I have fully transitioned to using Lemmy and Mastodon right when third party apps weren’t allowed on Spez’s place anymore, so I don’t know how it is over there anymore.
What do you use? Are you still switching between the two, essentially dualbooting?
What other social media do you use? How do you feel about Fediverse social media platforms in general?
(I’m sorry if I’m the 100th person to ask this on here…)
“Dualbooting” is a nice analogy, haha. No, I switched completely over from the previous main ones: No Reddit and no Twitter. But I still use dedicated forums for specific topics/software, such as a Romhacking (retro game modding) community or RetroArch forum. Unfortunately not everyone is on Lemmy (or Mastodon, but I stopped using Mastodon too). So for me it is Lemmy/Beehaw and a few standalone forums.
Wait I also started using Discord from time to time, but dislike this as a main application. There is an alternative called “Matrix”, which is similar to what Lemmy and Mastodon are respective to their technology. But its not that widespread, so stopped using it too. Maybe will comeback to it. I know there is BlueSky, which is a main competitor to Mastodon. Just didn’t have enough interested into it yet, as there is Mastodon already.
Fine with me, as I didn’t saw any of the 99th person asking this before.
I feel that Matrix and Lemmy go really nicely together. There are already some integrations, which let you link from your Lemmy to your Matrix account.
It’s nice that Lemmy directly tells you “These messages are not secure” and recommends Matrix.
If this were driven by a cooperation, they would say “blablabla it’s so secure you can trust us with your data blablabla” but no! This is the fediverse, where people can do what they want to!
Over here, they are self-aware and link to Matrix, which is so refreshing. This kind of open collaboration between projects is beautiful I think.
Also yeah, Mastodon feels weirdly… empty? I use it sometimes and despite it’s apparently larger userbase, I cannot seem to find a good starting point.
Then again, I also didn’t quite understand Twitter, so maybe that’s it.
I think Mastodon is heavily “following” based. I mean you need to find people to follow. I think you can even follow hashtags, which is pretty neat. So lookup if your favorite content creators may have a Mastodon account and follow them. And make sure to enable or disable the “world” view and not just looking at your own feed, if you don’t have much yet. Just some random thoughts. If you are already familiar with this, then apology.
As for the Matrix collaboration, I didn’t think about this working between Lemmy and Matrix. But it make sense. Because there is also some sort of “bridge” setup you can do between Matrix to Discord. I’m not much familiar with that, just read about it.
All of this is neat. But its biggest strength is also its biggest weakness: Being not centralized. It’s kinda like on Linux (and I don’t mean the distributions only). I just wish the entire Fediverse would already cooperate. The lack of a centralized place that has all instances and technologies that are based on Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, video platforms and so on) is a huge missed oppurnity.
Even Instagram, a technology not even based on Mastodon or Fediverse, can cooperate with Mastodon. I never used Instagram, so not sure how this looks in reality. But I thought its worth mentioning here.