this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2021
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Fediverse

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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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What are you using? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'm a Fediverse newbie and trying to understand how things work. I just read this ( https://lemmy.ml/post/76524 ) post and it answered part of my doubts.

Now I'd like to ask you something:

  1. what platform are you using? (Mastodon? Friendica? Pixelfed?)
  2. which instance? And most important question: 3) why/how did you choose 1 and 2?

I begin. Since I'm learning about Fediverse I made an account for each service (including peertube, diaspora, funkwhale, etc.) but my main account is on Mastodon because I found easier to find interesting accounts to follow. I'm on mastodon.uno because I wanted to know more about the Italian "fedisphere", but most of the accounts I follow are in English. I want to learn how to find interesting contents in the Fediverse.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

At the time I joined Fediverse - knowing little about it, just like you now - it seemed to make sense to choose Mastodon.social. I thought it made sense, because it was a large instance and had a generic theme of "social", and my account then represented mostly the Humane Tech Community (since then it has become much more my personal account).

Knowing what I know now, that choice was not good. I should have chosen a much smaller instance. The smaller the number of fedizens on an instance, the more the instance's theme makes sense. A small instance forms a real community. In very large instances this community appeal erodes, becomes meaningless.

Also, of course, large instances should be avoided because they are kind of a re-centralization of something that should stay decentralized (compare Gmail vs. email).

I will probably move to fosstodon.org or floss.social or something similar. That is still a Mastodon instance. To maximize diversity of apps used, I would love to move to a Pleroma instance instead (also Pleroma has some nice features, and is more lightweight on a server, saving energy). Problem here is lack of interoperability. I cannot migrate my account to Pleroma and would have to start from scratch. Also Pleroma does not currently have instance that look appealing to me (might self-host, but I have little time or incentive for that).

So your choices now might lead to network effects and FOMO later on :)