This morning, I had free time. As usual, opened my Apollo app, only to be greeted by the loud reminder that I am cut off from the community I have lurked, posted and lurked in almost a decade.
Days, even weeks before Apollo closed, KBin, Tildes, Mastodon and lemmy have been the talk of reddit. The fediverse is trending and just for the heck of it, I applied to lemmy.ml and vlemmy.net. My account wasn’t approved on vlemmy.net for days and only recently did my lemmy.ml account was approved, only to discover they don’t allow the creation of new communities.
I searched around and discovered lemmy.world. The sign up was painless, just like in reddit. As soon as I signed in I was able to create a community and started browsing right away.
As this day came to a close few more things jumped at me.
- The posts may be fewer but the quality and length is higher.
- The people I interacted with are more than helpful, positive and kind.
- No karma points
- The collective unity behind scorning the corporatization of the greater net.
As I browsed and scrolled, and discovered communities, I am reminded yet again of the bygone days of old, when the internet was young. When everyone had geocities website and phpbb forums.
Here, everyone is making the community into a digital home, built on ideals of a freer more independent internet. Here I felt something that I haven’t felt in a long time. And maybe it is nostalgia or maybe just a post trauma from the drama that is reddit.
But as I mindlessly scroll through the post here, I say to myself, this could be a good home. And truly, I am home.
Good day fellow lemmies. And thank you for reading through my long winded rant. I just want to express how happy I am to have discovered this place.
In time, may this grow into a friendlier, kinder reddit. And in time, may it surpass what it wasn’t intended to replace but took on the responsibility anyway; a testament to the enduring resilience of our love for all things free- an internet of the people, for the people and by the people.
The thing you will need to get your head around, is that you’ve not just joined lemmy.world. You’ve just joined the fediverse. I’m currently commenting on your post from kbin. I don’t even have a lemmy account. I am not on lemmy while I type this.
Want to ‘boost’ a ‘toot’ on mastodon, the fediverse equivalent of twitter? No problem. I’m almost certain you can do that from lemmy too, like I can from kbin. Hell, there are people working on allowing people on lemmy, mastodon, etc. to read and comment on wordpress posts:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/
There are still bugs to be ironed out, but imagine being able to retweet a youtube comment from facebook messenger with a reaction gif off instagram. Impossible, right? Not in the fediverse.
And I for one think that’s really really cool.
Caveat: you’re an early adopter. There are going to be bugs. On the other hand, unlike reddit which made millions in advertising revenue, IME the people running networks in the fediverse don’t wait ten years to half fix issues.
That was what immediately struck me as so cool once the concept clicked. It’s not platform, it’s a protocol. We can all interact and share content but the UI/UX is different depending on what platform you’re using. If you don’t like how others are doing it you can spin up your own instance and build the front end you want.
The Fediverse is an incredible idea and is probably the way forward for peer-to-peer communication. It feels a lot like old-school Usenet with different servers having different groups and I’m into it.
I noticed the mastodon instances, too when I was looking around which lemmy instance to join. The way I see it, lemmy can act as a more structured representation of the fediverse while mastodon the less archival version of it. It’s actually quite exciting to think about the interoperability and the possibilities it bring.