoted to making sure they do it right. :)

Hopefully whenever mastodon gets quote posts we’ll see something similar pop up over here.

I personally like being able to easily change the colour theme, but it’s of course entirely optional. Each to their own.

If you press the cog in the top right corner you can choose between six different themes, as well as moving the sidebar around, text size, and a bunch of other tweaks. :)

It has gotten really, really good for photography. There’s a bunch of incredible photographers posting their stuff on the Fediverse these days, and they enjoy the appeal of it that it’s closer to what Instagram was before it became an influencer hub.

As for random cats and dogs, I guess some people enjoy that as well.

I wouldn’t say mbin is awkward to use, but microblogging is included as a bit of a second thought. It’s still nice to be able to communicate with the fediverse at large.

PieFed feels faster than the others to me. It has good support for various content (like peertube channels), allows for content filtering with keywords, has combined communities, and a lot of other clever stuff.

I think it’s also a bit utopian to expect everyone to make an informed decision about which small instance to sign up for right away. It could be nice to have a little overview ready for whoever has been using lemmy.world or some other big instance for a while, understands how the fediverse works, and wants to migrate to a smaller instance for some reason or another.

Personally I wasn’t really sure where to go after Kbin.social, and my decision on Kbin.earth was pretty random. Happy with my decision though!