Federation is an attempt to recreate reddit. So they impose on themselves redditisms and make themselves bland enough to be reddit. Before reddit there were many message boards and social sites for different topics, hobbies, localities, etc. Some of these still exist today but they’re usually pretty empty but for the random 50 year olds who have diligently been posting pictures of skyscraper construction projects for the past 25 years.

What we need is a retvrn to webrings

I do not venture outside the bear website. Fuck knows what horrors lurk

This is true in a lot of places online and offline. Most of the communities I belong to are under 50 users of like minded or not so like minded people. Once you start going into massive userbase comms things get muddled and youll eventually not know very many of the people as well as you would if the community was smaller and you can actually engage with people at a personal level. Thats been my goal of using the internet since the beginning of my time on it. Meet people I like and would want to spend time with IRL.

The fediverse is a bit of a different beast as a lot of the software is a clone of other services. Those servuces have enclaves of different users that have different interests and interact with each other differently (based on hashtags, subreddits, etc) but were all technically on the same platform interacting with the entire userbase.

That brings a lot of baggage when those users have an exodus to one of the federated platforms. They bring their platform spexific sectarian mindsets in the form of brain worms or whatever other mind diseases that haven’t been discovered quite yet. Hexbear is relatively unique as its one of those enclaves of users that has successfully broken away and resembles more of the old web than something like reddit or twitter, even with the added twist of federation.

Thats why I like federation. It pushes people to host their own and do their own thing without having to answer to the site admins. Sure instances can defederate from you but that just means they probably suck or you’re just a Nazi. There are quite a few chud instances on various fedis that are straight up fash and have been wholly defederated for good reason. though I imagine most of them have eaten themselves without outside interaction.

With Lemmy, entire instances can be more like a single subreddit or a small set of them. Comms often lack clear distinctions in topic or focus and this is particularly true for small instances. They look more like the old-school forums that Reddit replaced but with better tooling and interfaces and ways to discover them.

Some of the large instances, by contrast, have complete Le Reddit brain and constantly want to speak to the manager about you daring to contradict them. That’s not the curated liberal echo chamber they signed up for! Nor what the admins nor their mods signed up for! They just wanted another Reddit with some vague nonsense about open APIs and they are, predictably, constantly shedding users back to Reddit.

Smaller communities strike me as more “natural” to engage with, by which I mean, the human brain (or mine at least) seems better equipped to engage with small groups of familiar people than a sea of usernames I don’t know and have no real rapport with.

but when people say they create their own echo chambers Yada Yada thing, even though I would agree with that, it’s interesting to see how people who believe different things, are just amongst eachother.

I think being exposed to the cacophony of “sound” online had given a lot of people strange ideas about “echo chambers.” To me it’s extremely natural and obvious that most people would gravitate towards people they actually like and broadly agree with, rather than toss themselves into online spaces where they’re constantly at odds with the other users. Depending on one’s perspectives and political persuasions, finding those spaces can be fairly easy, or very hard.