I’ve been off and on with the Fediverse for sometime now. It’s a relatively friendly place full of fellow nerds, but with a few caveats…
My feeds seem very focused on hard information be it Gaza, tech companies doing bad things, or people pitchforking about the lastest big bad in digital privacy. This is all well and good, but it does get a bit tired after a while. Seeing the samey stuff post after post by academic types makes me more informed but also mentally draining.
Where’s the fun? On Facebook and Instagram I see light fluffy popcorn type posts of people reminiscing over Nintendo games or reels of cockatiels being cockatiels. It’s fun to scroll and interact. Here it feels like I’m in a classroom, and people, while friendly, do get quite hostile if you don’t like Linux or Star Trek.
As a leftist I like it here because it’s my bubble of people, but I’d like to see the fedi let its hair down a bit. It’s okay to talk about stuff other than infosec, privacy guides, distros, and Gaza.
Personally, I feel like you can have fun on fedi, but it all depends on the accounts/communities you follow. My Sharkey feed AND my Lemmy feed are both full of memes, fandom nonsense, and shitposts. If you only follow serious communities and people that talk about serious news, you’ll have a serious time.
That said, one thing that I thought was unpleasant about the fediverse, and then realised was a feature rather than a bug is… The fact that you can run out of fediverse content. After 2 hours on Lemmy, I have functionally read all of Lemmy (or, well, all the communities I care to read), and maybe 1 more hour to join conversations I’d like to join.
Compared to the seemingly infinite content stream of The Other Sites ™, this initially struck me as bad and weird, but then I realised… I actually prefer it this way. Doomscrolling a fedi site/app is actually not possible, and that has done wonders for my mental health.
I’ll add that if you are running out of things to read you can instead post content you want to discuss. I’ve found that much of the time there are people waiting to jump in and comment, they just aren’t in the habit of making posts. Which you didn’t need to do on other sites because there were always enough people posting content. And it’s less likely to leave you doom scrolling since it’s a good opportunity to stop since comments won’t come in immediately.