Personally I dislike anything with -verse involved because big companies have run it into the ground and then some.

The boring, dry ways of describing them work best in my opinion.

Federated forums is the driest, most technical and to the point but not very telling.

Swap out forum for link aggregator and you have similar, arguably even more technical (certainly more of a mouthful).

Connected/linked forums might be more approachable, more readily conveying how these are separate forums but networked together.

Cross-forums may work as well to the same end, but not sure how immediately understandable cross may be in this context and outside of gaming spaces.

Whatever the case I kind of think this has things backwards. What’s more important than describing and talking about the backend tech is pointing people to any of the sites built with them that have anything of interest to them to bother with. I can’t think of anything online I’ve ever gone to or used because someone told me it was using Apache, Nginx, phpBB, or like an Open Source Web Server or using such and such CDN.

The reason why is simple: next to nobody talks like that. The only people that might are deep in web dev.

Keep an eye on !webrevival@lemm.ee, search via Marginalia Search, and check out the ooh directory among other things.

Also look out for webrings (or similar) on some of the sites you may find, as they can help you find other likeminded net people.

Some people are trying to bring back some of the old navigation methods, but with some improvements, to keep the open net around.

Honestly that’s one of my favorite parts of anthology/episodic shows. You get a loose theme of what to expect but each episode can pleasantly surprise you.

Aah, so I think Play Store is up to date but F-Droid isn’t, check again here: https://f-droid.org/packages/app.vger.voyager/

Unless this updates between me commenting & you checking (or browser cache is messing with me), it still shows v2.29.1 for F-Droid.

Checked the other day and it hasn’t gone up via F-Droid repo yet. I just downloaded the updated version from Github since it was bugging me.

I don’t know how accurate the stats are, but around the bottom of each instance sidebar they have a breakdown of users per day/week/month. I think that’s supposed to pull not from signed in visits but whether they were active by voting/commenting/posting.

Excluding the instances you mention, there’s still a sizable amount of people active if those stats are reliable.

You can see the weekly/monthly stats aggregated in the list view of instances on Lemmyverse:

https://lemmyverse.net/

Also while there’s a modest amount of people here (I’d reserve small for under a thousand online, personally), many of them seem to have a rather narrow set of interests they like to engage with. Namely technology (self-hosting & Linux in particular), news (primarily to do with politics), and memes (a mix of things but largely politically-tinged, old memes, nostalgia-tinged).

Outside of these interests the next most active may be cute animals, comics, and video games with some gradually rising gardening, stitching, woodworking, art, and certainly other interest communities I’m forgetting or haven’t noticed.

It’s great! Also for anyone that happens to be in the overlap of people that enjoy chess and go, and want to play go online as well, there’s online-go.com.

I don’t know that it has all the features that Lichess does, but it does have puzzles, tournaments, custom games, and so on.

Gonna take this as a jumping off point to mention some software.

Wanna get into video editing? Shotcut’s pretty solid in my experience.
Into mind-mapping stuff? You might give Freeplane a look.
Have a drawing tablet & want to use it to take handwritten digital notes? Check out Xournal++.
Cross-platform Notepad++ alternative? Might give CudaText a try.

Could list off more but will leave it at a few for now.

In terms of fully free, obligatory mention:
Your library may offer more than books alone, depending on how well supported they are. Borrow music, movies, sometimes even video games. For music and movies they may also offer these to borrow digitally as well via online services they coordinate with.

Tbh memes like this, and terms like “threadiverse” (not to mention fediverse), probably aren’t helping.

I know it’s well-meaning but the reality is the best “propaganda” for any of this is worthwhile content originating from our communities and fun/pleasant, welcoming communities. Get that going and people will share stuff from these sites to the corporate enclosures and they’ll start seeing the grass really is greener on the other side.

Yes. Alongside what others have mentioned, I think a couple factors are context oversight (in part from context collapse at times) and subsequent fumbling of code switching.

Many primarily comment in news or politics threads (see front pages with sort set to Active) or otherwise more serious communities, so I think it carries through in their other interactions elsewhere. It’s something of a bummer because generally neither party to fumbled interactions feels good about it.

Besides the active forum with an off-topic section recommendation, I’ve gotten the sense a lot of this style of communication has shifted from forums to group chats in whatever messaging app people are using, whether it’s Discord or Whatsapp or whathaveyou.

It’s unfortunate as those aren’t the same style at all, but seems to be how things are now. It’s part of why I wish more fediverse instances would instead operate with a site mindset and try to build distinct identities. A few do and they’re much more interesting for it imo, feeling like the small community site they are in a good way.

Oh, at the time of writing I wasn’t sure if the thread title would display in their notifications with the mention, so I wrote that just in case.

Meant to comment this earlier. On your last point so far as I’m aware there’s currently no way to create a link post (direct URL lemmy link as you say) from Mastodon/microblog to Lemmy. The reason your test post is linking back to the Mastodon instance is because of the image attachment, because you can create image posts between the two.

If you drop the image attachment, while it won’t look as nice, you can get the separate title, link, and body text without it looking too bad. Unfortunately it will lose the visual draw in the process, but that seems to be the workaround for the time being.

The main ones would be @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml, which I just mentioned so should be no need to mention again I think.

Btw for their benefit, adding the context: post with feedback and questions on Lemmy-Mastodon interoperation.

It may not do much depending on the mods/admins, but it never hurts to report and downvote comments or posts like that.

Emphasis on reporting there, as I think sometimes that stuff lingers around because people have made a habit of only downvoting and blocking those doing that regularly. I realize in your examples it’s more likely bias or bigotry respectively, but still.

Report first, then downvote and block. Doing only the latter only makes your experience a little better, the former may help the community.

For those that may only vote and otherwise lurk, there’s a decent amount.

The inability to create multi-communities/reddits (or feeds as Piefed calls them), the absence of post-folding/deduplication for when someone posts the same article to multiple communities (sometimes similar, sometimes distinct), the absence of keyword filtering to automatically filter out stuff from local/all feeds one’s uninterested in, and these are just a few from the top of my head for those that mostly lurk.

Website? That’s what they are, and I think many people would be more familiar with that than “instance”.

And if they follow up with questions about apps you can mention whatever your preference may be.

OpenRSS is a cool site that aims to produce RSS feeds for sites without them at no cost (some conditions apply, e.g. no account-walled/paywalled sites may be requested).

There’s also the Feedbro add-on for Firefox (and other browsers) that can be used to check if a website has a RSS feed buried somewhere to add to your reader.

If you’d like to keep up with some non-commercial music, you could check out the Editor’s Picks from ccMixter. Here’s the direct feed link.

In case of follow-up questions:

• Mobile Apps: personally I’m mostly using Feeder on Android these days. I like to be able to see a lot of feed entries at once and this works best for me. I’ve tried apps like Read You and Nunti, but they weren’t showing as much as I wanted.
  • Worth noting though, Nunti may be worth trying for its unique feature that tries to adjust your feeds to surface articles/entries that may be of more interest to you with offline systems.
• Desktop/laptop: I’m still sort of searching on this one. For the moment I use Thunderbird, but it’s not RSS-focused so it’s more than I want from a reader.