Its something to sleep on, thats for sure. Maybe I could shoot the idea of posting the lemmy-alternative community on their sidebar, and let naturally curious users find it on their own.

But would it be weird to, for example, host such a primarily US and international community on the lemmy.ca website? I would want to host it on the .ca one because I unabashedly simp for my country, but I think it would confuse a lot of people why their community is hosted by Canadians if it is not explicitly a canadian community. Is there maybe a history-based lemmy server that would make more sense to host under? Is that something I could host even? That could be pretty sick and impactful for the history professional community I feel. But the best server hosting experience I got is running a minecraft server, ngl. Super advanced stuff, I know.

Seems difficult to choose a server to join to engage on Mastodon. I want to support and choose a Canadian server, but it seems like sparse pickings, most of them have less than 100 people on them. But is that even a bad thing? I vaguely understand the emphasis that what server my account is created on doesn’t particularly matter. But lets say that small volunteer hosted server goes kaputt, what happens to my account or my posts? And I see that these servers can “defederalize” from other servers. Does that mean that these guys I don’t know can influence what I see and am exposed to on the fediverse? Feels like a really easy way to create a echo chamber for myself, if used maliciously. It feels like I should find a trustworthy server to create an account on.

Its also a little confusing seeing servers for specifically Ottawa, and other canadian cities, while some are just Canadian in general, and some are not even geographic but topic-based servers. How does the server I make my account on influence what my user experience will look like?

I will toy with the idea of posting some content on the history communities. For my professional field the most popular subreddit is r/museumpros. It is a small but fiercely engaged subreddit, and I think there would be like minded people that could be willing to make the switch over. I’d be sorta worried that I’d be drawing the ire of the mods there though, essentially disrupting their community and pilfering their members. Plus, the subreddit has been a massive boon to the museum community and fracturing it by having half go on lemmy and half stay on reddit would weaken the field massively at a critical juncture, with the massive gov threats the field is facing with the grant cutting and what not in the US. While I’d love to see like minded history-focused faces on lemmy, I think having a similar community gathering here will have to happen organically. I will explore maybe cross posting both content here and on bluesky, and on bluesky plugging whatever history community I post in.

I think id be much better suited as a normal member anyways. I touch way too much grass to be a community moderator. I already surprised myself by volunteering to create the Canadian Windsor city community on lemmy.ca I plan on handing over the reigns to just about anyone if it actually takes off.

Maybe once I get a job first. I need to sell the idea of myself to my small field first before I start trying to convince them why a federated social media alternative would benefit them. Honestly, aside from sticking it to facebook, I don’t think there would be tangible benefits. In all honesty, it would potentially fracture the field and weaken us even more by decreasing our professional network strength. I think if they migrate over here, it will have to be organically rather than coerced by me. Lots of people in my field migrating from twitter to bluesky though, so we take wins when we get them.

Can anyone explain to me what the primary difference is between Mastadon and Bluesky? I never used Mastadon but it is meant to be a twitter alternative correct? It seems like bluesky is gaining much more traction than mastadon ever did, based solely on how I literally hear nothing about it ever. If I am wrong on mastadon not being widely adopted, do tell, I am genuinely asking.

Unfortunately I actually just joined facebook recently. My professional field is a rather small one, and there are strong and established profesional groups on there that greatly benefit me that only exist on facebook. The older people in my field are unlikely to switch to anything newer. Set in their ways and what not. I am desperately looking for a job at the moment so I’d something I sorta have to grin and bear. I have an ad block and I don’t even post or engage with any of the crap on there though.

Is there any real benefit to deleting the account? I don’t see what harm a dead account could do. I have a instagram account that has my real name on it, and I’d hate to have someone potentially impersonate me. I instead posted a link to my personal website and also linked my Bluesky account in the bio, stating that I will no longer be using instagram or regularly checking it.

Tbf, my first foray into reddit-like federated alternatives was Kbin, and that did actually die.

Originally lemmy just did not interest me because it felt like the only early adopters of it were the CS and techbro crowd. But now two years later I’m seeing what seem like regular people that I’m more able to relate and discuss with, with more variety in content and communities available. Plus, I’m browsing lemmy using the old reddit format which I am still stubbornly using to this day on actual reddit. So now I am using lemmy in a format that is identical to how my reddit usually looks. I could have lemmy on one monitor, reddit on the other, and not tell the difference. Maybe petty, but its a big deal for me.

There is still a pretty big lapse on communities relevant to me tbh, but there is still enough to warrant me to visit lemmy more often. For example, I am a historian/museum professional, and the history communities heres are practically dead to non-existent. Many of the communities I am interested in are simply forking posts from reddit or simply posting news article links. But, I suppose that is the part where I stop being a lurker and be the change I want to see in the world. It is a bit more enticing and exciting to make posts knowing that a much smaller but more engaged community will see it. On reddit, it feels like pointlessly screaming at the void.

Regardless, after two years it is kinda clear that lemmy is here to stay. It seems to have survived the great filter that most other federated alternatives did not during the initial reddit api buzz.

Anyways, thats just my perspective as a completely random not technologically advanced person views and viewed lemmy.

It is a matter of engagement. People like engaging with dumb meme more than data privacy stuff. Especially when people don’t understand the ramifications of poor data privacy or understand fundamentally what the even means. Heck, even I don’t understand what companies harvesting my data will mean for my personal life. I am guilty of ignoring data privacy posts in favour of dumb memes too.

It sucks, but thats why the term edu-tainment was coined. To educate people, you must also entertain them.

I had someone post in the r/saskatchewan subreddit about lemmy.ca, and I had forgotten all about lemmy or that I even had an account on here already until they mentioned it.

Other social media sucks for sure, but OP has a point here. Lemmy is still at the stage where people only enter if they are told/reminded it exists. I genuinely thought lemmy died already. People finding lemmy naturally is very unlikely at this stage. It’s word of mouth, so the people here gotta start wording and mouthing about it.