OwenTo make clear at the start: I do not intend to denigrate anyone with this post, or anyone's efforts. I have a genuine question which has puzzled me since I first went off to explore Lemmy and Pixelfed.
What purpose do people think that they serve in the Fediverse?
When I first asked, people told me that Lemmy served as an alternative to Reddit and indeed lemmy.world describes itself as "the World's Internet Frontpage". But Reddit exists solely because of the sheer amount of users it houses. Reddit stands as the poster child for user-generated content whereas lemmy.world has less than 8K users a day.
Pixelfed has a similar very-poor-cousin relationship to Instagram. If you have a keen desire for the world to see your images then Instagram will scratch that itch much better than Pixelfed. Posting your images here might also attract more attention, since the pool of possible viewers seems much, much larger.
The biggest group I found on Lemmy? Mastodon.lemmy.world ! I found several posts there like this: "[mastodon] is like making an entire post out of a throwaway comment. That's what I saw on mastodon, didn't choose to participate." At the very least this serves to demonstrate that different people have wildly different experiences on Mastodon because that bears no relationship to my experiences.
In the world of Big Tech people start new social media because they think they see a gap in a market, or a way of splitting off some users of a current platform into their all-new shiny silo. Here, though, everything can live alongside everything else, hence my question: what functions do Lemmy, Pixelfed, and others serve that Mastodon doesn't?
I think I do understand the function of some projects like Bookwyrm or Funkwhale. They have very specific goals: much more specific than "sharing media" or "discussing in threads", for example, both of which can happen in Mastodon. Their design highlights these differences.
I understand that I could well have missed the point completely here, and hence my question. I joined Lemmy and Pixelfed wanting to participate but the level of traffic seemed too low to generate the interaction I had hoped for. Did I look in the wrong places, or did I fail to notice the action, or did I look too early? (When I first joined Mastodon it seemed empty. Now it certainly doesn't.)
Let me give a concrete example. I have a fifteen year project for which I take a single photo every day. Should I post it here or on Pixelfed? What difference would it make? Does it matter?
And finally, as part of looking into Lemmy I explored a lot of apps. If you like Ice Cubes for Mastodon and want to explore Lemmy then I recommend Artic.
Jupiter Rowland