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.

  • invicticide
    1·
    1 year ago

    and more importantly how hard it is to find anyone and anything else once you’re there

    I find this perspective fascinating. It took me ten minutes to find two dozen Lemmy communities of interest, about 2/3 of which were on other servers than my home server. On Mastodon, it similarly took me ten minutes to follow a bunch of hashtags that sounded interesting, and it’s trivial to follow new people from those hashtags too.

    I get that “it works on my machine” is never a very good excuse for dismissing someone else’s perspective, but I struggle to see what’s so much harder about the Fediverse vs Twitter or Reddit. I guess there’s the thing with Lemmy/Kbin about opening posts from your own instance so you can properly interact with them, which is weird, sure, but there are also like half a dozen solutions for it already, and they’re only going to keep getting better with time.

    I feel like the Fediverse got a reputation for being difficult because somebody freaked out about picking a home server once, and now that reputation has become a self-justifying argument that “Fediverse is too hard” that gets parroted by people who haven’t even looked at it yet.

    • JD Squared@lemm.ee
      1·
      1 year ago

      I find this perspective fascinating. It took me ten minutes to find two dozen Lemmy communities of interest, about 2/3 of which were on other servers than my home server.

      See I’m having a much different experience than you. I can’t seem to find any communities, and the ones I do have absolutely nothing going on with them. I’m looking for is geocaching and camping, school bus conversions, and a couple of cities. That in a s*** ton of politics made up my Reddit.

      And I understand those are all small niche groups, so I have to give it time. Meanwhile my front page is full of all those weird boring Reddit feeds that I didn’t associate with on Reddit.

      I joined lemme.ee just because it was there, and there aren’t a lot of communities on there, so every time I try to search for some, they show up from lemmy.world. which it turns out, keeps going down, because they roll back the upgrades.

      How am I being one of those guys who ends up finding communities, commenting so they end up showing up on the lemme.ee feed, but it’s not happening. And I’m still not sure if I’m doing something wrong or there’s just not much out there yet.