Twitter’s dying, Reddit’s changing, everything else is entertainment – and there’s nowhere left to hang out.

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.

  •  Qiz   ( @Qiz@beehaw.org ) English
    11•1 year ago

    I think the biggest issue is finding the content you are looking for.

    Sometimes people aren’t on Mastodon and even if they are it’s not alway easy to find them if they are not on the same instance.

    •  Dusty   ( @Dusty@l.dustybeer.com ) English
      1•1 year ago

      This has been my biggest issue. Finding and carefully curating what I’m looking for. My twitter (which I had for nearly 15 years) got so cluttered I kind of gave up on it. Add in the people/places I followed suddenly getting political, and I was just over it.

      I don’t want that to happen with my “refresh” so I’m being a lot more careful. That said, a lot of the problem is some of the people I really cared about simply won’t change from those platforms. I’ve not used facebook in years, but I still get friends and family asking if I’ve seen whatever bs was posted there.

    •  CalcProgrammer1   ( @CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml ) English
      1•1 year ago

      The discoverability is a uniquely Mastodon problem though. Mastodon’s lack of keyword search really hinders discoverability. I get why they don’t want site-wide keyword search (to reduce harassment) but it also really hurts usability. Hashtags only work if everyone uses the same tag (and actually tags it in all their posts).

      This doesn’t seem to be an issue on Lemmy. Site-wide keyword search works fine here.