A conversation about platforms bringing people together, respect for diversity (also of opinion and culture) and enshittified walled gardens, between @ke5arin@mastodon.social and @andypiper@macaw.social with obligatory mention of @pluralistic@mamot.fr. 40 minutes well spent.

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[–] wether@slrpnk.net 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

The Fediverse is great, but perhaps just because of the lack of algorithms and other content-promotion methods I have found it a bit harder to break out of my 'silos' in some places. Lemmy isn't too bad for this, but I've really struggled to find other people to follow and engage with on Mastodon as somebody on a small local instance. Little things like the Mastodon phone app not listing followers from other instances contributes to this.

[–] Dreaming_Novaling@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 days ago

Felt that. Lemmy perfectly replicates (and improves) on the things I liked about Reddit. I don't need or want an algorithm for this, because you can just subscribe to all the communities you love anyway.

Meanwhile, Mastodon and Pixelfed are a struggle. Tagging is key since there's no algorithm, but even after following like 50+ tags, I still don't see exactly what I want in my feeds. I love fanart of games and anime, so I tried to pick pixelfed.art, but even then I don't see much, and also realized a large amount of artists are on mastodon.art instead, and the federation struggles to show me people not on Pixelfed. Hell, both official and 3rd party clients sometimes break when viewing a non-pixelfed account page. You seriously have to work to curate a feed on these places that make you want to come back.

I was never really a Twitter person, but I absolutely used Instagram and Pinterest a lot to look at art before I dropped them, so now I use Tumblr to not shut myself off entirely from fan content. So it's not a matter of me not liking Fediverse services like Pixelfed and Mastodon, but them lacking the methods necessary to make viewing content easier.

Don't get me started on Misskey, the language barrier isn't a problem for me as I am learning Japanese. But I feel a little lost with the UI, and once again, trying to find artists on other instances.