I’ve been on the Fediverse since mid-2023, and I’m sticking around!

I bailed on Reddit, FB, and IG, and I’m only on Mastodon and Piefed now. I find that not being on algorithm-driven social media makes me less angry, and I have a much easier time avoiding getting caught up in a mindless scrolling marathon.

I like the ability to filter out by keywords, it makes for a much more pleasant experience

As far as improvements, my main complaint is that I wish there were more people and that the people who are here comment more. Bigger isn’t necessarily better, but there are a lot of communities that just don’t have enough people posting and commenting to make things feel lively yet.

I don’t feel good about being on mainstream social media any more. Any time I spend on Reddit or YouTube is minimal and with a sense of distrust.

I’ve been on lemmy for a few months now and it’s grown since I joined and grows more every day as people hear about it.

Never looking back.

I've only been on the fediverse for a total of like 10 minutes, but it seems so far like a perfectly viable alternative to big tech's data collection schemes disguised as websites.

I'm not new as such. I joined up on kbin initially and tried to establish my communities on there, but kbin kinda collapsed. Then I gave up for a while.

When I came back, I moved to lemm.ee and set up television and obscuremusic and got them going (the former especially) and then unfortunately lemm.ee shut down and then I moved to Piefed and rebuilt it all over again.

Personally, I came here because Reddit mods play king when they're less than a pauper. It is also full of pedos and rapists. Simple questions when people actually need to know are met with mockery and ridicule.

There is less to see here but the vibe is less fucky and I'm staying.

Almost as bad as reddit, sometimes for the same reasons, sometimes for completely new and unexpected reasons.

I created my first fedi account in 2017. It’s still a bit strange to hear people say there’s no content because to me this place is bumpin. It’s the same as anywhere — it what you make of it. With some careful curation, it’s plenty fine for my needs, and the underlying idea of internetworking social networks is something I believe in very strongly.

I’m new here and it’s quite a relaxed experience. I think there are more friendly and reflected people. It’s like people here are able to criticise properly and take criticism and also encourage and praise a little. I thought this was lost since early internet. But also very political / activist. I feel like in a bubble of people who want to change things for the sake of people and not capital. As much as I like it we’re not enough. I don’t care there are not many comments. Less comments, less fomo.

I used an apk called Relay when I was on reddit. Now I use an apk called Thunder on Lemmy.

My experience is almost exactly the same (very similar gui). Only difference is all the missing more niche sub\instances.

I'm pretty new.

Lemmy is great. It doesn't have as many active hyper specific communities as reddit. But there are still plenty of active communities.
There is no attention based algorithm. But the more basic sortings work well enough. I already spend too much time here.

I tried mastodon and Twitter a few years back. I still have absolutely no idea how that whole microblogging thing is supposed to work. Am I just supposed to scream into the void? Same thing with pixelfed.

If people link peertube videos from Lemmy, peertube works well. But the feed needs work. I don't really care about the topic of the video. So the filter by topic isn't that useful. I'd like to filter by language. And then find well researched videos by someone who is enthusiastic about a topic. Any topic. I don't know if there simply aren't that many or if I just can't find them.

I think attention based algorithms could help retain new users. I think there are many who try fediverse platforms and just don't stay long. And if we get more users that stay longer, we get more content, and then niches can form.

To not lose current users, and just because of mental health, it would probably be better if the attention based feeds could be turned off in the settings.

I joined two years ago after the Reddit API thing, full of hope and with bright eyes. I even got a couple of doggos in my PMs, which was nice. It got even better after I finally blocked enough weird porn communities so I stopped bumping into them all the time.

Now I only open Lemmy when I’m having trouble sleeping at night. I browse All/Active, and 90% of what I see are bot news reposts about Trump doing something stupid or scary, or some “are .ml tankies” shitstorms.

Also, I got banned on the Linux community at .ml and I have no idea why or even when it happened, which I actually find kind of funny.

As someone who has been exploring the Fediverse for about 2 weeks, it's been an overall good experience. I've been trying to use it instead of Reddit as much as possible, but it's also apparent that there's a lot less content.

I hope that the verse will continue to grow and that it will solve the content problem.

