I’ve been off and on with the Fediverse for sometime now. It’s a relatively friendly place full of fellow nerds, but with a few caveats…
My feeds seem very focused on hard information be it Gaza, tech companies doing bad things, or people pitchforking about the lastest big bad in digital privacy. This is all well and good, but it does get a bit tired after a while. Seeing the samey stuff post after post by academic types makes me more informed but also mentally draining.
Where’s the fun? On Facebook and Instagram I see light fluffy popcorn type posts of people reminiscing over Nintendo games or reels of cockatiels being cockatiels. It’s fun to scroll and interact. Here it feels like I’m in a classroom, and people, while friendly, do get quite hostile if you don’t like Linux or Star Trek.
As a leftist I like it here because it’s my bubble of people, but I’d like to see the fedi let its hair down a bit. It’s okay to talk about stuff other than infosec, privacy guides, distros, and Gaza.
Just so I don’t sound like some jackass saying “stick with it, it’ll all work out”:
This is the way the internet used to work. It used to work a lot closer to the fediverse, where you just had “token rings”, or networks of sites that banded together and shared links and promoted content from each other.
They were all hosted by random people who cared about the topics the communities were involved in, be it agriculture, painting, technology, politics, hunting, fishing, hiking, racing, swimming, etc. etc.
Central social networking services like Facebook/Twitter/Reddit are a relatively new invention, and is not how the internet used to work.
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