the predicted commie red wave revolution are all here in their dozens, actually about 2000 of them

revolution!

Then there are psychos like me who use both, and Bluesky, and other social media and have a personal blog.

Oh ok

Yes, and it consolidates comments from cross-posts. Very neat.

Having seen and experienced the different platforms, I'd say Facebook and Twitter/X have much larger userbases but vulnerable to manipulation, while Reddit is supposedly for people believing themselves to be "smarter" and above those social media platforms, and then Lemmy and Mastadon definitely more niche and heavily on the activist progressive side.

Step 2 is dead right. Before you can proceed, we're going to need you to make an apparently important and irreversible decision that you didn't even want to make, based on incomplete information.

Number 1 is the reason I rarely visit Lemmy. The choice and wording of political posts and reactions to them create a very negative atmosphere and sometimes it is combined with rather unrational doomerism. Threads just feel angry and hostile too often for me to have fun on here. This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.

User Experience Friction - You can't just sign up, you need to pick a server. You've already lost a significant amount of people in that step.

I think this can be improved if there was a better way to explain the identity of each instance and why you might want to join other than just "generic Lemmy server for everyone to use"

Also if the random server a new user randomly joins is one of the tankie trifecta they're not gonna have a good time.

I suggest a map that shows which instances are federated/defederated from eachother and lets you find which one has the closest identity to what you like. And possibly a disclaimer before joining one of the trifecta instances.

Or just say fuck it and join the one literally called "shit just works" like me 😂

some people might get confused for the instance they joined, like world, or ML, instead of another one, they go back to reddit.

To expand on 3, there are no (that I'm aware of) official community channels for businesses in the Fediverse compared to Reddit. The default avenues to interact with them are usually Discord, Reddit, and even Twitter.

Haha there are in fact 8 different NFL shitposting subreddits, one for each of the 8 different divisions. And each one is as active as just about any Lemmy community.

I agree on the other 2 points as well. Not only is it weird to have to pick an instance, the names and descriptions are off putting as well. You scroll through and several of the top ones are openly Marxist/leninist/leftist. 95% of people see that and are immediately put off. It sends a message that Lemmy is fundamentally for leftist agenda-posting, and a lot of users treat it that way. Click on any completely non-political-sounding community (like Movies or something), sort top all time and you will usually be greeted immediately by posts about Israel/Palestine or Donald Trump. Its exhausting honestly.

Edit: also, why does join-lemmy.org not show .world (one of the largest coms if not the largest) anywhere on the popular instances page? What kind of drama is going on there? This is exactly the kind of shit Im talking about.

In other words, you're saying I use Lemmy because I have no friends. If that's what you mean, you'd be right.

Im glad bots dont use lemmy as they do reddit.

When you onboard onto Reddit it asks interests and points users to subreddits. I don't think anything like that exists on Lemmy, but could be a good thing for the less tech inclined.

Alexandrite is pretty great

I'm not!

I’m nobody.

Also: Happy Cake Day!

100% of online respondents have confirmed they have access to internet.

Part of the problem is there's a lot less to it than it feels like there is. The analogies we use to teach to non-tech people don't quite match up.

It's simply a structured way to log in and send messages back and forth.

You can use it to stitch together forums, link shares, social media, video sharing, or image sharing sites.

But we really don't bind things together all that tightly. At best you can follow someone on pixelfed or mastodon. Since there's truly no minimum wiring, a lot of services don't even really fully communicate with each other. So we end up mostly with mastodon <-> mastodon links and lemmy->piefed<-lemmy links.

Reddit has like 8 different Dragon Ball communities lol, and 3 for the show "From"

but still something that could be improved in Lemmy, to have an advantage over Reddit

Oh, hi Odysseus.

No. You're just some guy.

I don't generally like the Twitter model and rarely use it, but I will say that one thing that it does do well, better than the Reddit/Threadiverse model, is very rapidly assembling information about a specific, temporary topic.

Like, the Reddit model is about letting a community assemble over time and letting people find their way there and moderators be chosen and all that. That works quite well for a lot of things, and lets people with expertise in the field arise and all that.

But let's say that there's a huge natural disaster and people are putting up video clips from their cell phones and stuff like that. They can coalesce around a hashtag or a couple of hashtags pretty quickly. Relevant material from people who have had no contact with each other and maybe no time to assemble a community or anything gets drawn together. Other users retweeting content help highlight it. The topic probably won't be active for long. It can be really useful for a rapid setup and teardown scenario.

Of course, that's really mostly following a hashtag, rather than a particular user...

I also dislike the "short comment" model that Twitter uses (though over the years, the comment length has been increased and workarounds added), but one thing that it does help with is to help deal with inexperienced users unfamiliar with quoting etiquette. In email or in traditional forum systems, it's conventional to quote a bit of relevant text before responding to it. This requires knowing syntax for doing so and when it's appropriate. Twitter deals with that by forcing everything to be broken up into bite-size chunks as a property of the system, so someone responding to something is forced to respond to only the relevant bit. I think that that probably helps make Twitter more-approachable.

Mastodon allows you to follow hashtags, which would be like following a topic.

Exactly! I'd be curious to see the reverse poll, asking Lemmy users "Why does nobody use Mastodon?" (and include Bluesky and Twitter in the poll.)

I use Lemmy (and in the past Reddit) because topic based conversation is what makes sense to me. Anytime I try to use Mastodon or Bluesky I lurk for a bit and then just come back here.

People that do actual geolocations for the war in Ukraine are basically the primary sources. They figure out where and when videos were taken and do the actual work. Following the topic gets you to some big account that aggregates them

And yet here we are 3 years later, still protesting.

I say this in all of these threads: more users does not mean a better experience.

Instead, focus on making our communities the best they can be.

To be fair, karma farmers aren't really possible on Lemmy.

I'm with you. I also come from the Usenet days and much prefer to follow topics over people.

I do have some web forums that I visit from time to time but those have even less traffic than Lemmy.

I don't use Reddit at all now, so Lemmy is pretty much the only option for this style of topic based content. The ability to follow hashtags on Mastodon is kind of nice too. Unfortunately, people spamming unrelated hashtags on their posts can still be a problem.

Ssh, this is a library.

What would you consider "the greatest"?

I just suggest that people join .world (unless I know the person I'm talking to will best fit a different instance) and not worry about it. Once they understand how it works, they can make an account on a different instance if they want. There's no need to overthink it.