That’s the wild thing—I’ve tried all sorts of ways and it reads like a viable meme whichever way I read it.

Absolutely cute critter you have in your yard there. Looks like the little dude has a delightful kingdom to roam around in 👑.

I love Tech Connections. Unnecessarily long deep dives, but that’s the kind of content I absolutely appreciate. His stuff is a treat that helps to highlight the rabbit holes that can be found in the mundane.

if im gon be blumbling around online at 2am im taking you all with me 😈

When I first starting shifting away from Reddit, I was nervous about whether I’d like having smaller communities. I’m definitely adapting more to it myself.

I remember coming to a similar realization with Discord servers. I started out with joining servers between friends and I figured that maybe I was missing out by not getting into some larger ones. I actively tried getting into a couple of servers that weren’t even all that big compared to some numbers I’ve heard before—the servers I’d try to get into were like, 3,000+ users typically?

The conversations always felt way too fast for me to get a word in, and it never felt like I had many chances to start conversations unless it was like 2am and most of the serve was asleep. Voice chat feels like I can’t even get my foot in the door. Server rules and policies paradoxically felt convoluted as well as nebulous. I make a solid attempt at integrating into the culture wherever I go, but I could never seem to do those servers right. I still stick around some of those servers now, but only because they play meaningful roles in communities I’m in.

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It feels radical to say, because I’m so used to equating Big Numbers and Lots of Content to being a healthy community, but maybe there really isn’t too much wrong with a smaller or slower community? That’s not to knock anyone who’d prefer the contrary, but I’m starting to realize that me personally, it’s those smaller places that I really enjoy, and that maybe I don’t give them enough credit. It takes more time for fresh content and talk to come in, but when it does, it feels meaningful and like I actually have a chance to be that someone who starts it in the first place. The moderation and culture feels much more in touch with the community there.

I hope Beehaw succeeds in whatever the community and its leadership wants it to be, but I hope that it holds on to its integrity and the philosophy it’s communicated so far, even if that means it leans toward a smaller feel. I think I kinda like that feel to it.

Differences in an instance’s culture and moderation is one reason I’m not too worried about fragmentation. If anything, I think it’ll be for the better. Even if there’s a lot of overlap in purpose between communities from different instances, the administration, moderation, and lay users of the communities will lend differences to how things feel. Sometimes it’s going to be obvious, sometimes it’s going to be subtle. Either way, I’m in favor of having more options. I think it increases the odds of finding a place that feels just right.

Ooooh man, I was searching up something earlier today and out of reflex I clicked a Reddit result. Felt icky once I realized where I ended up and went Back fast 😅.

It’ll be interesting to see if/how we’ll come to adapt to a more decentralized getup in time. I wonder how we might quickly search through all the public federated platforms at once? It’s gon’ get old fast to type [x] site:beehaw.org OR site:lemmy.world OR [ad nauseum]. I think it’d be cool if decentralized platforms got popular enough that search engines would add something like site:!social.lemmy.

I still have an Instagram because my friends do. Without Instagram DMs and iMessage, I lose real life connections.

Yep, I’m in a similar boat with real life connections as well as content creators I like. I’d love to drop Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, but so much of the people and content I enjoy are only in those places. I’d love to be a shepherd, but that’s easier said than done with friends and family, let alone a content creator you’d be invisible to through no fault of your own.

I’d still like to minimize my presence in such places, and I’m actively working toward that. But I think it’s going to be a long time before I’m completely out of there, if ever.

(pending evidence of good faith as discussed elsewhere in thread)

I think that’s going to be one of the big ifs about the new platform. The optimist in me really wants to give Meta the benefit of the doubt here. If they do this “right,” I think it has the potential to do great things for building up content and exposure and letting people do things their way. But admittedly I have some wariness of Meta, and I’m aware that it’s likely in their MO to mess things up in the name of profit or similar.

I suppose the approach I’ll end up taking will err towards a Wait and See perspective 🤷‍♂️

I say it’s cool to see a big company like Meta dipping it’s toes into ActivityPub and possibly cross-platform compatibility. I think that has the chance to expose more people to to the paradigm, and I really do think that more people should consider it. I’m wary about how Meta may approach it and what Meta may choose to do with it in time, but in sum, I’m in favor of it.

That sure doesn’t mean that I will be on Meta’s platform though 🙈.

I think it’ll be good for wider exposure, but I am wary of Meta’s history. Mastodon looks like it’ll scratch the Twitter itch in me plenty fine, and I’m of the understanding that Mastodon’s larger instances are pretty respectable in how they operate. Once I get my domain set up so I can don some self-hosted handles, I’ll be going with Mastodon’s services over Meta’s.

Not that I think it would happen, but I wonder if Discord could theoretically make publicly discoverable servers directly visible and indexable online?

Discord already has and maintains a web accessed variant of the platform. It’d require some UI for users not logged in and users not registered with a particular publicly visible server, but I’d wager it’s possible. Probably a nightmare to revamp the back-end to make it possible, but possible. It’d kinda feel like how Twitter is indexed and publicly searchable, but platform registration is required to participate, with Discord having the extra layer of server membership on top of a platform account.

It’d probably do nothing about servers that fall in a sort of visibility limbo, though, like servers that are significantly populated but invisible to Discord’s server discovery. Still, I like to daydream that kind of thing would put a dent on the platform’s information visibility issues 🤔.