I think this sort of unfulfilled promise has been the biggest obstacle of my full scale adoption of a reddit alternatives.
As a non-typical Lemmy user (No interest in privacy, piracy, Linux, FOSS, Web Dev, SW Dev, Veganism, or discussing political theory with strangers online) finding active communities in topics i am interested in (basketball, football, hip hop and rap, martial arts, boxing, mma, PC building, relationships, kink, and the specific humor and nuance that comes with being a Black person on the internet) has been a struggle.
Many of those communities have two people or less posting in them or don't exist at all.
People are talking here but not about things i wanna discuss and that's disappointing so i have a hard time "sticking" if that makes sense
Yeah, i think that's a very helpful distinction. Something like Beehaw or Hexbear is defined more by its rules than its software.
I added Bee as a fourth item because people described it as a separate item/entity/community/experience than the others. Its limited federation somewhat corroberates this sentiment IMO.
Yeah! I remember reading that Beehaw had defederated from a lot of servers; the people who talk about it genuinely have strong feelings one way or the other. It sounds like a planned housing community or gated community but online, and that generates some very polarizing opinions.
It's also the one I have the least interest in exploring at the moment.
I think it's this in large part. Lemmy's users are by and large migrants from Reddit for various reason.
But also, this place exists as an ideological alternative to Reddit more than a technical one. The API-pocalypse (API-calypse?) and enshitification and shameless money grabs to inflate stock prices were the final straws for a lot of people but it's no secret that there are a series of positions and interests that are (assumed to be) shared by all the current Lemmy users.
As Lemmy grows its instances will continually have to determine who, what, and what beliefs and practices are welcome there
But also some people are just jackasses and need to argue, and they come into contact with people who want the same thing.
That Mastodon opinion is fascinating to me. Mastodon is the one i know he best by far, which is why i left it out.
Mastodon might function similarly, but as a user the community feels nothing like Twitter, for better and for worse, and its users and devs seem proud of that.
I also notice a strong communist/anarchist presence.
IMO Mastodon's flaws are from trying to hard to not be Twitter the 2nd, not from being too similar to Twitter.
YouTube Shorts have been pretty good at recommending content from games i play (Street Fighter 6) or from martial arts/Boxing/MMA accounts that i am actually interested in
30 seconds is short enough for an SF6 round or a cool KO
With that said, you've asked this in the wrong place and are gonna get the most curmudgeonly answers from people who dislike videos, let alone shorts
I think it's a facet of the largest Lemmy servers feeling (being?) more ideologically homogenous, itself in part because of how niche Lemmy still is compared to Reddit.
Many of the users came here after the API died and so made joining here an explicitly ideological choice.
People aren't here because their friends are here. Not really. Not yet.
They're here cause they want to be, because this is important to them or their beliefs or their identity.
That's totally valid and good and fine. But u should know and expect that when posting here, especially on the biggest or most general or politically volatile communities.
I've got negative interest in trying any Unix/Linux based OS on my home PC and I'm ambivalent about FOSS, but i recognize that being here will mean that putting up with a certain amount of "Windows bad" that i just have to laugh and shake off or stop coming here
Wanderer's Guide for Pathfinder 2e character sheets
Liberation Martial Arts for a leftist understanding of martial arts
And half a dozen (mostly NSFW) artists
None. I use none. Kraft Mac is already bad but if I'm in the mood for something nostalgic there are a dozen other things i would add first