this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Lemmy
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I was just thinking about this.
I'm also old, having gotten into the internet back in the BBS days in the late 80s and early 90s. Lemmy is the first platform I've been on that resurrected those feelings of friendly competition, community, and variety. In those days, each BBS had its own character. There was plenty of duplication of content, but it didn't matter because each server you connected to was like looking at that content through a different lens. Users didn't get notoriety from collecting upvotes; they got it by being willing to travel to different servers and make a name for themselves by participating in many communities.
It's good to have that feeling again!
for anyone spending a few days on Lemmy it becomes obvious that stripping off all the advertising, algorithms and gunk attaching itself to online forums makes for a much better user experience.
The priority is to communicate, instead of making money... who knew that makes for an engaging experience!
You don't have to go far into Threads to imagine how that's going.
When people comment that having multiple communities fragmented over the fediverse is bad, I think back to this concept. We aren't built to handle the scope of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people under one roof. We are socially constructed for small groups of people--tribes, and the fediverse emulates that more closely where it is decentralized.
I don't mind if there's N Android communities if it means that when I ask a question, it's going to be seen, and people are willing to answer.
The other thing that I don’t quite get about it is, you can come across the “fragmented communities” either through random chance or consciously seeking them out, and just subscribe to them. Now you can participate in multiple communities from your home instance.
I get people are lazy and just want to have the stuff they like shoved in their face, but IMHO you get a much better result when you have to put a little skin in the game.
It also discourages some level of shitposting because shitposters have to work just as hard to find the places to make their dumb jokes and in my experience most of those types are not going out of their way to do that.
Same here, grew up with BBS, UseNet, NNTP. I'm digging this vibe here, and glad to be away from (fuck u) Spez and the shit show the other platforms contain.