Twitter’s dying, Reddit’s changing, everything else is entertainment – and there’s nowhere left to hang out.

But fediverse isn’t ready to take over yet

But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot. The growth that Mastodon has seen thanks to a Twitter exodus has only exposed how hard it is to join the platform, and more importantly how hard it is to find anyone and anything else once you’re there. Lemmy, the go-to decentralized Reddit alternative, has been around since 2019 but has some big gaps in its feature offering and its privacy policies — the platform is absolutely not ready for an influx of angry Redditors. Neither is Kbin, which doesn’t even have mobile apps and cautions new users that it is “very early beta” software. Flipboard and Mozilla and Tumblr are all working on interesting stuff in this space, but without much to show so far. The upcoming Threads app from Instagram should immediately be the biggest and most powerful thing in this space, but I’m not exactly confident in Meta’s long-term interest in building a better social platform.

  • OngoGablogian@beehaw.org
    3·
    1 year ago

    I didn’t know what the Fediverse was a week ago, and now I’m active on Lemmy and Mastodon. I think people are dramatically overstating how difficult it is to sign up. It’s not hard, it’s just new.

    And besides, I don’t think the fediverse needs to take over at all. It just needs to have active, viable, engaging communities. As Iong as enough people end up here to sustain that, it doesn’t really matter if they overtake the places we’re coming from.

    • seducingcamel@beehaw.org
      2·
      1 year ago

      Feels like a smear campaign at this point. They’re making it sound like you have to dig through instances and code your own interface or something

    • randomguy2323@lemmy.fmhy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      People are fucking stupid bro. They just need that algorithm to tell them they dont even want to search for communities explore and learn.

    • Drew Got No Clue@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      I told someone about uBlock as they were getting ads left and right, and I was told “oh no, I don’t wanna install anything!”

      So if it’s not extremely frictionless, many people won’t even try…

      (I agree with your second point BTW)

    • Curt@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      I agree with you that it isn’t that difficult. I signed up on mastodon.social months ago. It was a little confusing about picking an instance so I just arbitrarily picked one. The same was true for lemmy. Now I’m on lemme.ee and behaw.org.

      In the case of Matodon, I recently discovered the Explore option. There’s more than enough posts to keep me reading for hours. And most of them are interesting. Imagine reading an unfiltered Twitter feed. I don’t need Mastodon to get any bigger for my needs. It may even be better if it doesn’t get a huge membership. The same holds true for lemmy and kbin, bigger and better yes, but they don’t have to be a Reddit replacement.