My experience with the Fediverse has only been through Mastodon, through which I struggled to find a community I really gelled with. Either it was supper overwhelming with meme posts or NSFW, or it was too chill to the point of nothing. Or, it was hyperfocused like FOSS/Linux and became uninteresting after awhile. May try again, but I think I will explore the other fedisites like Plemora or Calckey to see if I like it better.
I love the pace of a forum. I grew up primarily with GameFAQS and some lucid dreaming forum, and honestly it was very formative in teaching me how to write and use critical thinking skills, as well as how to respond to a variety of temperaments. I stopped participating in online forums awhile ago, and while I loved Reddit as a resource, I never felt inspired to participate. In the same way, there are an incredible number of forums dedicated to a certain topic, and are extremely valuable, it would be annoying to make an account for all the things I am interested in.
I like what lemmy is becoming. Glad to find system that makes interacting with people enjoyable.
Yea, I found Mastodon useful for news, albeit completely random non focused news. It gets updates (I assume by bots) way more than the news subreddit did in the last few years, and now I can just post one of those links into lemmy if I want to talk about it.
I also see pictures on there a lot, but I’m not super interested in a lot of them. I have no idea what the commenting is useful for there - it’s seems like yelling into a void, though maybe that’s the fedilab problem? IDK.