what is an example of some super interesting shit
this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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two things I feel into a rabbit hole about recently were how LSD became illegal and the Fermi paradox.
so LSD, once hailed as a powerful tool for psychological healing and spiritual exploration, became illegal largely due to political and cultural backlash. as the drug became associated with the 1960s counterculture, anti-establishment movements, and civil unrest, governments—particularly in the U.S.—moved to criminalize it more out of fear of social disruption than scientific reasoning. the backlash overshadowed promising medical research, leading to decades of prohibition.
the Fermi Paradox points out the contradiction between the high probability of alien civilizations existing in our vast universe and the complete lack of evidence or contact with them. despite billions of stars and potentially habitable planets, we haven't seen signs of intelligent life—raising big questions like: Are we alone, or is something stopping civilizations from contacting or surviving long enough to do so?
That's a good question.
How about...
Fuck. Do I not know super interesting shit? What's happened to me
I find the actual user ENGAGEMENT significantly worse.
That's the point though?
I don't use Mastodon for engagement but a feed of interesting stuff across a variety of subjects posted by others. Masto is a little bit like an RSS feed, I don't castigate RSS for that either.
Therefore I've come to the clear scientific and educated decision that Lemmy is simply superior
Sarcasm aside, that's like saying a screwdriver is better then a hammer.
Same. I don't want interaction on Mastodon. I'm not looking for a discussion there, I just want to curate a feed that I find interesting to view and occasionally vent about things without the pressure of social interaction.
Mastodon and Lemmy both offer valuable features; they serve different purposes. Think of Mastodon as a blogging platform and Lemmy as a forum.
I never liked the Twitter format. Even as Mastodon, it just doesn't appeal to me at all.
That’s what I keep saying about friendica and maybe that Instagram clone. Who wants a FOSS version of Facebook?
Lemmy is designed around discussion, so that's the driving factor.
Where are you finding dope content
My Feedly mainly
Yeah, what coms
Because lemmy (forums) is built for following discussions, while mastodon (microblogging) is built for following people. Unless you’re popular and have many followers, you’ll have better engagement in a forum because people follow the topic being discussed, not the person discussing the topic.
100%. I don’t want to brag or anything but I do have 25 followers on Mastodon so I’m kind of a big deal and my posts get lots of engagement. I had 5 stars on one post, that’s the most amount of stars possible. Again, trying not to brag.
Damn, we have a celebrity here!
Congratulations, you made it big on Mastodon! Teach me your ways.
From my experience, bigger platforms lead to less engagement
Lemmy is the perfect application for the fediverse.
Mastodon is supposed to replace twitter.
Twitter was stupid easy. That was the appeal.
Mastodon is slightly harder than twitter to understand and use.
I had such a hard time trying to start off on mastodon. Finding the right accounts to follow, getting some basic filtering, no recommendations, ...
That was very difficult and uncomfortably unintuitive for me. And I am a software engineer.
I can only imagine what hell that might be for a "normie".
I love the fediverse and all it's platforms, including mastodon, Lemmy, pixelfed, matrix, etc. but we still have a long way to go for people to adopt them, especially if you make it hard to get started.
I personally think the issue was never the recommendations or "content milling". It was that there was no way to change it or turn it off.
I think the best way to make it more appealing is to put in the basics of other centralized platform but show users that it's a choice, every time.
Registration? Enable OAuth with Google etc., but show users all of the options.
Recommendations? Use open source algorithms. Or models. On first login enable it and ask them if they want it to stay enabled, changed, or disabled.
Privacy? Turn off telemetry but tell them on first login they are free to turn it on in the settings to help with development.
Donations? Just like in boost for Lemmy, this should be the bottom-most option in the settings. Dessalines deserves the support.
I think the issue was never that a platform is capable of all the things lots of people don't like, the issue were the dark patterns of opt out and making things hard to disable. Choice is powerful when it's truly free and transparent.
+1
I also never liked the twitter format of "tweets", there's too much going on at once and I feel overstimulated
They’re different things for different people & purposes. Lemmy is for pseudonymous topical communities. Mastodon is for following & interacting with personalities, mostly in a parasocial way.
Microblogging is a terrible social media format when what you want from social media is to read and discuss stuff you're interested in. In Mastodon, I can scream into the void, but I have no guarantee that anybody will be interested in what I have to say. If all you want is to keep tabs on people it works fine I guess, but as soon as you want to follow topics it becomes incredibly clunky.
