I try to learn a little something each day, even if it's as "simple" as how to pronounce a word or name. It's a good way to try to get out of my head (as mentioned in another comment) and a means to keep myself humble.
There's just so much I don't know, and each little thing I try to learn is a good reminder of that and how much more there is to learn.
Mine is probably a major nerd/geek move, but it's basically been taking as many of the organizations I followed on corporate social media, finding their RSS feeds (if they had any), plugging those in to different RSS readers and then by & large unplugging. I hadn't really used corporate social media for the social part in forever, so it didn't make much sense to keep putting up with their changes aiming to maximize ad views & exposure as much as possible.
The part that I've been struggling with from here however is just how to reach folks anymore as I don't necessarily want to have to have like 4 or 5 different messaging apps to do so. Unfortunately SMS feels clunky for anything beyond basic texting & I would really like to have a chat app that displays messages on both my phone & PC so I can respond from either depending on what I'm doing.
However the most popular apps with that kind of functionality are either tied into Meta/Facebook (WhatsApp/Messenger), gaming themed (Discord), or kind of clunky for chatting (Snapchat), and they're all centralized & trying to find ways to shove ads at you or sell you something.
As someone else mentioned, a lot of this is related to bots basically pulling & posting from RSS feeds, but even aside from that, it's the next easiest type of post to make outside of shitposts tbh. There's always something happening that's being reported in the news to share a link to, and there's always something going on with politics.
Other subjects also have a lot going on, e.g. there's also arguably a disproportionate amount of tech news being posted, but some other subjects take longer for anything of note to be shared/posted about, whether that's scientific research or entertainment. Books, movies/shows, music, games, they all take longer to make and there's not a ton many of them are allowed to discuss or share during the production process, so not as much to share or post about until the run-up to release, & after they're released.
Besides all of that, I think a lot of people are still figuring out what they even want to post & discuss here outside of news/tech/politics/shitposts and meta-conversations like this.
I can see where you're coming from, however...Did you message the mods of /c/politics & ask if they might consider changing their display name to more clearly indicate their US focus? It's not ideal, but the display name is what's shown when searching for communities or seeing posts from them in local/all feeds, so it at least helps in that regard.
At the same time, as other comments point out, there are a number of other politics communities with a broader focus across other instances, so unlike Reddit, we can have a /c/politics in any number of other instances with different rules and without a US focus. In a weird way, it's almost better that the /c/politics here is US focused, as it encourages folks to post & discuss general politics (including the US) in other smaller instances.
Although, ultimately, this would come down to whether the admins would prefer such simply named communities to have a wider focus as their name suggests instead of a narrow focus as is happening here, but I haven't gotten the sense that the admins necessarily want to get that directly involved in community naming & creation tbh.
Where do you fall on the "fur children" way of describing certain pets? I feel like this falls into a vaguely similar group of mannerisms that probably mildly infuriate a number of folks.
My knowledge is similarly limited, but fwiw I think you're more or less correct on what you've reasoned about your first question. Regarding the second, this is going to vary for each federated service and what's involved, e.g. on Mastodon your social graph (who you follow, who follows you) may be either public or private depending on your settings.
As to whether instances have lists of subscribed communities (or channels/followed users/etc.), I think you may be right as well as this is how the All/Federated/Other servers feeds are produced. However on private messages, they are absolutely not end to end encrypted on any fediverse service that I'm aware. It's much better to call these direct messages or mentioned people only (depending on context) rather than private, as many of the services that permit this form of messaging are really doing just that, simply making a public post only visible to the mentioned or directly messaged individual.
In other words, the fediverse is not really suited to private communications unless it's explicitly described as such (e.g. end to end encrypted channels/spaces on Matrix instances), so it's still better to use services like Signal or the like for private comms.
Regarding your third question, I don't know enough on this to comment.
Hope this helps, and if I'm mistaken on any of these, please correct me as I'm also interested in learning more on this subject!
