Speaking as someone who spent over a decade spending way too much time on Reddit… the problem with fediverse apps like lemmy is yes, partially the experience of the fediverse is inherently confusing. But it also doesn’t feel much like the raw, unfiltered internet. The fediverse has a bit of a sterilized and utopian feeling to it, in a way that even corpo-internet sites like Instagram, Reddit, Tumbler, etc don’t.
There is this hard to place aura about it, that the closest word I would use to describe it might be elitism. Despite being prescriptively and almost cloyingly inclusive at times, it’s still somehow not a place for all people and walks. Contrast that to a place like Facebook or Reddit, and even if you’re uneducated, technologically limited, and by all accounts living a most ordinary and unexamined life, you can find a community to welcome you. The fediverse really doesn’t have space for that sort of person, or really even folks who just empathize with such people and don’t mind them around.
And yes I know the fediverse is beautifully principled in that it’s not one thing or platform or instance and anyone can make their own blah blah but that’s not really how it plays out.
I don’t think the fediverse is a bad thing. But I do think it’s more of a home for the kind of people who love RSS feeds and classical music and vim and GPL and adblockers than it is for the huddled masses that comprise the majority of internet space.
What impression of the fediverse you get is highly dependent on who you federate and interact with. If you're on one of the nodes that block everything the admins disagree with, you're going to see the sterilized content you're describing. If you go with a node that doesn't block anything (except illegal content), you're likely to see more of the raw, unfiltered"old internet" style content where it was ok to be offensive or disagreeable.
I wouldn't describe it as "sterilized and utopian" but otherwise I agree.
Basically, 99% of the people on the Fediverse are tech-savvy, anti-corporate, chronically-online people*. Which also means that there's a much smaller population, because it only consists of these types of people. Meanwhile, there are more "normal" people on Reddit so it has more/more active communities and the viewpoints are more diverse.
It's ironic seeing Lemmy have even worse left-wing bias than Reddit, because there's a lot of left-center people on Reddit, but mostly only radical leftists are motivated to participate in Lemmy.
* Excluding the nearly-separate Fediverse of right-wing groups, who move to alternative platforms because they're banned from centralized ones. Except it's also an extreme echo-chamber, just a different one.
> The fediverse has a bit of a sterilized and utopian feeling to it
I mean if you want to join an instance with no rules that is a hive of horror and villainy, I'm pretty sure they are out there. They just won't be widely federated.
it certinaly doesnt feel like that on lemmy , maybe you re talking about some other part of the 'fediverse'?
To be honest i don't even care about that. As a user i want a place to store my thoughts, outside the impossibly juvenile corporate gardens, even if very few people read it. And if censorship becomes too much of a problem i can still create my own instance.
There is this hard to place aura about it, that the closest word I would use to describe it might be elitism. Despite being prescriptively and almost cloyingly inclusive at times, it’s still somehow not a place for all people and walks. Contrast that to a place like Facebook or Reddit, and even if you’re uneducated, technologically limited, and by all accounts living a most ordinary and unexamined life, you can find a community to welcome you. The fediverse really doesn’t have space for that sort of person, or really even folks who just empathize with such people and don’t mind them around.
And yes I know the fediverse is beautifully principled in that it’s not one thing or platform or instance and anyone can make their own blah blah but that’s not really how it plays out.
I don’t think the fediverse is a bad thing. But I do think it’s more of a home for the kind of people who love RSS feeds and classical music and vim and GPL and adblockers than it is for the huddled masses that comprise the majority of internet space.