My experience with the Fediverse has only been through Mastodon, through which I struggled to find a community I really gelled with. Either it was supper overwhelming with meme posts or NSFW, or it was too chill to the point of nothing. Or, it was hyperfocused like FOSS/Linux and became uninteresting after awhile. May try again, but I think I will explore the other fedisites like Plemora or Calckey to see if I like it better.
I love the pace of a forum. I grew up primarily with GameFAQS and some lucid dreaming forum, and honestly it was very formative in teaching me how to write and use critical thinking skills, as well as how to respond to a variety of temperaments. I stopped participating in online forums awhile ago, and while I loved Reddit as a resource, I never felt inspired to participate. In the same way, there are an incredible number of forums dedicated to a certain topic, and are extremely valuable, it would be annoying to make an account for all the things I am interested in.
I like what lemmy is becoming. Glad to find system that makes interacting with people enjoyable.
I don’t mind a community having low amount of content. It’s easy to just join multiple and hop around. I don’t mind a UI not entirely matching my preference, that stuff is “matter of time”.
But Mastodon made it VERY hard to find the little content their communities did have. They have an anti-Trending philosophy, and that drove me, and most people I know, away. When I joined, they didn’t even have proper tag searching, and to this day, the activity in a tag is still reported wrongly. When asked, I got aggressively told off that Text Search is evil and I’m evil for asking and no, I didn’t even talk about twitter but I’m evil for even daring to make requests even lightly resembling a Twitter user’s UX preferences (Aka: Discoverability and UX). I just wanted to hear a “oh that’s broken and being worked on” but no, it was always a “no, we don’t like that” instead.
No such thing here. I wanted to find the gaming subs, I found the gaming subs. I wanted to find a desolate abandoned community for Dota 2, bam, I found the desolate abandoned community for dota 2. Within 2 minutes I was on grounds with /c/PatientGamers.
It got slightly better. But won’t ever fully fix itself. To me, and to a couple colleagues, Mastodon was a bad website, with bad gatekeepers and a bad advert for the Fediverse. I don’t care about it and I hope Rhynodon some day comes, implements text search and steals all their users.
That sucks. If asking for a feature ends up with hostility from the developers, it is not worth your time and attention.
People share a lot of useful information that can absolutely make life better if it was shared, so it is insane anyone would be against search. Search is the most important technology on the internet, every large website needs it.