This morning, I had free time. As usual, opened my Apollo app, only to be greeted by the loud reminder that I am cut off from the community I have lurked, posted and lurked in almost a decade.
Days, even weeks before Apollo closed, KBin, Tildes, Mastodon and lemmy have been the talk of reddit. The fediverse is trending and just for the heck of it, I applied to lemmy.ml and vlemmy.net. My account wasn’t approved on vlemmy.net for days and only recently did my lemmy.ml account was approved, only to discover they don’t allow the creation of new communities.
I searched around and discovered lemmy.world. The sign up was painless, just like in reddit. As soon as I signed in I was able to create a community and started browsing right away.
As this day came to a close few more things jumped at me.
- The posts may be fewer but the quality and length is higher.
- The people I interacted with are more than helpful, positive and kind.
- No karma points
- The collective unity behind scorning the corporatization of the greater net.
As I browsed and scrolled, and discovered communities, I am reminded yet again of the bygone days of old, when the internet was young. When everyone had geocities website and phpbb forums.
Here, everyone is making the community into a digital home, built on ideals of a freer more independent internet. Here I felt something that I haven’t felt in a long time. And maybe it is nostalgia or maybe just a post trauma from the drama that is reddit.
But as I mindlessly scroll through the post here, I say to myself, this could be a good home. And truly, I am home.
Good day fellow lemmies. And thank you for reading through my long winded rant. I just want to express how happy I am to have discovered this place.
In time, may this grow into a friendlier, kinder reddit. And in time, may it surpass what it wasn’t intended to replace but took on the responsibility anyway; a testament to the enduring resilience of our love for all things free- an internet of the people, for the people and by the people.
Not the first I’ve seen make this comparison, but I do feel that the conclusion of it being because of the lack of corporate bullshit is false. It feels like the old internet because much like the older internet, it’s smaller.
I just know that if Lemmy reaches the same level of users as Reddit has/had just a month ago, it will more than likely have a lot of the same problems in terms of quality. Eternal September comes to everything, eventually. But that probably won’t be for a while, so I’m just going to enjoy this until we get there.
There may be some truth to that as all things eventually evolve whether for the better or worse. That said, I have high hopes that the federated nature will curb the oversaturation. If one instance do become corporatized, community instances can take over and quickly abandon the erring instance. This is what I think is lacking with reddit and twitter. People can’t just leave because there’s no alternatives. But with the fediverse, the sky’s the limit.