It’s about this time of year that marks my first year on the fediverse. I’ve really enjoyed it, I decided to quit Twitter just over a year ago and Reddit after they cut off third party apps. I have both my own Mastodon and Lemmy server. Mastodon is hosted with Masto.host, at the time I was pretty ill and didn’t want the hassle of managing it all myself, I also wanted the option of easily scaling it if I ever decided to open it up to friends/family.
Mastodon
Moving over from Twitter to Mastodon was super easy I hadn’t really been active for a while and I’d lost all interest in scrolling my feed.
Losing all my followers was a bit of a trip for me, part of social media was the reach and I guess the “fake” internet friends (and in Reddits case points). I’ve learnt that it really doesn’t matter and to just go with it. Who cares? (I do slightly still).
Over the past few months I found myself becoming frustrated with Mastodon and the quality of the content I was seeing. As an experiment I muted the two largest accounts I follow and wow what a difference it makes. I feel like I actually have control over my timeline and it’s actually interesting!
I’ve to start experimenting with adding none Mastodon federated content but will give it a go soon.
Hosting my instance on Masto.host has also been super easy and I’ve had no problems with them. I’d highly recommend them even if your into self hosting, the cost for a simple instance like mine makes it a simple choice.
I can’t wait to see how Mastodon evolves over the next few years, hopefully Markdown support comes officially.
Lemmy
After Reddit decided to purge 3rd party apps I decided that I’d purge Reddit. I like having control over how I view content and the official Reddit app just sucked. Again much like Mastodon switching over to Lemmy was super easy.
In the initial first few weeks it was great, a lot of subs I followed made the move over and content started flowing, this has since trickled off. There are still some really good and active communities though.
Selfhosting Lemmy was also pretty easy and my instance sits on Hetzner server ticking along nicely.
I’d say I was less happy with Lemmy than Mastodon, I’ve found it way easier to find right wing posts and spam. As the gold rush of Reddit has ebbed moderation has become a huge issue and I suspect a lot of people just couldn’t be arsed with it in the long term.
I’ll stick with Lemmy for a bit longer but I have kbin on my radar (just waiting on a sane release process). Unlike Mastodon I could happily nuke my Lemmy instance and not feel I’d lost anything.
Wrapping up
Overall discovering the Fediverse is great (I’m also on Bookwyrm) I love the idea of being in control of what I see and how I see it. The idea of being able to mix so many different types of content fascinates me. I can’t wait to see what comes next.