General Discussion
Welcome to Lemmy.World General!
This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.
🪆 About Lemmy World
🧭 Finding Communities
Feel free to ask here or over in: [email protected]!
Also keep an eye on:
For more involved tools to find communities to join: check out Lemmyverse!
💬 Additional Discussion Focused Communities:
- [email protected] - Note this is for more serious discussions.
- [email protected] - The opposite of the above, for more laidback chat!
- [email protected] - Into video games? Here's a place to discuss them!
- [email protected] - Watched a movie and wanna talk to others about it? Here's a place to do so!
- [email protected] - Want to talk politics apart from political news? Here's a community for that!
Rules and Policies
Remember, Lemmy World rules also apply here.
0. See: Rules for Users.
- No bigotry: including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘silly’ questions. The world won’t be made better by dismissive comments to others on Lemmy.
- Link posts should include some context/opinion in the body text when the title is unaltered, or be titled to encourage discussion.
- Posts concerning other instances' activity/decisions are better suited to [email protected] or [email protected] communities.
- No Ads/Spamming.
- No NSFW content.
There's a big diaspora right now.
If the fediverse can get more user-friendly instead of being a bunch of programming linuxites lying that their stuff is totally intuitive, it could be a lovely new home with lots of flexibility.
a bunch of programming linuxites lying that their stuff is totally intuitive
This is my least favorite part of the fediverse. I'm pretty tech savvy, and the jump to Mastodon when Elon took over and Lemmy when apps stopped working wasn't easy. Having to pick an instance to sign up with was a huge roadblock for me.
Mastodon discovery seems harder to achieve than Lemmy, probably because there are only a few Lemmy instances with active communities, so as long as your instance is federated and there are enough users to have subscribed to most of the communities, you're good.
On Mastodon I always felt like the number of different instances and different people posting (each being their own mini community) made it harder to assess whether you were actually seeing everything
Although part of the difficulty is that if you're coming from a centralised place like Reddit, Fediverse takes a bit to wrap your head around. Lemmy had a whole issue going for a while, where people logically flocked to the largest instance that they could find, possibly out of the misunderstanding that you had to pick and choose an instance.
To other websites.
Like where we are right now.
The experience from Brazil suggests that the viable 'post-twitter' is BlueSky. So one corporate-controlled platform that starts out okay and gets steadily worse is replaced by another, and the cycle continues.
I don't think there is a viable 'post-reddit' unfortunately , because they built up their userbase at a time when people would actually want to use a link aggregator, before the experience of clicking any external links became fraught and exhausting. So now reddit has the userbase, and they have the means to host images and videos internally, and none of the bots or the lack of API or the general weirdness of the place is enough to get people to leave. Potential competitors assume that they should offer an alternative link aggregator, whereas really the only competitor is something that could magically offer a comparable userbase size.
The Internet does not care is the bottom line. Both are still large platforms. Should they stop existing in the distant future, nothing really will happen, people find new ways to waste their time or find 1:1 copies of what they miss.
Outside I hope.
Something yet worse.
IRC, duh!
Probably will be decided by Gen Alpha. Once interest rates come down maybe Skibidi Toilet will start a social network and that will get lots of quick attention followed by VC funding and eventually we'll all be yes-yessing each other's dum dums.
Right now Discord, Slack, and other chat platforms seem to be becoming dominant. But now everything is not only locked away from the open web, but also ephemeral.
Mastodon seems to be doing pretty well and continuing to grow. Lemmy seems to have been stagnant for many months now though. I guess we're waiting on Reddit to piss their users off about something again before we'll see another surge here.
There's no shortage of cess pools
Hopefully people will start going back to independent forums. Google just added a "forums" tab at the top of their search, so they seem to want that too. It's not good for them that so much information is private on chat programs like Discord, other big social media sites, and concentrated on Reddit.
Lemmy never shows up in search results for me despite some instances having good domain authority, but more people should start using it when it starts showing up.
Eventually Justin Timberlake will overpay for them
Maybe to something more personally controlled, like everyone has a "server"(for feeds, "facebook", etc etc that they like to do) and connects to what ever they want.
More ease of use ofc greatly needed.
Geocities?
Anyways, that would be interesting. There coupd even be a website that indexes all the personal sites. It could even highlight interesting things from those sites. Perhaps it would even organize those interests into sub groups that you can follow and keep up to date on new information added to those sites.
Wherever they want and feel comfortable.
Well, I'd like to add, that most people do not use social media -almost interchangeable with internet for most folks- to interact with strangers in a reddit/discord/forum fashion... they just interact with people near them i.e. Instagram/facebook and so on.
Most people are in both of one of those and they are not going anywhere and not losing users, specially instagram.
Then you have things like twitter and tiktok, which are nor going anywhere anytime soon, yes lota of people went away from twitter, but those who stayed stayed for a reason (nazis and the hard right mostly)
So in summary, the internet, imho, at least for now, is staying right where it is.
Maybe reddit will fall, since the userbase was always more techy/quirky but they still seem to be doing fine, if your are ok with bots chatting with bots.