Was just browsing my favorite communities, commenting on posts I found really interesting, and engaging with other users who wanted to have conversations.
… and not a single paid ad in my feed. I effing love this platform.
I feel a lot more comfortable commenting here than anywhere else. Was always a lurker in reddit, but am a lot more active here.
The feeling of not having your comment buried by thousands is kind of nice.
I like this too! There wasn’t much point in posting anything on an r/popular post because no one would see it. Here I feel like I’m actually contributing [which really helps my fragile self-esteem ;)]
There's also the whole fact that you're less likely to get downvoted and berated to hell on lemmy. Still happens sometimes though if you openly present as American
I'm a big fan of the Fediverse and Lemmy in particular. Thanks to the Fediverse, but mostly Lemmy, I was able to build my home lab and now when I walk around my house, the lights come on by themselves. I love the conversions I get into. I love the open nature of Lemmy and how you can look at the repositories and watch how it grows.
There's definitely things that can be better and I'm happy to be on the train.
My only true desire is to see more people and communities distributed across more instances.
Eh, I'm worried that success will bring out the worst in people. I'm of the opinion that SM doesn't suck because SM companies suck, but that SM sucks because people suck when in large groups. See Bystander Effect and Bandwagon Effect.
But I guess that's a good problem to have, we can't come up with solutions until we actually get a chance to try.
I think your worry about large groups of people is warranted. I do think that the Fediverse has the best chance of anywhere to overcome it, though. No algorithms and only mods/admins to contend with. I how that extra freedom will promote better problem-solving.
I think that enshittification on any SM platform, whether free and open, or built for commerce, happens when companies try to exploit it for commercial gain.
Take Usenet for example: At the beginning it was great, then spammers found they could post unlimited spam across the newsgroups for free, and it became shit, barring a few groups where mods had to work very hard to weed out the spam to keep them readable, but eventually collapsed, and people moved on to the new platforms.
Reddit, was built for ads and tracking its users to start with, so the gradual creep of enshittification was no surprise there.
And now we have nation-state backed disinformation campaigns to deal with in addition to commercial spam.
I could see Lemmy and the Fediverse in general taking a similar path to Usenet, if the devs, admins, and mods aren't vigilant about keeping bad actors out.
I like the Fediverse's guarantor feature for adding new instances, but we'll have to see how well it holds up under assault from spammers.
I've been on Lemmy since June and I haven't once seen a video of a dude punching a girl. It always made me queasy that shit was soooo popular on reddit.