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.
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.
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.
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.
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Damn, I’ve only been to Lemmy and Kbin so far…
Baby steps are ok.
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.
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.
Much to learn it seems
Are there apps for any of those?
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.
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?
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
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/[email protected] if i recall correctly
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.
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.
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.
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.
Audience capture is a bitch
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!
Welcome!! We are glad to have you here!
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.
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.
Gave up Twitter the day of Musk mocked that disabled employee/partner. Didn’t delete the account though. I’m still on Reddit. Hope Lemmy would go a long way!!
PS: I still automatically ignore some image posts on Lemmy thinking it’s an Ad cause I’m so used to it on Reddit App 😂
I was on the edge, but this event with Halli showed clearly that Elon is not right person to lead Twitter.
Exactly. I had a very high regard for Musk before he opened his mouth during early lock down. His technological initiatives (Specially SpaceX) has being great drivers. (Though he’s not the one doing the innovations) But he as a person have the qualities of worst human beings. If he kept his mouth shut, could have gone a long way, still.
It makes me respect billionaires who aren’t insanely juvenile attention whores who try to be the coolest edgy meme lord in the world while pushing shitty politics. Take Spez, basically everyone hates him lately, but at least he doesn’t have a front page post on reddit every day like, “look at me, I’m cool right!?!!” All Musk had to do was shut up and he’d have mass respect.
I also had a thought that “All Billionaires are not like that”. But recently saw a very decent millionaire giving money advice on Facebook Stories saying “Your low amount of money can’t do anything. Try to grow it to higher amount and then we can talk about investing”. (Paraphrasing here) It’s very common. All these people have lost touch with reality.
PS: Check Spez’s AMA. He is just the same edge lord.
Oh sure, wealth seems to make people completely loony and incredibly out of touch. Even having a net worth of $5 million is considered pathetic to some people, and the way they waste their money (and society’s resources that could have helped hundreds or thousands of people) is insane… and then they’re still obsessed with getting more. This is also what fucked over the economy for everyone else.
Splez sucks for sure, I am familiar with how he is a survival prepper and his statement about how he thinks after an apocalypse he would be a ‘leader’, plus he was such a douche to the Apollo developer. Also his vision for reddit is apparently to make it steadily worse, certainly a slap in the face to everyone who has enjoyed how the site used to be. If anything though I appreciate that Splez isn’t out trying to make himself the center of attention the way Musk does, which is really the most objectionable thing about that dude.
Same here. I’m getting more into abandoning projects and companies with insane leadership as I get older. The older the get the more I realize that we should have been destroying these idols from the start.
I dropped Twitter as soon as Musky took over since I rarely used it anyway. Reddit has been significantly more difficult to let go of, so I haven’t deleted my account yet. I’ve tried to open Apollo at least 50 times since the 30th.
I was surprised by how much muscle I memory had to click RIF. I opened it almost instinctually all weekend.
I opened sync to a blank page about 6 times before I had to uninstall it and I still find myself opening the folder it used to be in. I pause every time and sigh before I go find something else to do. I’m excited for the upcoming mobile apps for Lemmy and hope this can be a new home / refuge from the sadness that is now Reddit
There are already mobile apps like wefwef.app and I believe that Apollo, RIF, etc are being switched to Lemmy now as well
I’m honestly waiting for sync to be ported. I loved the experience the developer created and want to support their migration to Lemmy. As much as I want a mobile app today, I’m willing to wait for one of my favorite devs to get their app ported over. :)
Rif isnt
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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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?
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.
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
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