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.
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.
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
Like Drew got no clue said, the issue is that the author can’t handle the tiny amount of friction encountered during the process. IMO, it keeps out those that wouldn’t be contributing anyway.
Edit: Our -> out
I disagree strongly with this view. One of the truly valuable elements of reddit is/was the shared knowledge for a lot of things that are not techy. As a somewhat recent homeowner, the r/homeimprovement subreddit and the mildly related ones have been invaluable. It’s populated by random homeowners of all types and experts in various professional and DIY fields. These are not people who are likely to migrate to Lemmy in droves and that’s a loss, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe some will make it and smaller communities might grow to have similar knowledge wells, but they won’t be as deep.
I’m all-in on the transition away from the social media giants, but there’s a lot about the simplicity of a non-federated platform that won’t carryover which will make the barrier to entry higher than many people want to navigate, and that is definitely a shame.
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)
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.
People are fucking stupid bro. They just need that algorithm to tell them they dont even want to search for communities explore and learn.