Holding a conversation
Talking is the best way to be social.
Social media is supposed to be social. It’s in the name, and the phenomenon has been compared to a town square or a village pub, where you can grab a pint, sit down at a table, and pitch in with your opinion on the latest football performance (it was a disgrace). Alternatively, you and your mates should be able to sneak off to a private snug and discuss marital woes away from the cacophony of other voices.
The layout of the venue should facilitate both of these conversation modes, while also talking to people in the pub next door through a handy hole in the wall.
Discussion is top priority with Lemmy. It’s built around the idea of positing an idea or article, and then talking about it. Conversations are threaded, and each comment can spin off dozens of other comments. While this is true of the other server types, Lemmy’s voting mechanism, as well as the ability to sort comments based on votes, age and more, makes it a lot easier to join in the conversation at a relevant point and address the part of the issue you want to talk about.
At the other end of the spectrum is Pixelfed. As with all of our test servers, you can do the equivalent of liking, sharing and commenting, but in practice, this doesn’t tend to happen. On Pixelfed servers in the wild, it’s typical to see an image liked dozens of times, shared hundreds, and with zero comments. We couldn’t say why – there is, after all, a clickable speech bubble and comment field. It just doesn’t seem to have been given much priority in the design phase, and it actually feels weird to comment or discuss.
The Mastodon web interface is an information overload, and you’re likely to have three or four streams of posts open at any time. You’ll see the comments as individual posts, then expand an interesting tidbit to view the entire conversation. Navigating branches to find the appropriate point at which to engage isn’t always intuitive, but it’s fun, and you rarely feel you’re butting in inappropriately. Akkoma and Misskey are just a fun experience.