Instead of visiting the Mall of America and shopping at only what the mall will offer, using outdated infrastructure-- you can instead visit a variety of towns (“instances”) which each host their own cute boutiques (“communities”) specializing in a particular sort of item (whatever the topic of the community is). The instances can have their own rules that apply to its communities, but communities can also make their own rules, like a shop can. Skip the crowds and barely functional Supermall experience and find a better place to engage in discussion and get information.

Yeah, I’m not going anywhere. I do like the smaller atmosphere in some ways because it’s less Social media heavy. I’m hoping all the recent chaos initiated by whacky rich CEOs signals the doom of the social media framework that has been predominant for the last ~10 yrs. I’m not saying Lemmy is hopeless. I wouldn’t have bothered to join. I think it’s really cool concept.

I wasn’t a very active redditor, tbh. My account was fairly young. Most of my time was on r/leaves, r/cardistry, r/playingcards, r/wood, and probably a few I haven’t remembered. The dust just needs to settle so I can find the proper places here. So far, a lot of the crafting and hobby themed communities are based upon sharing completed works, where I find I’d much rather see content that is instructional, educational, or problem solving. But I think maybe I’m better served by instructables or something in that regard. Probably also YouTube, but I hate video media. 😵‍💫

There’s maybe an interesting effect similar to domain name hoarding, so I’m going to watch and see how federated system handles important communities being made but not really invested in. I found a music community that was named well, but the only post was the sole moderator peddling their own album, which felt odd. I imagine a different community with the same name but on a different server instance might become more popular in that case and dwarf those. Natural selection of communities will be fun to observe.

A lot of the communities only seem to have like 50 subscribers. I know a lot of people are exploring options other than Reddit, so I’m confused where everyone is at.

Or maybe I just have weird taste. I am not so interested in shitposting, memes, politics, news; this may be where where everyone is? I’ll give it time to see who trickles in. I like the forum/discussion board style of this as opposed to Mastodon, which is obviously more timeline/feed based, but can feel like a random assortment of things.

On the other hand, since many of the communities are empty, I either do not have interesting topics to yet follow, or am not quite sure where I feel comfortable posting. Somewhat opposite ends of the spectrum, but okay that there is differentiation. Would like to see the fediverse group together (Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, whatever else believes in this approach), as alone there may not be power, but together, maybe something impressive can be made.

Imperial theme looming in the background…