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 think that the fediverse is going to take time to get really big. It’s a new paradigm for social media and internet users, I still can’t believe how much time it took for boomers to grasp the dark arts of the “email”. Lemmy in it’s current state is very promising. It’s not totally ready, but the slow growth will help developers get in their groove working on it. Who knows, maybe it will have new features that couldn’t even be conceived by a profit driven company.