I post on mastodon and bridge to bluesky. That way I can reach anyone there interested in following me, but I personally don’t have to bother with the site at all.

As someone trying to reach an audience, it’s pretty much perfect. Each to their own obviously.

Thanks, very insightful!

Maybe elaborate?

Vitamin D supplements. You’re not gonna get much sunlight, and you need vitamin D not to get depressed.

The locals are used to seasonal depression. Foreigners tend to have a hard time with it.

Layers are key. Noting beats real wool.

Use mittens, not gloves. Gloves suck.

You cannot interact with microblog folks on Lemmy, unless they actively post something in a Lemmy community by tagging it. So if you want to combine microblogging with threaded discussions Mbin is the only platform that does both. Mbin lists followers publicly.

I think there are Mastodon forks (or configurations) that hide followers from the public though. But it will only ever be half hidden.

It’s useful.

Let’s say you see someone who posts stuff you’re interested in. In a brief moment of absolute brilliance, you think to yourself “aha! Maybe this person follows other people whose content I would be interested in!”

So you check, and sure enough, there’s a bunch of interesting people listed. So you follow them as well. Your social graph grows, you have a better time there, the people you follow get better reach and gets to enjoy pleasant interactions with you. Everybody’s happy.

These social media platforms are designed to be public. If you want to do stuff in secret, do it somewhere else.

I guess I at least agree that we were naïve with regards to Dorsey and way too slow to realize Twitter was a threat. Looking back now it seems like it was bound to go to hell eventually, and if we look beyond the west it already went to hell a long time ago. And even in the west the tipping point was arguably years before Musk bought Twitter, it was just that people were too addicted to accept how dangerous it was.

So I guess you could criticize people for only realizing now how fucked up Twitter is. Then again, better late than never.

That’s fantastic.

It seems clear the English speaking web has a preference for Bluesky. It would be interesting to know how much variation there is between users of other European languages. It seems to me the Germans are pretty active in the Fediverse, which makes sense considering a significant portion of them have been huge privacy nerds since the fall of the GDR.

Oh no, it’s fine, we’re just being softly threatened with the enabling of a Russian invasion of our eastern borders should we force Twitter to comply with our laws. No real problem here, keep posting.

I think Homage to Catalonia is an important read. It’s a great account of things that can go wrong in a resistance, despite amazing people and incredible efforts.

Been thinking about this song lately.

It’s basically addressing God directly - pointing to the horrors of the world accusing him of actually wanting it. It’s written in the scripture. It’s not some idle claim. He wants it darker.

I struggled with some demons, they were middle class and lame.

Until now !superbowl@lemmy.world has been my source of uplifting content of last resort. Sadly I have woken up to the realization that owl pictures might not be enough going forwards. Appreciate the thread.

They elected the candidate backed by Russia, which is still the shining beacon of a global superpower for the Tankies out there. So I guess Trump is a perfectly fine representative of fascism, left or right.

I think we have to accept that the American electorate actually wants fascism.

In the event of a tight race, the Supreme Court can decide to speed up the process by not counting black votes.

I meant to say that I would never have believed back then that Lemmy would become as popular as it is today.

My point is that it’s a moving target. Reddit has a billion active users. Instagram has two billion. I don’t think these make sense as targets.

Does it currently make a profit? If not they will find ways to make it worse. And even if they do make a profit chances are they’ll want to increase their margins.

Maybe stuff like the Google deal could keep money pouring in while keeping usability at a respectable level though.

I’m gonna say yes, for the exercise.

Four assumptions:

1. Reddit will keep getting worse, due to the nature of enshittification and venture capital. Eventually enshittification reaches a breaking point where people leave or stop arriving.
2. Lemmy (in a broad sense - et al!) will keep getting better, due to.the nature of open source software.
3. Non-free alternatives to Reddit will eventually enshittify, law of enshittification.
4. Free alternatives will use ActivityPub for the obvious advantages.

If these assumptions are met, given infinite rounds of enshittification and unhappy users, eventually a federated and free alternative will be the most lucrative option for the majority of users. Eventually Reddit will Digg itself a hole. Maybe Lemmy won’t take over then, but it’ll stick around.

The most unrealistic assumption is of course that the federated solutions will keep getting better indefinitely. Maybe they won’t. But as long as people keep developing and contributing to the Fediverse, it’s alive and improving in a way commercial alternatives cannot in the long run compete with.

If I saw this question posted the first time I visited Lemmy (some months before the Reddit app drama) with “popular” being defined as the current level of activity, my clear answer would be a loud and clear “probably not”.

Congrats on getting out of it! Questioning one’s own set of beliefs is not an easy task even for people who genuinely believe they are doing it constantly. Cool stuff.