With the talks about blacking out Reddit to protest the API changes,
what are terminally online people to do? Here’s my proposal of some
profiles to follow on Fedi:
Adjacent:
There’s also Lemmy and kbin, two possible Reddit alternatives, but I
don’t know of any communities there. I’m personally on szmer.info, but I guess a Polish instance
isn’t what people here need 🙃
Some quick guide for people who are new to the “Twitter Clone” side
of Fedi:
- There’s basically two sides of Fedi, one where the ‘nice’ people
are, and another with fash/terfs/etc.
- Going through
John JoinMastodon should get you
on the former.
- ‘nice’ was in quotes, because if you aren’t a cishet white dude you
can still step into shit. A story by
Mekka Okereke what happened when he made an account on mastodon
(dot) cloud, which isn’t eager to block cesspools like poast etc.
- If you liked Twitter drama, you can now have the same, and also
between admins!
- Not all servers run Mastodon proper. There are forks, there are
completely different softwares.
- Pleroma which used to be ran by
some nasty people, not sure if it’s still true. It was forked into Akkoma which was christened ‘t-slur
software’ by Alex Gleason, so it must be doing something right.
- Misskey which is a flashy
Japanese weirdness, forked into FoundKey and CalcKey.
- GoToSocial, lightweight but so
currently
in alpha and missing basic features like signup, so only suitable
for screwing around and making single-user instances.
- The above doesn’t matter all that much, they all can talk to each
other. Though if you want cat ears over your profile pic, consider
Misskey or clones. Regrettably, cat ears don’t seem to federate to other
software.
here’s my short intro to Mastodon
Twitter is the main street, now in urban decay. Mastodon (the “nice” fediverse) is very much the suburbs, and full of individual HOAs. Pleasant enough if you find the right suburb, but not vibrant. It structurally can’t replace Twitter.
Bluesky could be the new main street, it’s got black twitter and the queer shitposters, but the devs and CEO are rationalist crypto bros who go to Vibecamp and spent a week to block a blatant neo-Nazi cos half the devs and the CEO were following her. So approach with caution.
Don’t forget https://jorts.horse/@AcausalRobotGod
Also, the official* fediverse theme song is the Eleanor Rigby Battle Theme by josef.
*in that I will keep saying so until it is true
(I’ve been at @bstacey@icosahedron.website since April ’17.)
interestingly, the lemmy instance beehaw was founded in part because the reddit/HN alternative tildes was infested by rationalists. lemmy as a part of the fediverse definitely gives me bad vibes, but beehaw-local communities at least seem better than most if a bit generic
kbin’s also kind of interesting. it’s a lot snappier overall than lemmy, and it can pull content from kbin, lemmy, and mastodon instances into one unified community (though masto posts are microblogs and pulled in based on tags? it’s confusing)
to be honest I’m still having the most fun by far on mastodon (@zzt@mas.to, til I get bored and switch instances again) even though it doesn’t scratch the same itch as a discussion forum