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.
This feels like the same anti-FOSS FUD that was there 20 years ago against linux: ‘it’s not ready!’ and ‘who will provide support?’ and ‘it’s too hard for people to figure out!’ and ‘how can you make money if it’s free?’ and so on.
Of course, the whole world runs on Linux now and it’s eaten the lunch of every single proprietary competitor… it just took more than a week to do it, which is far too long of a cycle if you’re a clickbait “journalist” on corpo-owned media.
The Verge peeps are rather enthusiastic about Activity Pub based platforms, I wouldn’t attribute bad intent there.
Linux is used by most of the world but it’s either backend where techies take care of things or super streamlined experiences like Android etc.
Maybe this time it’s not bad intent, but it’s the same arguments that have always been made against FOSS and open platforms. But, if you use the same arguments people have used in bad faith, then you should expect people will attribute previous experience to your opinions as well.
On the server side, maybe. On the consumer side? No.
Depends on which consumers you’re talking about: in the education market, it’s eaten Windows and MacOS’s lunch (Chromebooks), and for gamers, it’s making great inroads and is greatly praised while doing so (Steam Deck) and well, you can’t argue that Android’s 70% global market share isn’t anything other than a stunning success for it.
Now are any of those “Linux” as in rolling your own kernel and spending half the week deciding on which distribution you should use before using Ubuntu anyways? Well, no, but it is Linux and it’s dominating mobile, eating into the sales of Windows laptops, and has actual good press for a game platform, which is something someone from 2010 wouldn’t believe if you told them was happening.
right, because those are the ones feverishly musing about when “the year of the linux desktop” will arrive, as though the fact that it hasn’t displaced Windows yet proves its inferiority.