The mission-driven tech company behind the Firefox browser, Pocket reader and other apps is now investing its energy into the so-called “fediverse” — a collection of decentralized social networking applications, like Mastodon, that communicate with one another over the ActivityPub protocol.
It’s mostly Mastodon. The text doesn’t even mention Lemmy or Kbin.
I’m glad that Mozilla is doing this. It benefits both sides (Mozilla and the Fediverse), in a transparent way. Hopefully we get some Fediverse companion for Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey.
I have never understood why so many people find the structure of Twitter/Mastodon more appealing than that of Reddit/Lemmy.
I like it when I read other people’s thoughts on a matter, then react to them by adding relevant thoughts of my own and hoping people will react to mine too. Like on a traditional discussion forum (or for even older people, newsgroup or mailing list). That is what Reddit/Lemmy does reasonably well, although not quite as well as those traditional discussion forums.
On Twitter/Mastodon I have to have original thoughts of my own to be able to post anything at all, and even if I do have some, no one will read them if they aren’t already following me.
I agree with your preference for forum/community style.
But I think the purpose of microblogging is to follow a personality, rather than a topic or community. And users that share there do so to cultivate a following, which would be harder on Reddit/Lemmy (only ones that I can think of who do that successfully are onlyfans users).
Yeah, Mastodon is much larger than Lemmy yet it feels like shouting into the void. I like it as a means to keep up on news by following journalists who’ve fled twitter but I’ve yet to get any real interaction on my posts. Meanwhile on Lemmy I’m never running out of things to read and people to discuss posts with.
They have to start somewhere. Mastodon is the highest profile app in the fediverse and it’s best to capitalize on Twitter imploding while the dregs are hot.
Don’t worry, Reddit will do something stupid to get in the headlines eventually.