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.
Not to mention that the discussion is almost guaranteed to consist of similarly short (or even shorter) witty one-liners. Twitter format is just horrible, and its restrictions promote equally horrible behavior where you have to look for ways to convey ideas and feeling in a short manner, which almost never results in more polite and sophisticated conversations.
Never used Twitter for anything more serious than some announcements from the game devs I follow. Anything else is just plain stupid, which makes me really surprised over the wide-spread adoption of Twitter by officials and ministries and the like.
And raising the character limit is going to be even more absurd, because then it’s going to be reminiscent of an actual forum, just less structured and sensible.
Twitter, as a format, is the worst option between messengers like Matrix and proper forums of any kind.
I’m even a little suspicious that Twitter style messaging has played a part in “gotcha” politics that seem very popular everywhere, where some populists manage to gather a large following mostly by just using slick one-liners with relatively little substance.
Now sure, these have always existed and will likely exist, but I seem to see more and more of them with ever bigger popularity.
I think this kind of politics has been doing pretty alright before Twitter as well. They may have been lucky to have an entire platform dedicated to them in some way, but all it’s done is gather all the populists in one place to happily form echo chambers. It’s what Facebook has been for years, too.
We’re probably more aware of it than we used to be when this style was more spread out, but this bullshit has been doing well before, is doing well, and will do well with or without Twitter or any platform that forces short, clear-cut messages. People like this shit - this is the prime reason that counties living under dictatorship often have people praising their leaders for being “strong and effective”, i.e. if it sounds good, it must be good, with little firrheer analysis taking place; stickijg the the dictatorships example, you’ll often see the opposition followers falling very well for the same kind of populist talk or doing away with the past and punishing the dictator and their enablers.