I never was a big social media guy. Never had a Facebook or anything, except what google forced on me like Google+ and on reddit, I just used it for very specific tasks, when I couldn’t find answers anywhere else.
With the current shitstorm on reddit I decided that enough is enough and wanted to give this Fediverse I keep hearing about a try. With a little bit of searching around, I made an account, got the mobile app and things seemed settled. Until I tried finding stuff more targeted than a wall of posts on jerbil.
Granted, I haven’t read, let alone tried everything yet, but it seems limited, or most likely, I have no idea what I’m doing. Take for example emulation. One of the subreddits I was in, was about emulation since that’s a topic I’m passionate about. Good, went to the link provided to search for communities and got 11 results. As expected for the most part.
What was not expected was most of them being in the double digits of users with the biggest ones showing 3 posts and like…6 comments total.
I know that while the fediverse is not new by any means, there’s a large growth now with the shit happening over at reddit and is in by no means as populated or interacted with as the latter. But those numbers seem so small to me that I’m sure I’m doing something wrong.
Please help out an illiterate idiot?
PS. Emulation was just an example I was interested with. It’s not the point of my post.
The communities are still developing, but they’ll likely always be more fractured than Reddit was. Right now users, especially lurkers, are congregating to the most active instances and communities. Sounds like those aren’t the communities you’re most involved with.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the user history and contributions that Reddit is built on generally don’t exist here yet.
As you look around and get a feel for things I think you’ll find it feels more active and engaging than your initial impression.