this is how it starts. first you open one for your cat as a joke and next thing you know you're going meow meow :3 nyaaa~~ at people online and suddenly social media starts makign sense
and nyaizes your text so all your "na"s end up "nya"s. western forks like firefish/iceshrimp/sharkey have that separate from the cat ears toggle but honestly why would you disable that?
nah, there are plenty of truth wannabes (freeze peach bigotry safe havens) that actively federate. just look at literally any competent server's blocked instances list and you'll see a few examples. there's a reason why nobody* runs completely open federation
*: aside from people who're friendly with that crowd ofc
mastodon doesn’t “discover” akkoma content and won’t show anything unless you’re following a user from there, which kinda sucks.
I mean -- that's how all of them work. Even Lemmy. Unless your instance administrator joins relays (which have tradeoffs between privacy / effectiveness of blocking) your instance is only ever aware of posts from followed people (and reply threads followed people are involved in)
(also MUCH lighter on server resources, compared to most other twitter-like alternatives)
Mastodon is just unusually heavy, really. Even Misskey & forks are lighter than Masto on the server side (preferring being bloated on the client instead)
In my experience, once when you find your way into the correct circles the microblog-verse makes the "shitposting" of Lemmy look like r/memes. I do agree that discoverability could be better though, it took me 4-5 months before I got the hang of it. And now I barely check Lemmy despite my Lemmy account being older than my earliest microblog account (under this name, anyway).
One important thing is that your instance matters quite a bit more than here. Starting on a large general purpose instance (especially if it's mastodon.social) and just following Large Accounts and Nobody Else like most people recommend for some reason is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Instead, get on a smaller interest-specific instance (rule of thumb: the weirder the domain the better your experience will be!) and follow the local timeline (and on good software, the bubble/recommended timelines). And post stuff/interact with people. Don't be that one person that does nothing but boost news bots and occasionally butt into replies of people asking rhetorical questions they already know the answer for.
(Perhaps Lemmy is better at news or whatever, I wouldn't know as I block all news communities I can find -- I just don't see the point as all the discussion around most news ends up predictable, unproductive (not that internet communities necessarily need to be "productive"), and unnecessarily angry)
Also in a world with usable™ Misskey forks and Akkoma I think the limitations of Mastodon the software are really starting to show, and I urge anyone who's been disappointed in Mastodon to try other microblog software. (Quotes are already a thing if you know where to look! So are emoji reactions, because people have more emotions than :star:)
What I'm more worried about are posts relating to news mainly. Where even if the immediate first level comments are fine, there are threads that get out of hand really quickly.
I agree that while posts inherently designed to be controversial may not benefit from Active considering the influences voting has (though me being on an instance that has downvotes disabled may be influencing my view here!), Active may make it significantly easier for an otherwise innocent post to devolve into a flame war.
I'm just throwing this out there but having the default sort incentivize comments seems like it'd highlight posts meant to cause flame wars... Is that what we want out of this platform?
![kopper [they/them]](https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/PG5vaKqMsg.webp?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
this is how it starts. first you open one for your cat as a joke and next thing you know you're going meow meow :3 nyaaa~~ at people online and suddenly social media starts makign sense