I've been curious about the fediverse since I first learned about it, which was probably about when Trump's social media company cloned Mastodon instead of creating their own site from scratch. I did some reading and glanced at some different fediverse sites, but couldn't entirely wrap my mind around how the fediverse worked and honestly I was overwhelmed by the server choice aspect, especially since so many Mastodon servers in particular seem focused on specific topics and there wasn't any one specific topic I wanted to interact with more than the others.

Once Elon took over Twitter, I decided to finally sign up for a general Mastodon server out of a voyeuristic desire to see what the people fleeing had to say about their experiences. Joining in the middle of the Twitter exodus meant tons of fediverse tips and explanation posts were being shared and I finally got a better grasp of how the fediverse as a whole worked. I commented on PeerTube from Mastodon, I tried PixelFed and learned the global feed was pretty much all Mastodon posts and wished there was a global PixelFed-only option between local server and entire fediverse, and I finally settled on Calckey because it's way more playful with emojis and text animations but still allowed me to follow all the fascinating scientists that had hopped on the Mastodon train and Calckey formatted their Mastodon posts well.

I had checked out Lemmy, too, when reading up on the fediverse because I use Reddit far more than any other social media site. I initially passed on Lemmy because of server choice paralysis again and also because it didn't look very active. Now that Reddit is making their API unaffordable for third party apps, it seemed like a good time to give Lemmy a chance. The official Reddit app and site are insufferable and I'd rather start over in a smaller community without the ads (I loathe ads) than deal with an app that's too cluttered with irrelevant features like NFTs or use a website that constantly begs me to switch over to that terrible app instead.

I hope this does well. I have been using the internet since the 90s and it has been a crazy evolution. I'd love if we move out from the walled gardens that took over. Maybe I'll just be on the fringes while the masses stay with the corporations, but at least there are good people in these fringes.