alt Hacker NewsIt’s a little wild to read comments like this because this was just how the Internet worked before Twitter got popular. I still get “happy birthday” emails from forums I joined 20+ years ago.
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I still host one of those 20+ year old forums. The Fediverse is different. With forums (and HN/Reddit) you immediately had good sense of them being for you or not. With the Fediverse to have to commit to servers and even then you don't know if they are right for you unless you try and spend time customizing your feeds/follows. It's a lot of work and you don't know if it will pay off. I tried again today and so much of it has no focus at all. It reminds me of this exchange from the Good Place TV show:
Chidi Anagonye: So, making decisions isn't necessarily my strong suit.
Michael: I know that, buddy. You-you once had a panic attack at a make-your-own sundae bar.
Chidi Anagonye: There were too many toppings, and very early in the process, you had to commit to a chocolate palette or a fruit palette. And if you couldn't decide, you wound up with kiwi-Junior Mint-raisin, and it just ruins everyone's night.
Communities used to be themed. Honda forums. Programming. Gardening. Video games. Etc. We've been spoiled in the era of Reddit where all these communities could be found in the same place. Lemmy tried to replicate that experience by having a video games community in every instance. This has caused a lot of confusion and fragmentation. It's very difficult to figure out where to discuss video games (or any other topic). I think it would have made a lot more sense to theme instances instead of making instances Reddit clones.