I'm so lost right now. I was Redditor for 13 years. The last 8 I tried every app until I settled on Joey for politics and news and RIF for sports and entertainment. It was perfect. I could open RIF for college football, basketball and baseball, cricket, music, and various other hobbies. Then, I could find out what horrible shit was happening on Joey. Now, I'm trying to understand fedia, mastodon, and tiff but they are woefully underpopulated so if you post something, it usually just get ignored though I did get into an argument with Charles Stross on Mastodon and probably pissed him off (I love his writing but I think my points were just valid). I miss knowing who is going to create content that I might find enlightening and who I can avoid reading. I know know 2 people IRL who actually reddit and no one who uses anything but Facebook. I don't want to argue with college roommates
You know I get that you don't see 100s or even 1000s of comments on each post but I've found that on lemmy people are actually willing to talk to you and listen. You don't have to worry no one will see you or reply to you because you don't have enough upvotes.
Especially on beehaw. The quality of discussion is in most cases significantly better than modern Reddit. It all reminds me very much of the earlier days (16 year old reddit account here).
But honestly that’s been my experience on all Internet forums I’ve been a part of.
In the beginning they’re places with few, but good, discussions, but over time as their gravity exponentially attracts more people the level of quality drops until you have people who get angry at you because they’re on the wrong side of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I always strive to learn new things, and I hope that when I’m completely off the reservation about something and someone tells me I have the good sense to take a step back, learn something new, correct myself, and hopefully improve until next time.
Best I can say is, browse All on lemmy and Live Feeds / All on mastodon. You'll at least see some people and communities you want to follow. You gotta grow it organically here, with no algorithm to help. It's harder, but it's better.
This is my one big issue with Lemmy currently. I miss subscribing and just having a good feed. With Lemmy I find that a handful of very active communities end up pushing down the less active ones on a lot of the sorting options. I have to go directly to individual communities instead, which I guess could be considered a good thing for engagement but the UX side of my brain doesn’t like the extra clicks.
The Internet is full of people to argue with, if that is what you’re looking for.
I once tweeted at a guy who had gotten his name on an editorial about how Apple Pay (and Google Wallet/Pay) would fail as Walmart (IIRC) now had launched their own app-based payment service.
My tweet was just that he completely overlooked that Apple and Google had device level integration and a wider reach, and that Walmarts wallet-thingy thus would be competing with a lesser customer experience and way fewer supported locations.
His response was something along the lines of “boy, you really meet the crazy ones on Twitter”.
I think the fediverse might work out, but on the other side - a bit less social media never hurt anyone.