I have been on the edge with twitter and reddit for a while and I have finally deleted my accounts that I have had for a very long time there. They are no longer the places I used to know, even more so with twitter. I am ready for my new time here and on mastodon.
Hello Lemmy
Hello to the Fediverse! Hopefully you can also enjoy the rest of the sites such as Kbin, Pixelfed, Peertube, Owncast and Misskey - there’s plenty to choose from!
I’ve checked a few instances of federated YouTube alternatives and just… no. Most of the content is right wing guys looking for a place to spread hate they can’t elsewhere. The type of people that watch Andrew Tate and Admin Ross. Lemmy is Great though, mastodon seems a little boring compared to twitter. The fix to that would be Elon fucking up enough that the very change averse average internet user would be willing to try mastodon.
Mastodon gets better when you start following people by hashtag.
Account Settings > Profile > Featured Hashtags
Populate that area with hashtags of what interests you. Pretty soon you have people popping up that share your interests and you follow those that seem interesting.
OMG I love Mastodon and my instance (mas.to). Left Twitter for Mas about 8 months ago - I love following hashtags even more than people. There’s some great gems to follow though. For both Twitter, and now Reddit, I left for Fedi and just never went back. Facebook was another cold turkey quitting, no alternative for that one, that was years ago now.
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What I find when I follow tags is that my feed is now totally flooded with hundreds of new toots every time I log in - how do you deal with this? It’s way too much for me to ever go through and get anything meaningful out of it.
Follow a few interesting people based on a tag, perhaps by number of favorites / boosts, and then remove that tag.
You can always add it back in later.
Lists are your friend! Not sure if Mastodon can do it, but on Pleroma/Akkoma you can add users to a list without adding them to your main followed list.
That’s because you haven’t found The Good Ones ™ such as TILVids
Nick from The Linux Experiment is there, nice surprise! Gonna give it a try, the videos I saw on the front page seem cool.
Really? I can’t find his channel
I think the thing that may finally drive people off the platform may be the limitation on viewing posts. Busy days, I’m not likely to hit the limit - big news day? Yeah, going to hit the limit pretty fucking fast.
Yeah- this is my big gripe with all of the alternative video sharing platforms. All of them have a significantly right-wing conspiracy theorist bias. Not really a place I see myself spending a lot of time, personally.
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Damn, I’ve only been to Lemmy and Kbin so far…
Baby steps are ok.
I’d only heard of Kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon, and Peertube until now. Pixelfed looks cool, Owncast and Misskey are too but I don’t watch streamers or microblog so.
Are there apps for any of those?
what is the advantage to using kbin if i am already using lemmy?
Mastodon/Fed Twitter integration. You can post on a Lemmy community, tag a hashtag and it becomes a microblog (tweet) at the same time. But upvoted and downvotes are public on kbin. So depends what you want.
And in the long run we’ll see if kbin can keep up with the Twitter like software on the Twitter side and if it can keep up with Lemmy for reddit features at the same time. Like Lemmy can focus purely on meeting Reddits features then passing them. Kbin has to worry and work on both.
Much to learn it seems
Leaving Twitter for Mastodon barely had an impact. I was just about done with that whole place, with or without Musk in charge.
Reddit is different… I still loved using it. I had my subscriptions honed, all my interests represented. I suffered none of the toxicity that others saw. Not sure if that was just because I mostly used smaller, niche-interest subs or because I mostly lurked and seldom posted? It was all friendly, knowledgeable and entertaining, a stream of consciousness that I could dip in to whenever I wanted to.
So I’m not leaving Reddit because of the experience, but more on principal (both the API kerfuffle and a general aversion to ad-revenue models, which are clearly harmful to society). Principals sadly don’t give me something to read over breakfast…
I hope Lemmy can become that stream of consciousness in time. I’m trying to do my bit by being an active contributor rather than a lurking grazer.