Otherwise the clients feel like a breath of fresh air and less enshittified than Reddit..

edit: Also the first comment talking about experiences that are just too jarring. I haven’t encountered anything like that but maybe I am just a sweet summer child.

Got tired of the tankies on lemmy, was about to go to piefed, heard about the censorship of piefed, went back to lemmy. So idk

I gave Lemmy a dedicated year. A few notes:

Very few people click through.

Lots of rage bait.

Communities split over instances make it pretty hard to know where to post things, what with defederation and such.

I didn't miss much "news"; lemmy was functional for reporting what people were talking about.

No notification of moderation actions taken against you is a choice.

Those who post small websites that do cool things: thank you! I did discover several other cool places and tools.

I found that about 1/10 of the top lemmy posts (after filtering out jokes and sports) are links to AI slop that nobody bothered to check, comments just take the headline as real if they affirm. Pointing this out in the comments did not reduce engagement or drop the posts.

Cutting it out of my routine, at last for awhile.

One thing I really hoped for from the social Internet was access to people and data that could correct me/fill in gaps. But lemmy doesn't do this, as people see what is upvoted and upvotes are used for affirmations to the reader.

Lemmy really needs to get its shit together in the UI/UX dept for the default look of an instance. Mastodon does this much better.

I can’t stand looking at Lemmy without Voyager.

I've been here since the before times.

It was just weird back then. I had no idea what tankies were and the content just seemed bizarre without any content. I wasn't here daily but kept checking in.

Since the reddit 3rd party app fiasco there's been more content so you could block .ml and have a somewhat satisfying experience.

Piefed is very comparable to lemmy but without the ideological stink and better filters - I thoroughly recommend making the switch.

Mods in the fediverse generally have better intentions than their counterparts on reddit. There have been a number of fumbles but for the most part they're better community stewards, although they do still have the same inherent problem of being fieflords.

The content on the fediverse lags behind reddit. For emerging stories there's way more interesting and up to date content on reddit. I've been using redlib for the last few years so I browse reddit but can't log in. It's a reasonable compromise IMO.

I do have some concerns about the fediverse.

Firstly it's an echo chamber. Quite often if a commenter points out some kind of nuance which doesn't align with the approved opinion they just get piled on. One recent example was the "Trump shat himself" video. Someone said something like "I can't really see it, you can hear a little squeak that could be anything and green lady is just looking around", they got downvoted to oblivion and loads of responses basically saying "how dare you not make fun of the POTUS".

We can't discuss things here. There's like 6 types of posts and we all just make the approved responses to each of them.

Secondly is the dwindling content. Things have deteriorated in the last few years with smaller communities drying up. Everyone's aware of it but no one can or will do anything about it. I don't have the stats but I suspect that 99% of posts are made by about 4 different users.

lemmy is a mess since the same community can be found on a different server. same news have 2 comments, but 62 on the other. this thing is just gonna stay as an underground social media until someone solves this.

That we still can't use a single account to comment and post outside of our home instance is the most frustrating part of the fediverse and the main contradiction to "you just need one sign up".

It gets better the more familiar you become with it. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone in real life. There are parts that are just way too jarring.

I joined today! I tried to post some images, but could only have one image per post. Then someone was rude, and I wasn't able to downvote him. I keep refreshing the front page, but nothing happens since there's no algorithm, the latest posts just stay there.

I think I'll stick around here in parallel to Reddit. Maybe some day I'll understand how instances and all of that works.

I cannot use it, want to get rid of Reddit but this feels and acts like a site from 1980s , navigation and jumping off from one part to another is cumbersome at best and unknown at worst. What is difference between this and what I get in boost app is unknown.

Been on here since August and I like it. Left Reddit after I got a permaban for expressing how much I'd love to see the death of billionaires so I came here. Haven't had to worry about a ban for things I say and haven't been banned from groups cause I commented on other groups (I don't know what they're called and I don't want to call them subs). I'm still getting messages from mods of subreddits saying I've been banned cause I commented on an anti-Nintendo sub despite my profile being perma-banned from the site.

Kinda shit, actually. It's mostly just reddit reposts, nazi bot reposts, and furry porn.