Here is a short guide on finding interesting people on Mastodon. If you follow people on Twitter, a lot of them will have links to their Mastodon or Bluesky.
If you prefer a reddit format, there's Lemmy. I've found the communities there pretty small and the creators are tankies, but the point of the fediverse is that you can choose a server that suits your needs. You can even follow Lemmy users and "subreddits" from Mastodon to some extent, they're built on the same protocol.
Great post. I have the same experience on Lemmy with tankies, who are fundamentally just as big of wing nuts as the far right people they talk about. The drama and toxicity is as extreme as some of their rhetoric.
But it is simple enough to block a community and move on. A bigger problem are them overrunning other communities on other instances since it is federated. Unless an instance blocks another instance, it is difficult to deal with.
Seems to be an ongoing issue within open source at the moment. The Linux community is currently eating itself because a bunch of black-and-white good-and-evil tankies are revolting and putting people through purity tests to make sure their dogma aligns--otherwise they exclude people from projects, abandon projects, or flat out state "open source isn't for xyz type of person."
It is pretty gross seeing politics overtake one of the more noble aspects of tech. Folks are so bad at it right now that they are twisting the GNU manifesto as some sort of communist underpinning for all of open source. The reality is that GNU was largely apolitical; it is egalitarian in nature, is not against business and capital but is against secrecy and authoritarian enforcement which it deemed would be necessary to fully ensure everyone is in compliance with software licensing.
We'll all note that one thing GNU does not call for, however, is to freeze out other users and contributors on the basis of orthodox. Yet that's exactly what's happening with this new generation of FOSS devs. Sadly.
Enemies at the gates, and in the shadows, and at the foot of the bed, and next to you while you sleep, and under your skin chittering like bugs to chew its way out, and finally in your dreams. Some people are extremists.
As another sad but also funny example: Asahi Linux (distro that runs on Apple's M architecture) is having a breakdown because one person used the idiom that open source devs are the "thin blue line" protecting free software. And a couple people got all hot and bothered with low media literacy skills and took that as some kind of endorsement of the police (who are all bastards, they assure us) and so blew up the project in a temper tantrum.
People really, really need to take their meds. It has never been more normalized to get help, yet here we are.
I was briefly active on Lemmy when the whole reddit "exodus" happened, and then gave it another chance a few months later. Both times, I couldn't stay on because every single community would become a forum to discuss US imperialism and the woes of capitalism or something else of that nature. I lean left and am politically active, but I'm just not that interested in US culture war issues. Reddit has the same problem, but at least you can find a handful of small subreddits that have managed to fence themselves off from all the shit.
I have immediately found communities around personal and professional interests on both Bluesky and Mastodon, and I'm finding them much more pleasant to be on that Twitter. Lemmy probably won't be the alternative to reddit, but I'm still hoping something emerges, hopefully open source and/or federated.
I guess it's inevitable that open source projects will be a playground for people's egos, some Mastodon communities can be insufferable as well. I can ignore it for most projects, but it's worse with the likes of Lemmy because the devs have shaped the content on the platform(s), which should in theory be independent of the tech. When the official instance is called lemmy.ml (where "ml" stands for Marxism-Leninism) and the admins have pictures of Che Guevara and Mao Zedong, it sends a message about who the platform is for.
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u/pohui Feb 17 '25
Here is a short guide on finding interesting people on Mastodon. If you follow people on Twitter, a lot of them will have links to their Mastodon or Bluesky.
If you prefer a reddit format, there's Lemmy. I've found the communities there pretty small and the creators are tankies, but the point of the fediverse is that you can choose a server that suits your needs. You can even follow Lemmy users and "subreddits" from Mastodon to some extent, they're built on the same protocol.