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Fediverse @lemmy.world
jeze64 @midwest.social

I often get bored of the Fediverse, but I'm doing my best to stay here.

I've been off and on with the Fediverse for sometime now. It's a relatively friendly place full of fellow nerds, but with a few caveats....

My feeds seem very focused on hard information be it Gaza, tech companies doing bad things, or people pitchforking about the lastest big bad in digital privacy. This is all well and good, but it does get a bit tired after a while. Seeing the samey stuff post after post by academic types makes me more informed but also mentally draining.

Where's the fun? On Facebook and Instagram I see light fluffy popcorn type posts of people reminiscing over Nintendo games or reels of cockatiels being cockatiels. It's fun to scroll and interact. Here it feels like I'm in a classroom, and people, while friendly, do get quite hostile if you don't like Linux or Star Trek.

As a leftist I like it here because it's my bubble of people, but I'd like to see the fedi let its hair down a bit. It's okay to talk about stuff other than infosec, privacy guides, distros, and Gaza.

60 comments

  • Personally, I feel like you can have fun on fedi, but it all depends on the accounts/communities you follow. My Sharkey feed AND my Lemmy feed are both full of memes, fandom nonsense, and shitposts. If you only follow serious communities and people that talk about serious news, you'll have a serious time.

    That said, one thing that I thought was unpleasant about the fediverse, and then realised was a feature rather than a bug is... The fact that you can run out of fediverse content. After 2 hours on Lemmy, I have functionally read all of Lemmy (or, well, all the communities I care to read), and maybe 1 more hour to join conversations I'd like to join.

    Compared to the seemingly infinite content stream of The Other Sites (tm), this initially struck me as bad and weird, but then I realised... I actually prefer it this way. Doomscrolling a fedi site/app is actually not possible, and that has done wonders for my mental health.

  • The issue is that the majority of people on the Fediverse are "techies" with specific interests, which skews the spectrum of content quite a bit.

    The Fediverse is in an awkward spot. It needs more people like you to keep technology communities from becoming Linux circlejerks, but at the same time those circlejerks are driving people like you out.

    • I don’t think there is really a conflict here though if we are all just nice to each other.

      I think techy nerds are an absolutely fine foundation for a community so long as said techy nerds understand the inherent politics to being a techy nerd, having access to powerful computers and having the privilege of being in a highly skilled industry that pays fairly well (I know big generalization).

      It is going to be awkward trying to expand the horizons to include a more diverse user base, but there is nothing wrong with awkwardness, just toxic behavior and gatekeeping.

      Techy nerds just need to be willing to listen and evolve their understandings of community spaces. It seems like computer nerds are obsessed with visions of the internet before the masses of people and big corporations came onto it, but while that feeling is understandable it risks building a conceptual wall between people who are passionate about the capacity of computers to help people and the very people they want computers to help.

      We can have a better more positive federation of communities than the internet has ever had if we decide right now to be more inclusive and radical in our solidarity with each other.

  • The Fedi is what you make of it. Since there's no algorithm telling you who to follow or pushing posts to your feed, it's up to you to curate who you follow.

    My feed is a mixture of shit posts, memes, cats and dogs, flowers, a little politics and a little tech. Chaos is why I'm here and who I follow reflects that. If your feed is full of info you don't care about, then you're following the wrong people.

  • The only thing I’m missing from the fediverse is a platform where animations and animators can connect and share their work with the possibility of having it discovered. Pixelfed still isnt in the app stores, peertube is not user friendly and has no official apps, mastodon doesnt have amy kind of upvoting or algorithm or ability to browse lemmy communities, lemmy doesnt have native video support or user follows.

  • Fedi is the worst social media, except for all the others.

  • Lemmy is a little slow sometimes, but I've started to have the opposite problem on Mastodon. I need to weed out some hashtags or something because I can't keep up anymore.

    • Even back on twitter days I never got used to it because there's just so much content everywhere that I feel that I can't follow any topic properly and I lose all interest. In my case the concept of microblogging is not a right fit for me.

    • No kidding! I was just thinking this morning that my Mastodon feed has gone bonkers lately and it is getting harder to keep up! I suppose that is a good problem to have but I only follow a few tags. I am, however, enjoying Mastodon way more than I ever did twitter.

  • I had to leave a Mastodon instance because it was about activism, gaza and politics the whole fucking day. So I perfectly understand what you feel. But I think there are ways and/or servers where everybody can feel comfortable. The mastodon server where I'm on right now, people talks about US stuff the whole day, and I'm very annoyed because of that because I don't give a damn shit about US. But the admin is cool, people support Ukraine, and I follow funny stuff too.

  • Not a perfect solution by any means, but you can block communities you have no interest in.

60 comments