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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’ve been using Mastodon since Twitter was taken over by Musk, so I’m not a super long-term user, but I can give my perspective:

    Platforms like kbin / lemmy are more like “topic” communities. Like people on kbin create “magazines” and on lemmy they are actually “communities”. From the user perspective, you can just look for these communities you are interested in and sign up to get updates from them.

    Platforms like Mastodon are more like you and specific people you like to see content from. So you find people you like to hear from and you follow them to get their updates. They may post on subjects you aren’t interested in but oh well, that’s up to them.

    Both formats can produce desirable, tight-knit communities, but they just use different structure. In my opinion, the kbin / lemmy style is more accessible in terms of finding people interested in a specific subject but feels less personal since you are just all there to talk about a specific subject. On Mastodon, when I find people posting content I like, I end up learning more about the random nonsense they are interested in. Like my feed there has a ton of moose pictures now because one person I followed likes to post pictures of moose. I don’t mind seeing them, but I never expected to see so many moose.

    TLDR: Mastodon is about following people, kbin / lemmy are about following topics.




  • I think that would defeat a piece of the point of a decentralized system. In the current design, what will naturally happen is that if one instance has all the good content on a particular topic, most users will gravitate toward it anyway. We can read across federated instances anyway so I, a kbin user, have no problem reading something on lemmy like this.

    Then let’s say one day lemmyworld@lemmy.world gets taken over by people who want to post stuff I don’t want to see. If I miss how it used to be here, I could go make lemmyworld@kbin.social and it would be fine.