For me its a definitely the excitement of messing with a new toy while also making me think “how the hell does this work” and “the general population has no chance with this”.
I’ve only been trying out Lemmy/Mastodon for the past few days, slowly building up the communities I subscribe to. I was mostly a lurker on reddit and rarely made my own posts, so the smaller userbase is both good and bad. Good because I spend less time scrolling and I feel like I can contribute more. Bad because there is just less traffic.
Smaller communities tend to be more polite overall and are more welcoming to longer form writing and discussion which I am very down with. I am both intrigued and slightly bewildered how up front the platform is about blocking out content you don’t want to see. Again, good and bad.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on being a new user this week.