The whole fediverse thing is what really takes me back to my first days on the internet, because after some years, the way the internet works in general became common knowledge, so nothing felt new, or the things that were really new, were actually just stupid concepts (Take for example NFTs that rised in popularity last year, people said it would change the future and the way the internet works, but it actually was just a dumb pyramid scheme and it led to nothing, even to this day i have no idea how it works.)

But the federation is a genuinely interesting system that is different from everything i've seen in the past years. The concept of anyone hosting conglomerates of communities in their own house or even in a dedicated server, while all those instances communicate with eachother is mind boggling for me, and the fact that none of this is owned by a company truly reinforces the feeling of community. The fediverse feels like a part of the internet that is yet to be explored, and while i don't understand it completely, there's still much to learn and discover. Browsing through Lemmy doesn't feel just like a daily dopamine rush activity just like Reddit, it genuinely feels like i'm interacting, contributing and being part of it, something i haven't felt for a long time tbh.

I think for me Lemmy is providing a portal to those places because the content posted here tends to be more 'high effort digital garden' type links than low effort attention grabbers.

I dont think lemmy is necessarily doing anything to make this true, its just that its new and the people participating are more likely to be motivated by altruistic reasons, or just everyday human behavioral reasons, than the profit-making or attention-seeking we might see on 'popular' sites like reddit.

edit: however maybe the 'federated' nature will keep influence spread enough that the big system-gamers won't try to setup shop? we will see. Either way I like it here for now

Lemmy reminds me of discovering Usenet and experimenting with various Usenet clients, going down rabbit holes in the communities and so on.

Or discovering a good mailing list back in the day.

I think kind of depends on how deeply you explored the instance list to find and instance that really vibes with you and makes you feel like excited to join. If you join one of the major ones like lemmy.ml or lemmy.world or shit just works or another one of the big instances, it'll just feel like the early days of Reddit — young and active and exciting because it's a new platform but not particularly unique feel or culture or anything because they're just general purpose instances that let anyone in and so kind of end up with a common denominator internet culture. If you really go far down the instance list, though, and find an instance with less than a hundred users that has a really particular theme, target audience, and user culture, like I did, then it feels radically different than any other social media platform. I think that being on the big instances kind of hides the fact that Lemmy is super decentralized, just like the early internet, and so can give rise to really niche, unique, diverse, and interesting communities.

That's the bilbo baggins effect. That yearning for a past that doesn't exist because you've grown so much and it's changed and maybe it was never how you remembered it in the first place.