May sound silly, but fwiw I think adding to the display name of the community the word, "Updates" or "Announcements" might help better identify that's what it's for when looking for it.
After about an hour of public comment Tuesday, the commission voted 5-1-1 in favor of the motion. Commission Chair Peggy Taylor abstained, and Commissioner Brian Rossmann, the only active librarian on the commission, cast the one opposing vote.
Some library commissions are just so bizarre in their composition, and it sounds like this one is no different. Sometimes the committee is made up of folks with next to no background in library work, or if they do it's woefully out of date, and they can prove more of an obstacle to library operations & organization (as here) than of much benefit.
Er...Maybe I'm overlooking it, or maybe there's a slight misunderstanding here? I only see the option to adjust the default feed type below theme options in my settings, but without further settings to limit the All feed to only display remote/federated communities.
Here's to your drug crime lord with a similar name, always gotta have a little appreciation for someone else with a similar name giving you unintended cover 😅
So, it's a subtle detail and may not matter for many folks, but your instance choice affects your remote communities via the All feed, as the people there choose which of those to subscribe to & presumably discuss the posts there & post there themselves. It's something that isn't as clear on Lemmy yet as many instances are more general subject than focused at the moment and communities are still in the works, but it's really clear on smaller Mastodon instances.
Easy example would be like a tech or programming instance that strictly limits the creation of their local communities, e.g. programming.dev. Off the bat you know a lot of discussion there's to do with programming, and in turn there's a decent chance that many of the communities people follow through there may also be programming or tech related, so the all feed may have a largely tech/programming focus to it.
As time goes on, you may see more focused instances with stricter sign-ups specifically to ensure their all feed relates more to their community's focus, but honestly probably not too many as people enjoy flexibility in their posting.
What would be interesting is to see how these stats compare to comparable services after their releases
This is where it gets tricky though, as you'd have to find services that have used existing accounts to ease the adoption of the new service, otherwise I think the comparisons wouldn't provide much insight.
Sort of, yeah, but it's worth recognizing that this is a little different insofar as this isn't an independent new platform, this is directly linked to and leveraging the existing audience of Instagram into the platform.
This isn't the case of an independent new platform like, say, Kick trying to draw in an audience away from existing platforms to theirs. There's a distinct advantage here that they've clearly benefited from in terms of lowering the barrier to entry by not requiring a new account to be made. It may not sound like much, but every point of friction counts for anything new.
Nah, it was just something that crossed my mind as new platforms are popping up & folks are trying to suss out which ones to move to, and influencers aren't influencin' much in this regard (& haven't in the past either).
Also besides hentai, before the porn purge it had a creative sex worker/porn fan scene of sorts that was pretty unique. Then they wrecked it to try to monetize the site with ads but couldn't even get that right and so it's been shuffled around owners to where now the business behind WordPress.com owns it.
Tbh it's probably the closest we've seen to a modern mix of MySpace, LiveJournal(? whichever blogging site was popular for fanfic, I'm blanking on it atm), & Geocities just in terms of the fan groups, heavy blog customization, and content that makes you wonder where the hell you've stumbled into.
More of a small diaspora sort of situation I think, at least relative to the amount of people that use Reddit.
As to where besides Lemmy/Kbin, there's some mentions across similar discussions of going to Tildes, Squabbles.io, Raddle, Discord, and I'd suspect a tiny minority may have gone back to plain old forums and some may be working on setting some up (e.g. Jellyfin's devs went ahead & did so). If I were to guess without hard numbers, I would guess that the majority that made any move may have simply gone to Discord, with another large amount giving Lemmy/Kbin a go, and a smaller amount of folks going to the others mentioned (i.e. Tildes/Squabbles/Raddle/other forums or trying to set up forums).
I try to learn a little something each day, even if it's as "simple" as how to pronounce a word or name. It's a good way to try to get out of my head (as mentioned in another comment) and a means to keep myself humble.
There's just so much I don't know, and each little thing I try to learn is a good reminder of that and how much more there is to learn.