Iāve been on mastodon for a couple of years, hereās how I handled instance fomo there.
I made an account on a few different instances that I liked, got a feel for each instanceās rules, what was allowed, what wasnāt. Over time, I started to realize what kind of mod styles I liked, whether I cared much about the local timeline vs my subscribed timeline (I didnāt care as much about this on masto, but here, Iām much more interested in the local timeline, which Iāll get into in a bit.) Eventually, I settled on just one account, but really you never have to if you donāt want to, lots of people have alts, even back on non federated social media.
Iām doing this process again here. I currently have accounts on Beehaw, Kbin.social, and slrpnk.net, where Iām posting from currently. No matter which one, I can follow any community I want from any of these accounts provided they arenāt defederated. But, I also get a unique local timeline view, and a specific culture brought on by mods and users for each. I really think this gives power to smaller, more topic focused instances like slrpnk.net. Specifically, Iāve noticed two things it gives me that Reddit didnāt necessarily have
- a quick āshow me only posts related to this specific topic Iām interested inā button via the local timeline. (This could technically kind of be built with multireddits, but that wouldnāt quite be the same)
- (what I think is even better) show me more general topics, but hosted by people also interested in this one specific root topic (for my instance, the root topic would be solarpunk, but for others, Iāve seen instances dedicated to star trek, cyberpunk, local towns, the list goes on.) This I think has more community building power in an a way that is unique to here and that Iām interested in seeing more of, personally. After all, someone
could make a subreddit called, idk, r/startrekurbanism, but I donāt see that taking off on Reddit. It would be weirdly extremely niche, and the chances of it showing up on your TL (which you need to happen to encourage engagement) over more popular posts is minimal. Here though, I bet a community dedicated to discussing city planning and design ran by Star Trek fans could have some engagement just due to the local timeline bringing it to peopleās attention. This has potential to allow Lemmy to be weird and unique in a way previous aggregator sites couldnāt pull off.
Tl;dr: local timelines are cool. try a few instances out to get a feel for what you like (and to get over instance fomo), and give fedi time to grow on you. It may not work out for everyone, and thatās okay, but I really have grown to prefer Mastodon to Twitter, and Iām excited to see a federated alternative to Reddit gain traction.