Yeah, on reflection, I think that’s the crux of it. There were some users from a more tight knit subreddit that I got to know well, but we all moved to discord a few years back. I miss some of the more active niche subreddits, but otherwise Lemmy replaced it very easily.
It’s entirely possible that my timing was just bad for Mastodon and good for Lemmy. The fact that I could jump on Boost and have an extremely familiar experience was a big plus. Bluesky was more similar in terms of migration experience to Lemmy than Mastodon was.
The other issue is that in a forum site you follow topics, where on a microblog site you follow people. The topics are here on Lemmy (to some extent), even if the people aren’t, but I don’t really care about the individual contributors as much. The people I wanted to follow for microblogging went to Bluesky, and that matters a lot more there.
That was actually part of my issue, and I experienced the same problem on Bluesky at first. The difference for me was ease of discovery and the influx of people I followed on other platforms. If they had gone to Mastodon instead, I’d have been more inclined to give it more effort. As it stands, I’m content with Bluesky and don’t feel I’m missing much on Mastodon. Perhaps I’m mistaken, and that’s my loss. Just trying to add some perspective.
It’s important to note that my experience is from a year ago, and I imagine a lot has changed. Part of my issue at the time was that I couldn’t see things like who people I followed were following because they were on a different server, which made discovery challenging. Also very few people who I followed on the bird site went to Mastodon.
I’m not saying the platform can’t work or that the barriers make it unusable, just that the draw wasn’t there to warrant the investment in learning a more complex platform than the alternatives.
Anecdotally, I joined Mastodon, found it difficult to find people who I personally know that were on different instances, kind of lost interest and thought kbin might be a better solution for both forums and microblogs all in one place, then my Mastodon instance shut down, and then kbin died too. Hence me being on lemmy.world, as default and stable of a server as there is here.
Bluesky felt fun and familiar right off the bat, my only issue was that it was still so small when I joined. Now that there’s an influx of new users, many of whom I followed on the bird site, it just feels like Twitter 2, which I suspect is what most people want.
FWIW I have a highly technical job and consider myself pretty tech literate, so I don’t think any of the issues I had with Mastodon weren’t things I could’ve figured out or worked around, I just didn’t feel incentivized to bother. I suspect they’ve smoothed out a lot of the federating issues I saw before, but at this point I’m happy enough on Bluesky to stay put.
Nope, the movie takes place in Utqiagvik (formerly known as Barrow), Alaska, which is one of the northernmost populated areas on earth. From the Wikipedia page:
When the sun sets on November 18, it stays below the horizon until January 23, resulting in a polar night that lasts about 66 days.[37] When the polar night starts, about 6 hours of civil twilight occur, with the amount decreasing each day during the first half of the polar night. On the winter solstice (around December 21 or December 22), civil twilight in Utqiagvik lasts a mere 3 hours.[34][38] After this, the amount of civil twilight increases each day to around 6 hours at the end of the polar night.
Edit: to OP’s point, most depictions of the Arctic aren’t that far north. 30 Days of Night happens to be one that really does have that level of continual darkness. Even so, while it’s night for several months, it’s really just the day shortening to the point that you don’t see the sun with that civil twilight reducing to a few hours, and then as the “days” get longer eventually you start to see the sun again. The reverse happens for the summer, where eventually the sun doesn’t set enough to be out of view.
Excellent, thanks!