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.

  •  Thugosaurus_Rex   ( @Thugosaurus_Rex@beehaw.org ) 
    2•1 year ago

    As I see it the issue isn’t with structure–it’s with mass appeal and convincing potential users that Fediverse systems are worth investing their time in. That’s going to take convincing as the systems involved are a bit more complicated to get started in than with a centralized site where you just open the page, maybe log in, and are set to go.

    General users largely won’t care one way or the other what type of system they have–they just want it to work. On top of that there’s a bit of a marketing problem. Just looking at YouTube for an explanation as to what decentralized sites or decentralized social media is, and the top videos are a bunch of 20 something Crypto Bros relating everything to block chain or decentralized finance or crypto or what have you. Less than 20 seconds in and I’m already shutting off to the idea, and that’s as someone who already has a surface level understanding of the concepts going in.

    I agree with you that on a structural level the bones are strong and will only get stronger, but I don’t know if we’re quite there yet on general appeal as a next wave of the internet.