Remember back in the old web when letting people know your real name was a horrifying breach of personal privacy? Heck, having the same username for multiple places gave me the hives, if it was unique enough.

We need to go back to those days; not just for safety reasons but because there’s a freedom to the individualized anonymity of being a (apparently) distinct user in each instance.

That’s what I was looking for, yeah. Part of it was that I was subscribed to language learning communities (and memes in the target language: the shared language of memes provides a lot of context!) which can be named a large variety of things, so I’d be back at square one and searching for things manually.

It’s not the worst thing to be back to basics, because it forces me to explore and learn about the Fediverse, but there’s always going to be that nagging “did I get everything out of the old apartment” feeling as I drop off the key.

“Honey what’s wrong, you’ve barely touched your Androgyn-Os.”

I was like that on Reddit, but that was partly because it’s SO heavily trafficked and there are so many comments within any given post that you either have to be in at the start or make a popular post to have any effect upon discussion. And by “discussion” I mean more using a loudspeaker: there’s little meaningful back and forth, just presentations.

Smaller communities allow for more forum-like interaction.

Wefwef feels like Apollo in a stable beta version: it doesn’t have everything I’m used to (blocking communities from the main feed is a big one) but everything is in the right place. Pity I only got it after Apollo went down, since I can’t get my data from Apollo now.

I’m just trying Lemmy (writing this comment on it) and it’s still rather light but thankfully speedier than on a browser.

I figure I’ll bounce between them for a bit and see which one starts to gain more usage and features. But yes, it’s good that there are more options available.