For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—
Listen, I am a Lemmy supporter at the highest level. I believe that the Fediverse model for social media is the next step in evolution for the industry. But Lemmy itself, in terms of the front end, is a near exact copy of Reddit. And was created, at least in part, with the idea that from the beginning, it couldn’t be heavily monetized and become a profit-driven and publicly traded company. That it wouldn’t sacrifice the quality of the product and lead to the enshittification of the service like so many other digital offerings.
But currently, if you were to compare Reddit and Lemmy. Reddit’s digital content offerings are significantly better than Lemmy’s. Which makes sense. Reddit has been around for much longer than Lemmy and is much more known by the general public. It has a much larger user base as a result. Which for a user generated content platform is everything when it comes to the pool of individuals that can generate and submit interesting content.
Lemmy was the first Fediverse that actually worked for me, because I don’t like Twitter and don’t care to follow randos I’ve never heard of. I like anonymous forums.
Having more people does help, but only to a certain extent. At some point, it just becomes difficult to moderate and having a higher number of casual users that don’t give a shit about the rules.
The thing that I am still struggling to wrap my smooth brain around, is that I have an account on a widely federated lemmy instance. Allegedly, I should also see content from mastadon and other federated services. How do I do that? How would I even phrase the question so that a search engine could provide useful results?
actually, imma ask chat gpt. if it spits out anything usefull, i’ll report back.
You’ll only see posts from Mastodon on Lemmy if they get posted on a Lemmy community I think