My Adventures in Fediland

You may or may not have noticed, but I added a link to my account on cdrom.tokyo, an Akkoma instance, in addition to other personal links.

With that account, I spent a few days exploring Fediverse, or at least, Mastodon/Pleroma/Akkoma/Misskey and Lemmy/Kbin portions of it.

If you have been living under a rock, Fediverse (a combination of "federation" and "universe") is a bunch of social networks connected together. They all use ActivityPub protocol, which allows users from different platforms interact with one another. In the past year or so, Fediverse has been gaining popularity due to failures of centralized platforms like Twitter and Reddit.

The first thing I noticed is how relaxing Fediverse is compared to "normal" social media. People generally are a lot more civil, and those who aren't can be blocked and muted. There's no discovery algorithm either, meaning my home timeline isn't filled with ads and "suggested for you" posts. Of course, this also means I need to find the content I want by myself.

As I mentioned before, Fediverse sits on ActivityPub. Thanks to that, rather than having a separate Lemmy account, I can use my Akkoma account to subscribe to Lemmy communities and have the posts delivered to my home timeline.

I like how few users cdrom.tokyo has. Looking at the public timeline, I recognize most of the posters. This gives the instance a comfy feel, reminiscent of old web forums. The theming is nice, too.

My only problem is that there's not enough Star Fox content that isn't porn or doesn't have Krystal in it (or both).

For now, I think I'll stay on Fediverse.