Fediverse

Then there are psychos like me who use both, and Bluesky, and other social media and have a personal blog.

I think it's too empty a lot of times. Mainstream topics are nicely populated but a vast amount of specific communities are just one person posting links over and over with a handful of upvotes and zero comments. Sometimes I see posts here and have to go to Reddit to see what the community thinks about it, because on Lemmy the post is completely dead.

100% of online respondents have confirmed they have access to internet.

I don't generally like the Twitter model and rarely use it, but I will say that one thing that it does do well, better than the Reddit/Threadiverse model, is very rapidly assembling information about a specific, temporary topic.

Like, the Reddit model is about letting a community assemble over time and letting people find their way there and moderators be chosen and all that. That works quite well for a lot of things, and lets people with expertise in the field arise and all that.

But let's say that there's a huge natural disaster and people are putting up video clips from their cell phones and stuff like that. They can coalesce around a hashtag or a couple of hashtags pretty quickly. Relevant material from people who have had no contact with each other and maybe no time to assemble a community or anything gets drawn together. Other users retweeting content help highlight it. The topic probably won't be active for long. It can be really useful for a rapid setup and teardown scenario.

Of course, that's really mostly following a hashtag, rather than a particular user...

I also dislike the "short comment" model that Twitter uses (though over the years, the comment length has been increased and workarounds added), but one thing that it does help with is to help deal with inexperienced users unfamiliar with quoting etiquette. In email or in traditional forum systems, it's conventional to quote a bit of relevant text before responding to it. This requires knowing syntax for doing so and when it's appropriate. Twitter deals with that by forcing everything to be broken up into bite-size chunks as a property of the system, so someone responding to something is forced to respond to only the relevant bit. I think that that probably helps make Twitter more-approachable.

Having seen and experienced the different platforms, I'd say Facebook and Twitter/X have much larger userbases but vulnerable to manipulation, while Reddit is supposedly for people believing themselves to be "smarter" and above those social media platforms, and then Lemmy and Mastadon definitely more niche and heavily on the activist progressive side.

I'm with you. I also come from the Usenet days and much prefer to follow topics over people.

I do have some web forums that I visit from time to time but those have even less traffic than Lemmy.

I don't use Reddit at all now, so Lemmy is pretty much the only option for this style of topic based content. The ability to follow hashtags on Mastodon is kind of nice too. Unfortunately, people spamming unrelated hashtags on their posts can still be a problem.

Yes, and it consolidates comments from cross-posts. Very neat.

When you onboard onto Reddit it asks interests and points users to subreddits. I don't think anything like that exists on Lemmy, but could be a good thing for the less tech inclined.