“What’s up?”

“I’m pissed”

This will probably be how I meet my end someday.

I actually find myself spending more time here, to the point to where I might have to take a break because it’s starting to become unhealthy.

I think the reason why is since there are less posts per volume, it’s easier to read through everything. Since the communities are smaller, the news and discussion is more focused. And because a lot of the more tech savy and activist minded individuals made the switch over to lemmy, I find it easier to have more nuanced conversation than on reddit.

However some of my bad habits from reddit are starting to resurface here, and I probably need to start regulating my time here. At the very least, I feel like I get a lot more out of my time and participation here.

On kbin and I think most major lemmy instances, you can block communities, so if you don’t want to see content from them, say redditmigration posts, you can filter the whole community. That won’t stop you from say seeing it in unrelated communities, in which case blocking the users who keep bring it up reduces visibility of the topic even more. Finally setting your default page to your subs rather than top reduces the visibility of unwanted topics even more.

I sincerely wish people would use the block feature, rather than keep making threads complaining about content/communities they don’t like to see.

I like them for different reasons. Mastodon is somewhere I check on my phone for updates on things I care about, random posts, memes, or interesting topics that make it into my feed.

Lemmy on the other hand is somewhere I actually hang out. Sure, there are the memes, but there’s more room for in depth discussion here, and I can spend hours here while I usually browse mastodon in minutes. In a way they are both how Twitter and Reddit used to be before they got massively popular and I find it refreshing.

In the end, I went with kbin because it combines features and integration of the two platforms while having stuff unique to it. I definitely recommend it if you like both platforms.

Missed train, but eh, whatever.

The year is 2016, I’m teaching English in Japan, and the Olympics is on TV with Nigeria vs. Japan in Soccer.

I’m normally not into Scoccer or any kind of TV sport for that matter, but I caught the game early on, and Japan was neck and neck with Nigeria. For some reason I wanted to see it play out. JAPAN scores! YES! then I remember where I was and what I was doing, and my train to Sapporo had left 30 minutes ago…

Luckily I was able to schedule another train, and what time I got there didn’t really matter, but I had to wait several hours for it to arrive. Japan ended up losing 5 to 4.

I was introduced to kbin first, and after giving both kbin and lemmy a shot, I decided on kbin as my primary. I prefer the layout mostly. Yes I know you can customize lemmy to get it to a similar look and feel, but kbin feels great straight out the box. The Mastodon integration is interesting, and its nice to keep up with what’s going on there at the same time on one site. Also as federation users, we are encouraged to join smaller instances to lighten the load of ml and world, and kbin seems to be a good compromise of joining a smaller instance that isn’t too empty. Also, with the recent hacks happening with the bigger lemmy instances, I feel like I made the right call sticking around here.

As someone who is still on reddit and other mainstream sites as well as fediverse, here are my impressions.

There is definitely a frustration around the enshitefication of most of the major platforms, which is causing users to seek out alternatives to these sites. A lot of this has translated into increased traffic and membership on fediverse sites like Lemmy and Mastodon, but the reality is the situation still hasn’t gotten bad enough for most general users to abandon the platforms entirely, or they stick around because despite everything, they are still the platforms with the most reach, and are still easy to use for most users.

Mastodon seems to have waves of activity based on the latest major fuckup by Elon Musk, but because of the learning curb and the differences in how Mastodon works, combined with the lack of user activity compared to twitter, most users don’t stick around. Meanwhile, Bluesky is advertising itself as twitter pre enshitefication, and Threads is promising a userbase comparable to twitter without it being ran by Musk, which to a more casual person may seems more appealing. Fediverse is more appealing to people like you and me because we’re nerds. Like we are interested in the technology, and want to dive into it to create the web experience we want. That’s not going to appeal to the average user though.

There are weeks where I spend most of my time online on kbin and mastodon, and if I go by word and news posted, it would seem like reddit and twitter are on their final ropes, everyone is rushing to the fediverse, and we are about to enter another wild west period of the internet. But then I go back to reddit, and most of the communities I was apart of still seem as active as they have ever been. Most people I followed on twitter still post regularly with similar amounts of likes, retweets and comments, and most content creators will still point people towards these platforms for further engagement.

One space I have seen a major shift in is the LGBTQ community. There is definitely a diminishing of activity on major platforms mostly because the recent enshitefications have made these platforms more hostile places. Fediverse is a popular alternative for these communities, which is probably why you see a large amount of queer users within the fediverse. A lot of tech communities have also flocked to the fediverse and other communities because these spaces attract a lot of tech savy nerds, and are a great place to find fellow techies who know what you’re talking about.

Overall, There is definitely a shift in how people use the internet and how they interact in Social media. The echochambers within the fediverse though would make it seem like it is bigger than it actually is. I would say we are seeing the dawn of the expansion of the internet, where instead of everything being centralized on 4 or 5 major sites, there will be a number of smaller sites that host their own communities. It probably won’t be anywhere near as decentralized as the pre youtube and facebook era of the internet, but you’ll at least have other places to go to when you get sick of a site, but still want to find like minded people to discuss your interests with.

Probably so. That and 196 is a very active community.

Startrek: Deep Space Nine, Web Comic, Bread, Followup on interview, friend who is moving in 2 weeks, and coffee mugs specifically.