• It is instantly familiar in operation to anyone who has used Twitter. It looks and feels almost the same to use in a way that Mastadon doesn’t (arguable whether that’s a good thing or not, but it makes for a comfortable transition).

Yup, pretty much. I tried Mastodon and found it very unintuitive, but BlueSky was immediately understandable as a former Twitter user. I don’t really use either that much, but I’ve spent way more time with BlueSky.

Honestly, it’s the same with Lemmy. I tried a lot of Reddit alternatives, both federated and centralized, and I landed on Lemmy because A) It has the only decently-sized user base and B) my preferred Reddit app, Sync, moved to Lemmy. Lemmy is similar enough to Reddit on it’s own that transitioning over wouldn’t have been difficult, but having Sync just made it that much easier.

That’s why like Emma Vigeland. She’s calm, cool, and pretty open minded, and when things do get confrontational, it’s Tim Pool that’s screeching, not her.

Yeah, I fell off of TYT in 2017 or 2018 for a lot of the same reasons I can’t stand listening to right-wing pundits; a lot of smug and little information (mostly from Cenk). I hadn’t heard anything about Ana Kasperian. What happened with her?

There are some leftist podcasts that I like, but they are kinda just angry and unproductive, like The Insurgents; I only listen to them when I’m deeply angry or they have a good guest. The Lever is probably the best new left-wing podcast I’m listening to right now, and the Majority Report is always great.

I follow a lot of podcasts that are either center-left sources or Democratic party cheerleaders: NPR and the NPR Politics Podcast, Ezra Klein (God he’s an insufferable twat), the Daily, Pod Save America…some of these I listen to because I want to know what the, “mainstream American left,” believes, some of them just have good information; NPR’s Up First is a great 15 minute morning news wrap, and the Daily does good in depth reporting (even better when Michael Barbaro is on vacation).

I don’t listen to right-wing pundits like Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh very often. They’re mostly culture war crap, and there’s usually very little information to be gained from them. I do regularly read conservative reporting though, mostly WSJ and the Economist.