Technology

As always, non-profit open-source software gets branded as "complex" for no reason. Mastodon's maintainer even made mastodon.social a default server so it takes absolutely 0 seconds to get started which was hated by the userbase for the centralization it causes, and it's still "complex"

You just got interacted

My main problem is that there just isn't anything I actually want to engage with on Mastodon. Most of the communities I would engage with simply don't exist there, or only exist there in minute quantities.

They are connected (you can boost/retweet Lemmy posts from Mastodon) but use a different API for apps, so they won't all support it. Kbin supports interacting with both Lemmy and Mastodon, but it's a different platform so you're going to have to create a new account

I follow a couple Lemmy communities from Mastodon. If you create a Mastodon account and search for @technology@lemmy.world you can subscribe to new posts, which get boosted into your feed. You can upvote by favoriting a post and you can reply from Mastodon and it’ll show up on Lemmy.

I can also follow Lemmy users, like by searching for mxwarp@lemmy.world and your posts (but not comments) will show up in my feed.

Two different platforms that use the same software and can kind-of sort-of communicate with each other. I can see this post and comment in Mastodon and reply to Lemmy users. But Lemmy cannot see Mastodon posts.

It might not work since they're different platforms with different APIs. The only way an app might work on both platforms is if the app itself chooses to support both APIs.

That said, there's a level of interaction between the two since they both use ActivityPub. I.e. on Mastodon I can search for a particular Lemmy user and see their posts.

Twitter has gotten A LOT worse since Musk took over. The blue check brigade is given priority across the entire site, so you’re likely to see all the bigots and qidiots more than those engaging in actual discourse.

You can see for yourself without creating an account: https://mastodon.social/explore

Honestly, I don’t notice any toxicity, but I’m not in any communities I think toxicity would even flourish (eg politics). Twitter seemed to be so fucking toxic for so long so I think mastodon is much better in that regard

In my experience, Mastodon is much, much less toxic than twitter!

It's mostly polite, friendly, community-minded folks, & the moderation is a million times more effective than corporate social media, because the mods care about keeping the community healthy, instead of focusing on driving hostile engagement to increase advertising views.

Lol. That's probably one of Durant's alternates

It's great. Number go up mentality is dead, none of Twitter's features used for toxicity are integrated, actual communities are formed

It's really a bunch of communities. I have a few accounts on different servers; one for general use (medium sized server), one academic (on a pretty specialized server), and one for following open source projects I'm interested in (since early 2020 on a server hasn't been updated for a while so it's lacking features).

Common for all is that people are generally willing to engage in discussions, and it feels more intimate and welcoming than many other social media I've been using. I haven't really seen it be toxic at all. It can, however, be challenging to break out of your little bubble, and especially so in smaller servers where you depend more on finding and following people around the Fediverse.

My advise would be to either try to find a specialized server for something you're interested in, or join a bigger general one if you just want to check it out without putting in the effort. You could always move somewhere else and take your followers with you later on, should you feel like it. :)

Technology is confusing to the masses, which news articles appeal to. They likely know what Twitter is, and that’s the best comparison.