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.
The Fediverse has this really organic, underground feel to it that I don’t think I want to lose.
If people want to leave Reddit/Twitter/Facebook/whatever and come to Fedi, I don’t mind there being a 1-hour learning curve to read an intro, find an instance, and sign up.
Peeps who aren’t willing to do that are probably better off on other social media.
Is there a reason to want to compete with Mainstream Social Media?
Content I guess. As much as we like niche stuff people will go to where the content is.
The one benefit you would have is the up-to-the-minute news on important world events. A smaller userbase may mean that you don’t have someone in every corner of the world who is willing to provide updates like that.
However, we have survived before without minute-by-minute updates on world events, so surely we can do so again.
Thats the one thing that has made the jump over to lemmy slightly difficult for me. The niche subreddits for retro gaming, various hobbies etc don’t seem to be a thing here? Unless I’m just not understanding how to search for them which could be the case.
I miss the 3ds, gameboy, wiiu, splatoon, gunpla, plantedtank and bonsai subreddits. Oh an animal crossing. Those subs were really chill.
They often exist but there usually isn’t much content in niche communities. There just aren’t enough users yet.
I think the desire there is the faster you can replace a mainstream site the faster it’ll go down.
Also, it’s hard to deny that part of the draw of social media is following/interacting with certain people, so if they move it makes it even easier.
For social media, it’s a double edged sword. You’re right in that creating a small barrier to entry will prevent low quality users to an extent. But social platforms can’t survive on low volume, high quality alone. There needs to be a certain critical mass of users for a platform to be successful. With forum type platforms, the numbers supply the diversity of content so that even small niche areas have regular content. For social platforms like mastodon, it’s about communication and most people want to be where there IRL friends are.