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.
Not sure how to express this, but the feel here is reminiscent of Reddit during the period after it achieved critical mass but before the great Digg migration. There are differences to be sure, and that is a good thing, but the feeling of intimacy and sense you are interacting with a smaller group that cares about what is being discussed is similar. It is totally fucking refreshing.
I guess I am saying that being ‘ready’ to be the top shitpost destination on the internet isn’t necessarily something to aspire to.