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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: October 21st, 2025

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  • I would suggest a few things. First, be genuinely open minded to the discussion/topic (as in your opinion can change with a good enough argument.

    Second, I would suggest using “feeling” language as much as possible. Examples are: “I feel like that will cause an issue with…”, “my understanding is…”, “my thoughts are…”, “from what I’ve seen/read the setup is …”, etc. From my perspective, feeling language lowers the “absoluteness” of statements and makes conversions easier by changing them from arguing absolute truths, to discussing lived experiences.

    Third would be to reframe the discussion/argument from “you vs them” to the two of you vs a problem/issue and you both are working together to find the answer. This somewhat goes with being open minded.

    Fourth, I don’t think works too well in online discussions, but in person I find starting from a base situation and asking the other person their thoughts on it, and adding your own, works well. So, start with a base situation and then adding a little complexity each time you both agree on the outcome and reasoning. Once you’ve found your divergence point you can start having your discussion about the pros/cons of different approaches/solutions to that specific situation.



  • No worries :)

    • Not sure we have a Hobbydrama, but it’s also not my interest, so I could have blocked it.
    • Cursedcrochet looks fun. We have an active knitting community, but probably not enough activity/users for a specific “cursedcrochet” community at this point. Also have a semi-active leatherwork community, if that’s of interest.
    • Wunkus seems great. I think the closest match we may have would be Scrungy Cats, but there could be communities I don’t know about.
    • Also, in a different comment someone mentioned the solarpunk communities (basically anything on the slrpnk.net instance), I’m a big fan of those, and think they’re worth checking out.

    The threadiverse (roughly the reddit-like part of the fediverse) is pretty small (~43k MAU), so if something doesn’t exist and you want it to, your probably going to have to start and build it yourself.

    I was kind of off-put by that initially, but I kind of like it now. It’s kind of like building your own little space and people can come check it out and see what you’ve been building and contribute if they feel like it. I created fedilytics (Fediverse-Analytics) a couple months ago because I was curious how the fediverse was doing. It’s not particularly active with other people (got first non-me post yesterday!), but I mostly built it for myself and enjoy anytime someone stops in to talk in the comments.

    If you do decide to make a community in the future, I’d suggest making the post in the community and then cross-posting it, to a larger relevant community, to increase traffic to your post (as many people just stick to their subscribed feed).


  • If you provide some of your interests/hobbies, we can probably be more helpful.

    That being said, I think these are a few active and interesting communities:

    Regarding places to avoid, I don’t think anyplace needs to be avoided, per say. Politics can be problematic, if you go into those posts.

    There’s no real algorithm, so you need to curate your own feed. In general, I’d suggest, if you see a community that could interest you, just subscribe. You can always unsubscribe later (if it turns out not to be what you want), but getting a denser “good stuff” home feed is beneficial.

    By the same token, I’d suggest blocking communities you have zero interest in (helps filtering, so you come across more content you are interested in when browsing “All”). If you run into a problematic user, report (if they have done something reportable), block, and move on.

    If 2 communities are posting the same content and you get tired of seeing double, I’d suggest removing the community from the bigger or flagship instance (ex. Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world, Piefed.Social).

    This would have the effect of distributing the communities across the threadiverse rather than having them bunch up on a few. A problem with bunching can be if an instance goes down, they take their users/communities with them. Most of the medium/large instances in the threadiverse are stable, but it has happened in the past (Lemm.ee).

    My understanding is this should be much less of a problem in the future, they are working on making user profiles and communities transferable between instances/servers.

    Note: there is an active autism community, if that’s of interest to you.



  • What is Catadon:

    Catodon is open source software for building federated communities

    Catodon is a fork of Sharkey, but with many features ported from Firefish, and some new ones! Its target is to provide a smoother, more comprehensible UX - so terminology is simplified and made more descriptive, and several features of Misskey/Sharkey that were not widely used or not federated were removed from the frontend. There is also an attempt to make the design more minimal wherever possible - see the redesigned posting form for example. One of the main design goals is to make something more user-friendly, where you can invite your friends and they can adjust easily.

    Please join our Matrix space at #catodon-space:matrix.org for direct communication! Feedback and code reviews are much appreciated.

    Main differences from Sharkey:

    • A new, rounder look!
    • You can follow hashtags and words in you Home timeline, by adding Custom feeds (Antennas) to Home
    • You can integrate GIF search for your users through Klipy
    • Improved notifications: Added a “mark all as read” button to the Notifications widget, there is a highlighted divider between new and old notifications, and they are marked read easier when you view them, so that you no longer need to use the “mark all as read” button as much. You can also see a list of who reacted in grouped reaction notifications
    • Threads in timelines (imported from Firefish), greatly decluttering timelines for longer threads
    • Users now have the choice to link to external media (including GIFs) without permanently saving them to their Storage, using a new dedicated cache - allows admins to provide less permanent storage space per user, keeping server resources under control
    • There is a global, admin-definable cap to the cache for remote files, so that you no longer need to manually delete it regularly
    • Different/simpler terminology so that new users can understand what everything means more easily
    • Decluttered buttons under posts: Like/Reaction (merged), Reply, Repost/Quote (merged)
    • Deprecated/removed from the frontend the gamifying or local only/not widely used features: Channels, Achievements, Gallery, Clips, Games, Chat, Play
    • Redesigned left sidebar. Much fewer items in the Navigation Bar, which now expands/collapses with a button. The profile picture now acts as a direct link to your profile, as it’s separated from the account menu that sits under it
    • Fewer timelines, no hardcoded links in the header menu - everything is a timeline
    • “Accounts timeline” based on the “Following” page, but upgraded to a timeline with columns scrolling independently and a search bar
    • The local timeline now takes the server’s short name, adding a unique touch to your community
    • Custom feeds and Lists are in their own dedicated timeline
    • More filters in timelines and Lists - you can now view your following accounts’ replies to others (or only to accounts you also follow) in Home, choose between Following and Mutual followers, and include the public posts from your server in Home (covering the functionality of the deprecated “Social” timeline)
    • Post area is now clickable everywhere, not only over the text area
    • You can view all reactions together under a post in detailed post view (added “All” tab). You can also see the total number of replies+subreplies next to the number of direct replies, showing instantly how deep the discussion under a post goes
    • Redesigned posting form with buttons in more practical positions - also the collapsed posting form at the top of timelines takes up half the space the old one did
    • The posting form autoexpands as you write longer posts - imported from Firefish
    • Autocomplete also shows results for names of users - you no longer need to remember the exact username to mention or DM someone
    • You can disable sign-in emails by deactivating sign-in notifications
    • You can now close the alt text window over images, which can make parts of them hard to see/read, by clicking on it
    • Much better key navigation - both with h/j/k/l and arrows. Focus is more often where you expect it to be, so that you can key nav instantly when opening a page. You can also swipe through timelines on desktop with left/right
    • Countless bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements!

    Only server i found: https://catodon.rocks/