Good old wiki walking, you never realize what you're doing until a few hours in, and even then you can't stop.

Oof, felt this right in the geriatric millennials.

Mfer I was doing assignments where I had to scroll through index cards to find the encyclopaedia, then hand write out the essay.

It’s weird when you go from being the disruptor demographic to realising that when your 5 yo kid jokes about the 80s it’s as far away in time to him as the 1940s we’re to me - for him it’s a 2d, pre-Alexa, analog dystopia.

And I’m only 42.

Jimmy Wales does sound like a porn name.

There was a scientific paper I read semi recently that showed that researchers who post on Mastodon get much higher quality interaction than on Twitter (and I think a few other social-media type places, but it was mainly Mastodon vs Twitter). There was overall less interaction on Mastodon (unsurprisingly), but also that this difference has been diminishing as Mastodon grows. My takeaway is that if you want engagement, go Mastodon.

Reddits quality main appeal also is its past threads whereas on Twitter is rarely about what was tweeted but rather what’s the latest thing that’s happening.

Lemmy will need time and it might never replace reddit. But I look forward to the quality interactions with everyone here!

I read somewhere this is an upcoming feature. Let's say you subscribe "memes" then you got shown all communities named "memes" from federated servers combined.

They are not duplicated (just the same name) and it's not impossible to subscribe to them all with a few clicks.

Use https://lemmyverse.net/communities and simply search for communities and subscribe to them.

From a product perspective, I really disagree.

Twitter’s value is/was that it was ubiquitous. Everyone (important) was there and it was the only Twitter-like thing that there was. Even the Pope tweets. I guarantee you the Pope will never be on Mastodon. Not that any of us necessarily care about updates from the Pope or Lebron James or whoever, but your favorite journalist was, and the developers of all your favorite indie iOS apps were, and if you live in a city, your local public transit authority was likely there as well. Twitter was really the only place for microblogging type of content.

On the other hand, Reddit is, by nature, just a centralized collection of forums, which I think is far more easily recreated in a decentralized way. You already have posts organized into communities, now with Lemmy we’re just adding another layer of organization on top of that. As another commenter said, much of Reddit’s value is that it was the place where someone asked the same question you now have and so you can read those answers, but Twitter’s value really is for real time communications.

The issue I see with both frankly is search. It can be kinda hard with either to find the community/discussions that are interesting and relevant to you, but hopefully that will improve.

To be fully transparent I donate 1 dollar a day, I just appreciate what they do, and I would like to have more services that are able to keep it that way, sadly that is not the case.

The Dutch government had created a mastodon server