There was a comment a few years ago, during the height of Trump and COVID, that basically said “You all remember when that Large Hadron Collider experiment went off and they said it was totally okay? You sure about that?”

I think it hits the same idea you’ve got. And I know this is crazy, but several years back (at a completely different time), I had the same feeling you’re describing. I woke up with the feeling like there’d been a switch thrown and now reality was on a different track

It all started with Harambe. A series of events each more ridiculous than the last. At what point will they finally realize it’s all fake? Tune in next week for the next thrilling installment!

Whoa, this is one I haven’t come across. What is it?

Ha, sorry! I guess being on them hasn’t improved my reading skills. :-D

I have tried all the things! And I recently saw that article you’re referencing.

In my own experience, I haven’t seen one single person being rude or mean or blowing off newcomers. I suspect the bar to entry is slightly higher because you have to get your head around how the fediverse works, so the types of people coming here trend more patient. It’s also a slower pace here, which can be good or bad depending on what you like.

The nicest feature for my use is that you can follow just about anyone anywhere. On kbin especially. There you can follow users from any Lemmy instance, or an entire instance, as well as users at Mastodon. The downside is that it can be a little tricky at first to figure out how to follow someone who’s on another instance. It’s not hard, but it’s something new if you’re coming from a single entity site like Twitter.

It’s also no big deal to make an account on multiple instances if you’re not sure where to go. My approach with all of them was to browse the local server (e.g., lemmy.world, mastodon.social) rather than the federated feed. The local feed gives you an idea of who’s on that instance, what topics come up a lot, how the users act, etc. I’d also check out the “about” section. That will show you who the moderators are and what their focus and approach is. Some are laissez-faire and others are much more curated, so there’s something for everyone.

The neat thing about this system is that you can find more niche instances if you have a particular interest – gaming, software development, climate, science, memes, etc. You can make that your main instance and still see everything going on across all instances. That helps eliminate a lot of FOMO.

I was never on Twitter and not on most social media except Reddit, which I thought I’d miss. But I’ve enjoyed using Mastodon, Firefish, and Lemmy/kbin a lot. It’s a smaller group but still plenty to see and lots of interesting people and topics. Everyone has been very nice, but it’s easy to mute or block people or subs that you’re not interested in. After that you won’t see them in your feed at all.

I hope they call it Pooh Beer

It’s like the old Monty Python joke. American beer is like making love in a canoe… It’s fucking close to water.

Have you checked out kbin? It has some of those features, and you can sub to lemmy communities with it. It also allows you to follow users, which lemmy doesn’t seem to do. But you can’t save posts at kbin, which is something I use a lot.

Edit: literally just discovered you can save comments and posts, at least here. I don’t know if that’s new or if I missed it somehow.

Nice! Good bot.

How would you describe their differences? I’m always curious to see what people think about the different instances.

Nice! That’s good to know. I also just checked out a post from @Arotrios@kbin.social with some great info about viewing and following posts from entire instances here. That’s pretty mind-blowing.

I’m new to it as well and I’ve been poking around for info recently, so take this with a grain of salt.

Fediverse = Lemmies + Mastodons + Pixfed + all the other things that use Activity pub. They can, more or less, all talk to each other. So you can, more or less, get stuff from Lemmy on Mastodon and vice versa. But for right now, it looks like that can be a bit of a hassle – or at least more of a hassle than we’re used to with centralized services like FB, IG, Twitter, etc. You generally have to look them up and get a specific link and search on your own instance and follow.

But the fact that they can do this at all, and that so many people are working on making it better, means it will probably become easier and easier over time. And the more you play around with them, the less of a hassle it becomes.

My takeaway, for the moment, is that it’s simpler to keep Mastodon and Lemmy as two separate things, but it’s not so hard to cross instances within each of them. And since I am still new to this, I’ve joined a few instances of each to get a feel for them. Signups for both are really simple. The main thing I look at to decide if I’d want to join is their local feeds – the things you could browse easily if you joined that instance. I feel like it gives you a sense of who’s there and what they’re posting and what the instance’s main interests are.

I’ve been using lemmy.world as a general instance and joined beehaw.org and mander.xyz for more focused instances with different approaches to moderation and federation. But following communities across instances is pretty easy to do once you try it out. So that means you could have just one single instance and still follow interesting people or communities across all the other instances out there.

Awesome, thanks for this!

It’s so nice to see people excited about this! It feels like forever since something has come along that shook things up (in a good way).

Hey! I’ve been trying to get the hang of the fedi stuff. Is there a good source for how to combine Lemmy and Mastodon at kbin?

Yep. She was the canary in the coal mine.