(Skip to the final paragraph if you don’t care about the details)

Greetings. I want to start by saying I’m new to both lemmy and the fediverse in general.

I started with mastodon because the concept was familiar and I found an instance I like. I’ve made some aquaintances there and have since been testing the waters on diaspora and friendica as well.

Generally I’m having fun but things are also very diluted with this approach. Especially when there’s some redundancy in the protocols used, so I’d like to narrow things down in the future. I don’t really have any special needs in terms of creating content or accumulating followers. For the most part I’m just looking to hang out and be social without being surveilled by advertisers.

I understand the protocols well enough to know the implications of choosing one over another, but the more I try and think about it objectively the more I overthink it, hence this novel.

Finally getting to my questions, how did you deal with the number of options available? Did you pick a platform and stick with it or is there some merit to the “try everything” approach? I understand that this might be pretty subjective and I’m really not looking for specific advice on exactly which platform to choose, however any opinions from those more experienced than me would be appreciated.

    • b6_@lemmy.mlOP
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      3 years ago

      Thank you for all the information, that gives me a lot to think about

  • Liwott@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    One criterion that I don’t see in other comments and that was decisive for me to choose a mastodon instance is the language. In a generally english-speaking fediverse, it is refreshing to have a local feed where most posts are in my mothertongue.

    • b6_@lemmy.mlOP
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      3 years ago

      Excellent point. I’m OK with English but it seems like there are a lot of German pods on diaspora which I can barely read, even those that are labeled as English just hosted in Germany.

  • Echedenyan@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    In summary, people.

    As extended, I valued the following points:

    • political aligntments
    • participation/activity
    • posibiliy to make friendship
    • kindness
    • veganism content

    Additionally, I also checked the following:

    • protocol based in a true standard
    • license of main software implementation
    • programming language used
    • design
    • content type

    Ah, I forgot:

    • elitism, mostly in developing side but also users and power users
  • atti@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    Woooow! I was about to ask the exact same question! It means this could be a FAQ for newbies, like me. I just entered the Fediverse and I’m still trying to understand how things work.

  • seahorse@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    I wanted a reddit alternative with a more left leaning slant, and I think the idea of the people developing their own tools that isn’t VC funded is based. So, I found out about lemmy and here I am.

    I knew about mastodon but I’m not familiar with twitter at all and I don’t care much for microblogging.

    • b6_@lemmy.mlOP
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      3 years ago

      That’s cool, I’m not even sure it’s for the people that do like it lol

      Forgot to mention I’m coming from reddit too so I’ll probably be keeping a lemmy account either way, but I never used twitter much either and I haven’t had a Facebook account in years

  • wiki_me@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    iirc i looked on the-federation.info to see what are the most popular platforms and the most popular instances. i never really liked the whole concept of limiting the length of posts so that ruled out some of these platforms, i actually like some of facebook feature set so friendica seemed like a natural choice and the project is getting some healthy development activity so i went with that.

    I went with feneas because i liked the whole democratic non profit thing they are doing but the instance was slow so i moved to the more popular and faster squeet.me.