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An unfortunate part of the fediverse is that it attracts people who were too obnoxious for even the more annoying parts of Reddit/Twitter/etc. I’ve made plenty of attempts to “get into” Mastodon and can confidently say that’s a miserable experience across the board if you aren’t willing to do the work to curate your feed. Even if you do get a feed that is free of bad actors, conversations rarely veer off-course from Linux, programming, computers, tech, etc., at which point that’s fine, I guess, but it’s hardly diverse. Also, for all the complaining about “techbros” ruining the fediverse, it sure is full of them.

I have more faith in Bluesky currently. If they’re able to achieve their own kind of federation then I’ll gladly jump ship since their userbase is a lot friendlier and more diverse that Mastodon IMO.

I started doing this after my phone number got into some kind of crazy scam call database. At the height of it I was getting somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 calls a day, basically rendering the phone unusable.

So I started actually picking up and running these jokesters through the ringer. I’m talking 15+ minutes of pointless conversation, false info, tons of backtracking, and general bullshit. I refined my craft over a few months and would time how quickly I could make them scream at me for fucking with them. At the end of it my phone got taken off at least one of the bigger lists because the calls went to down only 10 or so a day. Now it’s one or two a day at the most, probably from me not answering like I used to.

Favorite call was one guy who figured out I was messing with him and it turned into this general question and answer thing about life in the US. Dude wanted to know how easy it was to pick up chicks and whether or not I’d dated a lot/was married. Great guy, really into Counter-Strike.

I’m fairly certain they’re a college student also.

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How many times is this going to get posted? We’re on the fourth or fifth repost since it was written. The last post was just 12 hours ago on this community and there’s still active discussion.

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Why on Earth would we want to make (Lemmy) more popular? I want more people to leave. Things have noticeably gotten better over the last few weeks, but there’s still a ways to go. The people who are leaving are presumably mostly people who are frustrated by the relative complexity of decentralized forums and people who can’t find enough “content” to scroll through here, and good riddance to the lot of them.

You, two months ago. The quote perfectly encapsulates why niche communities aren’t taking off and why the demographic here will always be nerdy and tech-focused.

Every single one of the Reddit communities I followed that tried to move to Lemmy inevitably went back. There’s a ton of reasons why, like instances going down, poor moderation, unreliable servers, and general confusion as to how a Lemmy account works to name a few. The apps not being up to par at the time were a huge factor also. It’s highly unlikely that Reddit will ever see an organized effort to seek out communities off-site ever again, so the chance to just transplant a community in its entirety over to Lemmy is gone. Now we’re pretending it’s going to be possible to take a niche site (Lemmy, compared to the wider internet) and somehow develop niche communities from an active pool of users a fraction of a fraction of Reddit’s. It’s not happening.

It’s a tough pill to swallow, but if you have a problem with Reddit you’re in the minority. I’m fine with maintaining a Reddit account to communicate with people who are still on Reddit. I go where the users are. I’m not going to sit in an empty community for months talking to myself while conversations are happening elsewhere. It is what it is.

What if I don’t want the content I post to Reddit mirrored on Lemmy? How can individual users opt out?

Firefish definitely seems like it’s overly concerned with aesthetics over anything else. Nearly every instance I checked out had a ton of custom CSS which frankly reminded me more of something like Tumblr than what it really is (Mastodon with a coat of paint.) I don’t mean this as a slight since it’s obviously attracting a community, but it’s completely inscrutable to users not familiar with the platform its based on and seems to be very taxing to maintain (my experience mirrors yours somewhat.)

If they can get more people on board to keep it together then I’d definitely be willing to spin up another instance.

The front page of lemmy.world has a similar tone. Frankly I have enough problems to deal with in my own life - to willingly browse something designed to piss you off and remind you that people you disagree with exist is just pointlessly distressing. Yet this is what the majority of Lemmy and Mastodon people are choosing to do if the numbers are to be believed.

The best way to follow news is RSS or via an aggregator. I recommend SPIDR, which organizes stories from different publications under one shared headline. You can click the flag in the top left to pick the news from your country.

I would like to see Lemmy used like PHPbb or vBulletin was back in the early 2000s - interest/hobby-specific instances designed to house a set of users with a few general discussion boards outside of the main topic to aid community-building. A lot of people seem very focused on joining instances that federate with as many instances as possible, but there’s a lot of value to be found in going the opposite direction, I feel.

Have heard good things re: customization and layout. Any support for Lemmy/kbin? Seems they’re aiming to cover most fediverse platforms.

There’s also Voyager (aka wefwef.) I like default Lemmy, but nice to see there’s options.

I think this is something clients/frontends can fix by grouping together communties of a similar name.