Thanks, will try that out

Do you know a way to see the ActivityPub JSON for fediverse objects?

Here’s the thing: without this thread, I might never have become aware of this user or their activities. Are you sure that what you’re doing isn’t counterproductive and giving them more undeserved attention?

Lemmy has a karma system? Where?

(It’s a troll post anyway, isn’t it.)

Can confirm that sorting by new comments makes it appear a lot more active. There’s a reason why old forums’ only sorting method was thread bumping.

anything teenagers actually want to do and enjoy doing is self-harm, haven’t you gotten the memo that adults know in 100% of all cases what’s good for them a lot better than they themselves do

(To any reader unironically agreeing with the above paragraph, I suggest reading this webcomic.)

You can register on an instance with a backend that combines the microblogging fediverse and the threadiverse (afaik: mbin, piefed, friendica), then you can both microblog and post to communities.

doesn’t look like either mastodon or lemmy, although its structure is similar to lemmy; from the sidebar it appears they are running something called “scored” which I don’t know anything about

I mean you could use pretty much any federated blogging software for such purposes.

The clue what ActivityPub is for is in the name: it is for publishing one’s activities (so that others can subscribe to them). Fiction writing isn’t inherently about publishing one’s activities, the main thing you want to do on such platforms is host the content so others find it, not make sure your subscribers are notified about your activities. So it’s not really clear how ActivityPub fits into that use case, although I suppose you could use it to publish the content.

I switched to “new comments” and don’t want to go back to anything else. It has only advantages in my mind:

• It gives me a mix of older and very new threads (because new posting also counts as a comment).
• It makes sure different threads are shown to me after a short period of time already, making sure I do not get bored by seeing only things I’ve already seen.
• It reminds me of web forums with thread bumping, which I continue to think were one of the best ways to organize online discussions we’ve ever had.
• It still shows me more upvoted stuff more of the time because many other users sort by sorting methods that take upvotes into account, so such threads also get more comments usually.

One disadvantage is that occasionally I get several-month-old (or even year-old) threads at the top of my feed if someone has the brilliant idea to post in them. Doesn’t happen very much though.

You mostly understood it right.

I think of Mastodon/Twitter as essentially server-side RSS readers: you follow the sources you want to read, then are notified when they are posting something. If you don’t already have any followers, there is little point in posting anything there. The forum-like structure of Lemmy is a lot more suited for ordinary people to discuss topics they are interested in.

reddit was once smaller than it is now too

No, I was somewhat expanding on my previous thoughts on how to discover things on the fediverse and make it more active. Maybe that was a bit off-topic, sorry if it was.

I have already found my instance’s “all communities” link fairly useful for finding communities.

The problem is I am subscribed to many communities that hardly anyone ever posts anything to, and the answer is not always “be the change you want to see in the world”. For example, I’m a native speaker of German and enjoy helping learners of German with grammatical questions, so I am subscribed to !german@lemmy.world – yet, almost no one ever posts any questions there for me to answer. (This is in stark contrast to reddit, where there is a very active /r/german.) People who see that community on lemmy probably think no one will ever read their question if they post it there. Chicken and egg problem.

Looking back at my own life, I found the first few online communities I ever seriously joined (when I was a preteen, for context) through a web search, then discovered most others (recursively) from there, until I ended up (among other places) here on lemmy (which I can trace back to reddit, which I can trace back to a forum I started to pay attention to because of one of these original online communities preteen me found through a web search; not providing more info for privacy reasons). :P

So #1 and #3 are how it should work, IMHO, although #3 mostly for people who aren’t yet engaging with anything at all, most things will be discovered through #1.

I think most people use the Internet not for posting anything (or at least not much) themselves, but for looking up things they want to know (through a web search). In the pre-smartphone era, web searches would often direct to specific websites which might have forums attached to them, that was how I first started to seriously engage in my first online community actually. This isn’t the case much nowadays: many search results are either wikis (which are communities themselves, but don’t really invite discussion that isn’t about working on the wiki) or blogs/WordPress websites which may or may not have a comment section, but it’s relatively rare for them to have forums or even to link to reddit/fediverse communities to discuss their subject matter.

So I think it would be desirable if we managed to change that last part: top search results for many terms on search engines should be, or link to, fediverse communities, which should make it clear that users are invited to join. That would help us get more users engaged with fediverse communities in the first place, they would naturally discover more communities once they’re here.

I follow both, but a lot more people/organizations than hashtags.

I always find it funny when I read a lemmy thread that’s being posted in by microbloggers who just start all replies with @ followed by usernames of people they’re replying to.

you can sort !casualconversation@lemm.ee by “new comments”

Human nature does not change very much over time. When I was younger I thought the future was going to be awesome because then, people like me would be in power. Now there are many politicians, celebrities, activists, journalists, other people more powerful than me who are the same age as me or even younger; they are pretty much the same as the ones who are older than me.

Somewhat more sophisticated version of a one-way cul-de-sac.