I would like to tell you about LEMMY aka KBIN which is the new "the Mastodon version of Reddit" federated service. I think it's PRETTY NEAT.
First, let me tell you how to get Into Lemmy:
Just go to this website
https://beehaw.org/
and start reading.
That's it! A nice thing about Lemmy is you don't *really* need to be logged in to use it. Since the focus is communities rather than personal feeds you can just click around logged out until you want to comment.
What if you want to comment?
I think the best way to comment on Lemmy is to have an account on one of the Lemmy-frontend instances.
I don't know of a better way to do this right now than to look under "Popular" (not under "Recommended") on https://join-lemmy.org/ . lemmy.blahaj.zone seems like a good default instance for queer shitposters. Alternately, Beehaw itself might be okay to sign up on (tho there's a wait).
Alternately alternately, you CAN post to a Beehaw/Lemmy thread from Mastodon, but it's a little awkward:
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here. Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated. Subcommunities on Beehaw: - Free and Open Source Software [https://beehaw.org/c/foss] - Programming [https://beehaw.org/c/programming] - Operating Systems [https://beehaw.org/c/operating_systems] — This community’s icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/].
Each Lemmy instance has a front page of popular posts from all the locally hosted communities, which I feel gives individual instances a sense of local character I feel like don't usually in practice develop on Mastodon servers. It also means the front pages are great places to go to look for posts.
I find this model– distinct communities with crossposting rights– is a little easier to grasp than Mastodon, which *pretends* to be one big single shared service but (because of defederation) isn't.
Anyway assuming you can figure out how to post on Lemmy at all, there's a bunch of directories of /c/ communities, mostly focused around migration from specific Reddits:
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
https://sub.rehab/
https://lemmy.ca/c/wowthislemmyexists
https://kbin.social/m/FindAKbin
https://redditmigration.com/
https://www.quippd.com/writing/2023/06/15/unofficial-subreddit-migration-list-lemmy-kbin-etc.html
I'm looking forward to seeing where Lemmy/Kbin go.
This community is dedicated to helping Lemmy and kbin users find communities and magazines to participate in. Post your questions, requests, and tips in this community. All discussion is good! The more we share about what’s out there, the better the Lemmy experience will be for everyone. Note: Please avoid using the shorthand link (links that begin with !) when linking to communities. That method can result in an error in small instances. Details here [https://lemmy.ninja/post/84573].
@mcc Mastodon does have this as well, as the local timeline, but it's not very useful on a really big instance like the one you're on. It's really good for finding people to follow on smaller more focused ones though.
I definitely agree though that this is the better conceptual model, and that Mastodon gets things backwards. Federation should be about connecting people, not about building a specific platform imo.
@terry There is no https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/technology . But if there were, it would be a different community from https://beehaw.org/c/technology . A "community" is a specific thing on a specific instance. Actually, they seem to be a variant of an ActivityPub account.
If you paste https://beehaw.org/c/technology in the Mastodon.social search box (or possibly if you click here: @technology ) Mastodon.social will display the community *as* an account, but with a little bitty "Group" tag.
@terry not mcc, but they're different communities.
The thinking seems to be that eventually a larger community may become the defacto tech community for the various instances, or that they'll develop a way you can group the different communities together to view in a single feed if you have an account on a Lemmy/Kbin instance.
mcc
MrEUser
Yawning Chasm
Meg
Kris Nuttycombe
Terry Cavanagh 🎲
Gmr Leon
Bujold