Frostwolf

True. This is just my first week on lemmy and I am enjoying the quality of discussions, as well as the responses. Unlike in some subreddits and forums where any question can be dismissed, at least in lemmy as I experienced it, there seems to be more willingness to engage and inform. All in all a very non toxic experience. And all the more made me more hopeful for what it could become in the future.

Freer true. But isolated and less archival. Some forums tend to just disappear without a trace and some are hard to find (though I guess the directories and web rings back then have this mitigated.)

Still with the fediverse, I am hopeful that much of these concerns would be slowly addressed. And with the influx of users catapulting the platform to a more mainstream one, more and more issues would come to light and be easily stomped out.

As is frequently said, we’re just in the “growing pains” phase after all. :)

Well said. Aside from the obvious isolation the forums of old suffered the same weakness of reddit- power lies at the hand of the chosen few. And it rise and fall based on the action of its mods or admin. This weakness is, I believe, alleviated with federation.

some members weren’t always welcoming to newcomers. “We answered this four years ago so go rtfm” is not good for conversation and discussion, no matter how true it may be.

Ugh so true. With federation, this too will slowly fade to obscurity. If one instance becomes too toxic, there’s always the option that a more welcoming instance or community exist in the fediverse.

I noticed the mastodon instances, too when I was looking around which lemmy instance to join. The way I see it, lemmy can act as a more structured representation of the fediverse while mastodon the less archival version of it. It’s actually quite exciting to think about the interoperability and the possibilities it bring.

Just out of curiosity, how do you do that?

There may be some truth to that as all things eventually evolve whether for the better or worse. That said, I have high hopes that the federated nature will curb the oversaturation. If one instance do become corporatized, community instances can take over and quickly abandon the erring instance. This is what I think is lacking with reddit and twitter. People can’t just leave because there’s no alternatives. But with the fediverse, the sky’s the limit.

Omg! The web ring!! The link swaps and the directories. I feel so old… lemmycities. What a perfect idea. If only lemmy is as simple as clicking install on softaculous, I would have installed an instance ASAP. Build it on an offshore/privacy respecting VPS and build as many communities as I want without limits.

It may be true but the aspect of federation can at least slow that or maybe even act as a protection against extreme dilution due to many communities spread across multiple instances.

True. And in busier communities, you wouldn’t really know that it’s not reddit. With the dark theme, I feel like I’m back to using Apollo. Whether the UI is intentional or both lemmy and Apollo took inspiration with each other really helps the feeling of familiarity, like riding a new bike after the old one was broken.

Not only that but the idea of the fediverse reminds me a lot of the internet of old where multiple blogs and geocities pages would be linked by blog rolls. Now that that I think about it, maybe federation is really just the modern blog roll. 😅

Thank you ☺️ mostly the anime community and the bye reddit community I started. But will check out tech and gaming-related communities soon. I feel so giddy at the thought of discovering new communities that I feel like I’m a child again, first learning about the internet at the beginning of the dial up days. 😁