We might have to accept we’re on the “losing” side, e.g. Lemmy will never have the numbers our subreddits had. We’ll have smaller communities and less content, but hopefully better conversation.
Honestly reddit lost too. The quality drop in content and comments is noticeable and unlikely to get better. Meanwhile lemmy/kbin/fediverse in general seems to be thriving with hope and energy.
That sounds like the winning side to me.
I made the transition from Digg to Reddit way back when, and like you didn’t see a lot of the toxicity of Reddit likely by having a honed list of subreddits. 99% of my time was spent lurking tho over the last years - so now I’m going to take more initiative and engage more with the platform
Same here. Lemmy is rising quickly though, I have no doubt it will be a sufficient Reddit replacement soon enough. I’ve been using Apple News as my “read over breakfast” app. I already pay for the sub anyway, and once I set it up with a bunch of sources/topics I was interested in, it became a pretty good reading experience.
I hope you consider an open news alternative, or even a closed one slightly less bad than Apple. Good for you for not using Reddit though.
I fear that sounded too condescending, I seriously want to encourage you to not use Apple without making you sound like an idiot.
I don’t think you are an idiot, just the same as the other millions of people who were taken in by Apple’s ‘privacy’ and ‘simplicity’, while not realising the price gouging, right to repair smashing, closed source, keeping everything ensnared its ecosystem that it really is.
I hope it gets a good following because it is nice it exists at all
I was never big on Twitter myself… I made an account when it first came out and never used it… and then for a high school unit for something we were required to make accounts (I graduated 10+ years ago… so that in and of itself is scary). I’ve never liked twitter. It always seemed to be screaming into the void.
Mastodon I really appreciate the real conversations with real people, especially when they are interested in what I have to say. I made a post about getting rid of lawns and had people from all angles of the argument discussing with me about it. It felt… healthy?!
Well, as healthy as internettin’ is.
Yes, I never got into Twitter but I have an active Mastodon life. I also appreciate smaller communities where you can talk to people like you said. On big platforms I don’t even bother commenting, much less making a post. It will just fall into the void.
You’re right… it’s just not worth it for the most part on larger platforms. I’m not sitting here trying to argue with anyone-- we can have a civilized discussion that ends in a disagreement on smaller platforms. On larger platforms it always turns into fights and pilings-on. It is gross.
Twitter has seriously turned into a right wing cess pool. :( 😞
Can’t even watch porn on there anymore. LOL
I was watching one of my favorite gay porn stars and swiped up foe the next video and it was this couple that had like 45 guns strapped to them out shooting printed out faces of Democrat politicians.
Talk about a damn boner killer.
Also, the only comments that show up are right wing nut jobs as well. Idk what the hell is going on there.
I learned the best way to avoid all the lunatics is to block anyone with a Blue Checkmark. There are block list’s for that to I think, though I was doing it manually.
What is really terrible is that, Twitter is considered mainstream social media alongside Instagram here in Japan. So even the normies ends up stepping into that right wing cesspool. I was really shocked to see my normie ex friend retweeting transphobic shit😿😿
While I really really hate Twitter, and tend to be more on Instagram, Losing Twitter means losing the single biggest information source for the majority that can’t read English. Even I sometimes have to open Twitter to see wtf is going on in the society (also it’s useful to get the most up to date information during emergency situations, like earthquake)
I saw the impact of them siloing their user base yesterday when a trade was made for one of my sports teams. The news broke on Twitter and I heard about it on a local radio show. I tried to find it in the news but I couldn’t. I don’t use Twitter so I wasn’t able to see any info on the trade for another 2 hours until local news and other services started to confirm and replicate the Twitter post.
It’s incredibly short sighted of them to do this.
Audience capture is a bitch
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I deleted my Twitter account when Elon reinstated Donald Trump’s account - it was clear there was no saving that platform.
It’s a Nazi bar now because the owner is a Nazi.
