I mean, I try and test drive all new social media platforms that don't actively make my skin crawl, but. I've really bonded with it super fast, and not the way I did with Mastodon where I really sat down to make myself adapt. Don't get me wrong, I love it and pretty much use constantly, but there's always an adjustment period; the very worst was tumblr's hellscapy postingness, but reddit was a very close second. My first social media was livejournal, so for me, everything is compared to that. When I went to dreamwidth, I had enough experience scripting and remembered enough from doing web design to build my own layout and theme straight from the available source, so my friendslist there (dw: circle) is literally customized as close as my skill level then could get to exactly how I want to read, and the right sidebar is customized to only want I personally want there that aren't distracting to me, which is basically a fancier and more idiosyncratic version of my livejournal friendslist. I do me, okay.

Back to Lemmy: from the first, it was super comfortable and familiar. Community posts to the left, right sidebar, almost the exact amount of white space I need, so it was effortless to follow along and add communities and post comments. No weird distractions, nothing unnecessary or fancy to take my attention from content, and I can open up pictures directly in my feed and close them there without having to go to the community or change my scroll rhythm much. Joyous.

I just went back to DW to search for one of my posts and while there, I paused on my circle page and took a moment to realize: oh. They are not the same, no, but Lemmy is basically a less idiosyncratic minimalist version of my specific reading aesthetic; the base elements of both are the same.

(The only thing I might want to change is coloring the post titles since I'm very trained to see plain uncolored black text as text and not links, but three entirely different colors on a general feed page like this one might be a dealbreaker for me; I can adapt to seeing 'post title is link even if black' but tossing in a green or something with blue and orange in close proximity feels like a nope and I do like the blue for user and orange for community very, very much.)

So tentatively: this may be my new community-oriented home.