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’d personally like it better if nothing tAkEs oVEr. I’m comfortable with the internet having more than one website.
I’m uninformed about the interesting stuff from Mozilla, Tumblr, etc. that the author mentioned, but I hope it’s cool and varied.
Lemmy taking over as a protocol would not be a bad thing, because by design it promotes the creation of multiple federated instances. At least the UI woukd be standardized, lowering the user friction in case he needs to migrate.
I don’t think the UI even needs to be standardized. Imagine all the old-style forums except that they share content with each other so that they’re more accessible. I could see it becoming something like this, where each instance defines its own identity and cooperates with other instances to build a web of connected forums.
For the time being though, there is little divergence from the base Lemmy UI.