I don’t know enough to say if it’s more insular or not, I don’t know how common it is to have the default sort as All, but we’re definitely worldly enough for other instances to have some users pushing stereotypes on us when we comment.
You do have some point about lemmy.ml having enough instances that you can get by with Local as default, but I assume most people would be subscribing to or exploring other instances too? I really don’t know.
Honestly, it depends on your circles and network. I only remember seeing The Picard Maneuver maybe twice, didn’t know of them before this week. I’ve seen your username far more, for example.
and especially here
Good to know that old post is still useful. (It’s also nice to see that wolfballs, bakchodi and exploding-heads all died.)
well I’d say since non-federated Lemmy is just a forum with a bunch of stuff for federation that you won’t use
It’s not the same as every other forum software, or even every other content aggregator.
with only one instance, it’s little more than a mediocre forum.
What would make it mediocre or not is the community, and pre-federation Hexbear, or even reddit itself, is proof that you don’t need federation to have an active community, it simply makes it far easier.
Federation doesn’t make the rest of the software worse.
It’s not like wanting a car to solely generate heat with the exhaust, it’s closer to using a four-wheel-drive car on regular city streets.
I haven’t checked around since the reddit API fiasco, but there were unfederated Lemmy instances. As Diva mentions in more detail, Hexbear used to be unfederated and it was the largest of all instances. Even without federation, it’s a viable, actively developed content aggregator. So I wouldn’t call it silly, it’s a valid choice.
and wasn’t it revealed that that Trump’s garbage dump was running defedded Masto?
Gab is also a Mastodon fork, which was originally defederated before being blocked from most instances and bullied by the remaining freeze peach instances, so they mechanically removed the federation code.
I’ve also heard some special interest communities on Mastodon intentionally defederate from the broader network for privacy reasons.
I personally don’t value the microblogging format and never really gave it a shot. It’s just personal preference. In my opinion, the site format mechanically encourages low-effort junk, and there’s enough of that on sites like this. I only use microblogs as an inconvenient feed for specific niche news updates I can’t get elsewhere, like I would an RSS-type feed.
With that said, I support people posting on fediverse microblogging sites rather than on xitter or bluesky. I have to jump through a lot of moving hoops to even view xitter feeds without an account.
The fact that Lemmy doesn’t calculate and show a user’s total post score is proof itself that it doesn’t reflect Lemmy’s political leanings.