I still have my Reddit account, but it’s becoming quickly like my Facebook account - I barely use it. In Facebook, it’s to catch up with friends and family, and in Reddit, it’s the more esoteric subs. But I feel dirty & gross every time I load up a page from those sites, so I don’t unless I have to.
I make one post a month on Facebook. Usually within the first couple days. This month’s was about how since the supreme court wanted to rule dumb last week, I was going to play along and disallow certain people from shopping at my etsy shop. Got me a handful of orders, too… which is nice.
Reddit I just use still to check in on if any weird news happened… but that’s about it.
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How does this comment have nearly 50 up votes?
Welcome!! We are glad to have you here!
Welcome to the Fediverse 🌞 I switched to Mastodon after Musk announced to buy the Twitter. It is already over a year ago 🤔
I am new to Lemmy myself, but it looks good
Any advice on mastodon?
I use Mastoot it’s pretty cool
You can tell who the Memmy users are by the repeat posting when the JSON error happens 😅
I just started using Ice Cubes and it’s pretty solid
Beyond the general app recommendations, here’s some more advice
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Take a moment to read fedi.tips
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Hashtags are your friend. Follow them. Use them. Capitalize each word in them
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You will miss things. That is the point
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For accounts you don’t want to miss, click the bell in the profile or make a list
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Boost the toots!
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Be here to make connections
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No algorithm means post what you want
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Add alt-text to images
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I love Moshidon as mobil app
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It’s strange, but the 3 day poop challenge meme that swept through lemmy the other day reminded me of what Reddit used to be. It felt like an actual community where people were actually interacting, and sometimes bizarre posts turned into legends. I hadn’t noticed the slow transition to just endless bot reposts. With all the spez drama, i decided Reddit was dead to me, and that was sad to acknowledge the sudden end of an era like that. But lemmy showed me that the things that made me love Reddit have been gone for a long time, and I feel more at home here.
Lol, what community was this
/c/memes@lemmy.ml if i recall correctly
Same. It was nice to break up from Reddit after 10 years
16 years here. Hard but that’s life.
16 years too. We’ve been through these transitions before with Digg!
13 for me, and a few days ago they banned me without even telling me why. I asked and I got no response. Fuck them, I was getting done with them anyway and when I found out that blind mods couldn’t moderate their own subreddit, I’m glad I didn’t even attempt to appeal.
Been here for a couple weeks, I’ve enjoyed it so far. Some niche communities are missing but I think Lemmy is a good time and I love the vision
I hope that this is the start of something special on the internet. I hope that this is the beginning of us users taking the power back from big tech companies.
Same; I’ve been trying to disengage from anything big tech related recently, not just social media, even Amazon etc. Can’t take it anymore. It’s all so blatantly exploitative and fucked up. Cancelling subscriptions feels good; hope I stick to it. Can’t shake YouTube yet though, need my Rossmann fix. Hopefully we can figure out a viable FOSS alternative; tried PeerTube but it doesn’t quite do it just yet.
The Internet can still be a beautiful positive thing.
BezoSpez Zuck-Musk can fuck off.
Have you tried invidious as YouTube alternative?
Thanks very much for recommending this! Tried it and am quite happy. Also just tried NewPipe on my phone and it works really well. Bye bye YouTube
For Browser there are actually two YouTube Frontends: piped and invidious
Oh yes I’ve still not been able to get out of YouTube. :(
Got out of pretty much every other social media platform!
Same.
I had deleted my main reddit account that I had for 13/14 years a few months ago. I created a new alt so I could check in and talk about some of more niche interests, but I deleted that 3 weeks ago, just couldn’t be dealing with the increasing enshittification.
I’ve had a Twitter a/c since 2009, have a lot of mutual followers and a lot of people I know only for there, but decided today that it’s definitely not going to get any better. I had a Mastodon account since last year, but it was very slow and quiet, and again, not a lot of niche interests I have over there yet. But this weekend’s bullshit (and obvious lies from Musk) makes it clear twitter isn’t going to get better. Even if the stupid rates thing improves in the next while, it will just be something else Musk decides which will be making twitter worse.
