cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/57576884
There’s so many ways to interact with the Fediverse. The most popular, by far, seems to be Mastodon, but Lemmy, Misskey, and Pixelfed are also relatively popular. Kbin used to be popular, but it has apparently been abandoned, and is mostly dead at this point.
I recently learned that Mbin is a thing, checked it out, and it looked really cool! Has anyone used it? How different is it from Lemmy? I hear they have better integration with Mastodon.
What Fediverse services do you actually, regularly use?
For me, it’s mostly Lemmy, though I do hop on Mastodon every now and then.
Having a variety of software from where to choose, even within the same type of platform is actually positive. These software, while similar — but not equal — in terms of UI are completely different in terms of userbase and culture.
Not all former twitter users gave twitter an usage that translates well into Mastodon culture. Instead they could be a better fit for misskey (although this one isn’t 100% twitter-like) or pleroma. Or maybe the best for them is something smaller like GTS.
A neurodivergent person that needs to be able to quotepost because they find easy to process information that way is going to have a hard time in Mastodon where are not only now discussing adding the tool, but big part of its userbase reacts negatively to it. Again a Twitter-style fediverse microblogging platform that already has the tool, not only as a feature but ingrained in the culture might be a better fit for them.
Something similar occures with the link aggregators. Yes, they are “Reddit replacements”, but they have different cultures, thus they target different kinds of former and in-the-process-of-leaving redditors.
The fediverse is to homogeneous, each particular protocol has its culture that’s distinct from all others that make part of the Fediverse; each software using a given protocol has its culture that’s distinct from the culture of all other software using the same protocol and each particular instance running a given software has its individual culture that distinguish itself from all other servers running the same software.
Culture and userbase behaviour are just or even more important than the list of features or the UI style when it comes to choose the best place for you on the Fediverse.
The Twitter-style fediverse microblogging platforms are all the same when you just focus on the design aspect and all you have used is Mastodon, but when you take into account culture, the way they behave and interact within themselves and with the wider fediverse…these platforms couldn’t be more different from each other.
You say that some are “gonna get culled” but, with exception of projects that were dropped due to personal issues with the devs, but that all somehow live in the form of forks, the Fediverse is expanding and the diversity of platform types is getting greater each day. In fact, there are categories where more diversity of software is needed.
Well, I guess that’s a factor. I haven’t really experienced this, as someone that uses mostly Lemmy and Mastodon. I don’t know, I’m speaking from a place of profound ignorance on that front.
Yeah I mean, if culture is the breaker then that’s that, right? I was thinking pretty exclusively thru the lens of software, and I don’t believe that there’s enough granularity in use-cases to justify all these apps, especially considering they are very much evolving, adding features, improving on several fronts… Intuitively, I think they’d be converging towards a feature niche.
If, as you say, there’s a cultural aspect to using a certain software-base as opposed to another, then that’s a whole other thing. Very interesting… I just hadn’t thought of that.