Refugee here too. Took me a minute to figure it all out, but the learning curve isn't quite as steep as all the FUD tech articles made it out to be. I love the potential the fediverse has
If it has "communities" list with a selector to show your the ones from other instances, why not.
The point is, software on your instance will fetch and send all posts and comments from/to linked communities (you can see the list in your instance webpage footer, under "Instances" link) and skip comments, threads and post from banned communities.
I tried Mastodon and I just couldn't do it. But I don't use Twitter either. I've been using Lemmy/BeeHaw for 10 minutes and it already seems like a drop-in, minimal learning curve to reddit. this looks super promising!
I have been trying to comment instead of just lurking. Its against my natural tendencies, but I want to see this place live, so I thought I would be the change I want to see in the world.
Man I use to be a mad lurker too, I'd occasionally repost a 30K upvote banger, but other than that I'd always second guess myself when I write a comment, go "nah" and then return back to lurking
I wish it didn't take a system/site/service imploding to get people to try something new.
MySpace got silly, enter FB. Twitter gets Musked, Mastodon finally takes off after years of not. Reddit nukes their own service, Etc.
Not that bad projects shouldn't die off, but it's always a reactionary move for the masses, rather than a proactive "let's try this new thing because it might be better".
I think Reddit is an outlier in the sense that until now it has been a good service with fairly minor flaws.
FB is totally garbage and had been that for many years now and yet people are not seeking alternatives, maybe because that kind of social media is not that interesting anymore to the types that would care.
It's definitely been going downhill but by choosing good subreddits and using a 3rd party app that strips out all the new "features" it was still usable. Now it won't be usable.
To me with old.reddit & Apollo nothing much has changed until now. As for new Reddit, I used to think it's okay if they can monetize some things without affecting me, though I did know the good times will end someday.
That may be, but they have 100’s of millions of users, and most of them will never entertain an alternative until [insert world-breaking issue/event here].
Maybe it's OK though. The big majority usually follows what is default, and then you have a minority doing something different. Linux users are like 1% and it's still enough for the community to thrive and enjoy themselves a lot. It's probably the same here, that once we reach enough users to keep things interesting, we don't actually need more users. :)
I've recently returned to Facebook after many years away from it specifically for some local outdoors groups (lots of good posts there about local trail conditions, good training routes, what stores have/offer X, etc). I keep the blinders on and avoid the main News Feed, and it's been fine. It might be just me, but the idea of having super localized communities on Facebook makes more sense compared to somewhere else like Reddit.
Many people won't rock the boat (or even think og doing it) if the current thing is sufficient. Luckly, it seems that, with time, all monitized, centralized platforms inevitably fail.
Honestly Lemmy is much better than I thought it would be. My main problem is the lack of some niche communities that are on Reddit. For example as a GW2 player I get all my news about game updates & store discounts etc from the GW2 subreddit, but I don't see Lemmy taking that over anytime soon, if ever. Maybe I'll need to use a Reddit scraper for that, if I want to completely abandon the platform.
What I dislike about Reddit is the system of incentivizing karma farming. This leads to unhealthy posting behaviors that always bugged me. So far to me it seems Lemmy does not have that, so it's a huge win.
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