So I’m just going to enjoy the chill vibes and explore all the different communities here.
500 upvotes in 2 hours?! Fuck yes bois. Fuck that jailbait mod spez, and his shit website full of toxic spakkers.
Long live the fed!
Vive la Fédération
The only thing I still need reddit for is the sports communities. I hope some start getting bigger over here.
r/formula1 and r/soccer for me personally
There’s a !Football one that seems tho be getting the content.
There’s a Formula 1 community. It’s still small, but we can all make it grow. Also, the soccer community managed to grab the football name before the other guys, LOL
be the change you want to see, subscribe to those communities and be active in them
Is there a fantasy football one that’s migrated over?
A couple of small ones are starting out here and there: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=fantasy+football
Doesn’t seem like big communities hopped over yet.
The quality of content on reddit has deteriorated at an astounding pace. It feels like everyone is just repeating the same thing to get upvotes… and upvoting people who repeat the same thing. I’m kind of glad it exists now as a containment zone. The people who want higher quality content can move to the fediverse. Those who don’t can stay right where they are.
A lot of it seems to be repost bots these days, and it’s impossible to know whether the upvotes they get are real or coming from other bots.
I’m largely ignorant to the mechanics of the attention economy in mass social media spaces, but what’s the point of having bots post on social media platforms, only to be mass upvoted and interacted with by other bots? Like who benefits from that and how? Why is that a thing?
Karma farming, where you boost up the reputation of an account so you can sell it. Propagandists and marketers will pay more for an account that looks like a real user in good standing. So you keep the account busy and raise its karma by whatever means, including repeating formerly popular posts and using bots to boost them.
Whom do they sell the account to? How does the purchaser benefit from the account? I’m sure these are probably basic questions. I’m just curious
Dodgy organizations who want to pose as regular people and spread propaganda/disinformation/guerrilla advertising. Here’s one forum I found which has reddit accounts for sale. There would be more on the “dark web” I imagine:
Wow. I’ve heard about this kind of thing before but haven’t actually dug to go and find it
My guess is bots circle jerk other bots and those accounts will (at least appear to) have large audiences, which may be valuable to advertisers or the like.
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I think this is going to be a trend. Centralized social media just isn’t financially viable and it’s worse for the users in so many ways. We already have alternatives for youtube, reddit, and twitter popping up. I think youtube might be the hardest to replace though because so many people view youtube as a job rather than a place to share content just for the sake of it. Hopefully with all this we can return to the good old days of the internet where a few corporations didn’t control the majority of traffic.
The problem with YouTube is the sheer amount of historical content that’ll never make it to an alternative site. I don’t think it can ever be replaced unfortunately.
As soon as everyone realizes Youtube is seriously declining everyone at c/datahoarder is gonna start archiving everything. I’m personally going to try and archive as much of my favorite channels as I can. Regardless of everyone’s efforts though there’s still gonna be so much lost content.
Another issue with YouTube is that media, especially video is vastly more resource demanding than anything mostly text based.
With something like Twitter or Reddit (as long as you don’t directly host all media) the quality and importance of each post relative to it’s resources needed don’t really matter that much.
Especially with high bitrate video footage on the other hand it does matter. So having a drive for profit somewhere in the chain does in someway help shape the system to be viable financially.
This is the problem with modern social media in general. It’s no longer about being “social,” and all about trying to make a buck. Every time someone complains on Mastodon about their “engagement,” my eyes roll.
Fortunately, corporate social media seems eager to cut its own throat: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-twitter-mark-zuckerberg-changes-facebook-social-media-tech-rcna89766
Centralized social media is as viable as any other digital media, but like many other services there’s not a lot of room for growth once you reach the plateau. This is fine for a private company, but doesn’t translate well to public or investment platforms who’s returns are based on profit growth over consistency.
