• @MangoCats@feddit.it
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      05 months ago

      Not all of Reddit works, but some of it does for some people, and the reason it works for them is because the moderators shape communities that the community members enjoy participating in.

      Personally, I think active communities below the Dunbar number (about 150) in size are some of the most rewarding to participate in, long term. But, there are always a lot of people who flock to wherever the biggest crowds are.

      • Liam Mayfair
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        05 months ago

        I’d say genuine. Genuine experiences. Sharing shit for sharing’s sake. Not for better SEO. Not for profit. Just unadulterated human expression.

        That’s how I envision using the internet for entertainment in the near future. I’ll still use the shitty corporate sites when I must, for transactional browsing. I’m not going to pretend I can push Amazon, Microsoft, Google, online banking, etc. out of my life just like that.

        But I will actively seek authentic spaces. They will be a tad smaller than your average social network, Reddit, and whatnot. But I’m certain they’re out there and more people will join me in this search and populate these small spaces as time goes on.

        Lemmy, Mastodon, the IndieWeb movement. The first steps. I hope to find more!

        • @MangoCats@feddit.it
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          05 months ago

          Smaller communities don’t get targeted for commercial exploitation. But, then, something has to support them even if they don’t cost much to run - they still cost something, both for bandwidth/storage and moderation/curation effort.

          • Liam Mayfair
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            05 months ago

            Of course. I have nothing against Fediverse server admins setting up a Patreon —ideally Liberapay— or something similar to receive donations to cover running costs. I have and continue to contribute financially to indie devs or server admins when I can.

            Not everyone will do that of course. But there again, running stuff at a small scale shouldn’t be crazy expensive either. The operational costs of keeping a microblog or indie site running are little to none. I host my blog and all of my side projects for free in a cloud provider.

            Running a Fediverse server is more expensive. Last time I looked into what it would roughly cost to stand up a barebones stack to host a Mastodon server in a public cloud, it was like a hundred bucks a month. Not cheap but it may be big enough to house a couple thousand users. If at least 0.5% of your userbase donated some money to cover running costs, you might be ok.

            Alternatively, if you have a server lying around at home, loads of people self-host at home, which is a tad cheaper.

            I’m not saying a fully decentralised indie internet wouldn’t have its shortcomings, of course. I’m just saying I’d happily take that over the current state of the web.

            • @MangoCats@feddit.it
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              05 months ago

              For what it’s worth, I looked around and saw “ready to run” Mastodon hosting services starting at $6 per month, not too long ago. Tempting, but the service is the easy part, maintaining the community can be much more challenging.

              • Liam Mayfair
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                04 months ago

                Ah, good suggestion that! $6/mo sounds way more affordable than self-hosting from scratch for sure. I fully agree the really difficult (and valuable) part is the people you bring in and keep, not the tech.

  • @EarlGrey@discuss.tchncs.de
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    05 months ago

    …smaller communities

    So like it was before the dawn of Reddit and social media?

    Sign me the fuck up. I miss my dumb little websites with a dodgy layout full of terribly cropped gifs.

  • shoulderoforion
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    05 months ago

    I do not hold with this, at all. After leaving Twitter two years ago, and going to Mastodon, and Mbin, when the world started to come to an end three weeks ago, when Trump flipped to making the US and ally of Russia against the world, I needed to be plugged in, so with years of reservations against supporting anything fucking Jack was involved in (he’s still the largest single shareholder of bluesky stock, so fuck off telling me he stepped away from the board), I finally signed up for Bluesky, because when shit is going down, I don’t need to be browsing some lefty tankie currated community for realtime news, I need to be jacked in to the widest collective there is, so I can parse and disseminate information for every source possible.

    • @misk@sopuli.xyzOP
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      05 months ago

      Maybe the idea behind those smaller communities is that they’d be focused on things like fishing and kite surfing. Social media that are even remotely popular have become football stadiums where people constantly need to pledge allegiance to their teams and that’s just really boring now.

      • shoulderoforion
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        05 months ago

        the world is now gripped in the great struggle between democracy and fascist disassembly with the worlds only superpower squarely onside with a criminal fascist government of russia with no regard for human life even of it’s own citizens, with Billions of real lives on the line all around the world, a great many of us will be fighting over tinned beans and rainwater in the next years, there is nothing boring about being able to prepare yourself to keep your family and loved ones as protected as you can, with forewarning, and kite surfing ain’t gonna do that. fishing will become more and more useful though, that’s a good one.

        • @misk@sopuli.xyzOP
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          5 months ago

          I’m a news junkie but you’re kidding yourself if you staying on top of things can affect anything. Now is a good time to review reliability of news sources that you’re using, not add even more. To me it sounds like you’re about to create an enormous bubble / slash echo chamber where you can no longer recognise any self faults. It’s now more important than ever to see reality all of us created. Please be mindful of your mental health or you’ll end up with anxiety attacks.

      • shoulderoforion
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        05 months ago

        I’m finding it just like Twitter used to be (which is what I heard it was, and expected before I signed up), minus the overt Nazis, and able to weed out the AntiSemites easily enough with an actual “fuck off into the shadow realm i can’t see you you can’t see me” block function, as apposed to what Mbin/Lemmy offer which is simply masking

  • /home/pineapplelover
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    05 months ago

    Small communities where one can talk about specific subjects? Man there’s something like that already and people can run it from their own computers too, forgot the name though.

  • Sandwich Artist
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    05 months ago

    Is there something like a masterlist of forums. Id like to join some but dont know where to look.

    • turtle [he/him]
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      05 months ago

      The best I can think of off hand is to look at the mobile apps that are designed to interact with traditional forums, because they will have directories of all the ones that are integrated with them. For example, Tapatalk and Fora Communities. You should be able to find thousands of forums categorized in those apps? I’ve never used these apps myself, but have heard of them.

  • @kameecoding@lemmy.world
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    05 months ago

    I wasn’t too early, but I joined reddit around the Dota 2 beta, so circa 2012, and damn the site became more and more garbage the more people it had, most comments became nothing but karma farming one liners, references or snide shit.

    Communities grew into massive echo chambers, quality of discussions went down the drain.

    • JoYo
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      05 months ago

      now they’re heading to lemmy to do the same thing

      • @kameecoding@lemmy.world
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        05 months ago

        meh, lemmy is pretty stagnant from what I have seen, plus you can create your own instance and mostly defederate from a lot of stuff.