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.
Lemmy and the larger Fediverse really shouldn’t even be trying to convert minimum effort users anyways. If someone isn’t willing to expend even a modicum of effort signing up for and understanding a new platform, I doubt they will be a very valuable addition to the community. The Fediverse needs to grow some more, but not at any cost.
This sounds kind of mean, but I kind of agree. One thing I miss from the earlier days of the internet was that communities could be more niche, and the slight barrier to entry of making a new account for a forum or something meant that you’d mostly get people who were very interested in a topic in the community. It feels kind of bad to be in favor of barriers for a community, but I think it can make a bit of a difference in the mix of people that you get and how the community feels.