You can search keywords or hashtags, but all you get is an unmoderated firehose of loosely connected posts about the topic you want, and other topics for which people use the same words. You can follow hashtags, but then you just get said unfiltered firehose on your TL. Unless everyone somehow agrees in how to use the hashtag, it's pointless.
Frankly I think all microblogging platforms would improve if there was a closed set of possible hashtags you could use in your posts. Hopefully there would be a unified name convention for each topic, and each hashtag could have a dedicated curation team of some sort, that could remove or relocate posts. Likewise, users should be able to submit a new possible hashtag for everyone to use. This way, I would be able to subscribe to a hashtag, be sure that all the content I receive will be relevant to a topic I care about, and I could post to it knowing that other people who subscribe to the hashtag are guaranteed to be at least somewhat interested in what I have to say. Oh wait, I think I just reinvented Lemmy communities.
While we're at it, Mastodon is not 2008 Twitter anymore. No one posts via SMS. Inline hashtags should not be a thing, because it lets people optimize the way they phrase their posts for discoverability, and abusing them makes posts very uncomfortable to read. I have not seen as many people on Mastodon doing this as on Twitter, but why even keep inline hashtags at all nowadays? Just keep tags separately from the post's content.
and get fuck all as any for of reaction whatsoever
I mean yeah, why would anyone see your posts. I doubt people look at the "new" live feed much on mastodon. I dont have an account, but as far as i can see there are zero sorting features like on lemmy. There is only the live feed and a couple "Explore" filters that are not configurable.
So yeah nobody will see your posts unless you already have followers... Thats just how microblogging works by default. On lemmy people will just automatically see your posts if its posted into a community with a bunch of subscribers.
As long as you're getting "favorited", it's working as intended. Retooting (sorry, I know that's not what it's called I just enjoy the term) is less a determinant of what kind of interest there is on your post, but if you're getting any at all, you're doing good.
Mastodon as a whole isn't really about this kind of discussion. Just like Twitter was not going to have the same degree of interaction that reddit offered. Mastodon serves a different purpose, so it's very difficult to make it work for threaded discussion, even though you can even use it to interact with lemmy (or other federated services).
If you don't want to use Mastodon as just a place to send your thoughts into the world, you have to follow hashtags that are about discussion and engagement. They can be hard to find, and often aren't great because most people use instances that limit character use. Hard to have a nuanced talk with under 500 characters.
Lemmy is the new Reddit. Mastadon is the new Twitter.
I don’t expect them to be the same.
I've found almost the exact opposite.
Engagement on Lemmy is mostly fine, but I chat with people all the time on Mastodon
I think the key is to meet people on their level, to find people who share your interests and sensibilities. Follow plenty of folks and chat to them and before long you'll have a grand little community.
Science is an imprecise art form. You have to do it with gusto. I think you did good.
Mastodon simply isn't designed for discussions. It is designed to (micro)blog. People can react to your microblog, but if you're not a well-known personality or your content isn't relevant for the people who see your posts, that probably won't happen.
What helps to build a followership on Mastodon is to regularly interact with people who post about similar things to your interests and who already have a big following. Then they might be inclined to know who you are, follow you and actually interact with your content/rebl9g it for their audiences.
Over on Twitter I was keen to chat to people with large follower bases in order to perhaps hook in to some of that. On Mastodon I generally have no idea how many followers people have because it really isn't important to me any more.
If someone is interesting, and their engagement good, then I'm happy to be a follower.
Definitely noticed that with Mastodon -- there's not a whole lot of folks talking/reacting with one another. I suspect it's related to the user base (doesn't have critical mass, demographics, or activity) or a discoverability issue. Bluesky, on the other hand, has a whole lot more engagement on a host of topics.
Not seeing the same. I get lots of engagement …
I think something like Twitter hinges on people/organisations being there that are popular for whatever reason. Many people engage with those people's posts and react to each other. Since there aren't many such people on Mastodon, there isn't as much activity.
Mastodon puts the blog in mini blog. It’s more of an introspective platform where discussion can take place, but that’s not the aim.
Lemmy is more geared toward discussion with others, like a forum.
But in my opinion…
Mastodon > Lemmy.
Why? For the reasons I mentioned.
Also, Upvote/Downvote systems can go to hell.