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.

  •  Swallowtail   ( @Swallowtail@beehaw.org ) 
    53•1 year ago

    I’m honestly starting to feel like it might be a net benefit for the barrier to entry to be higher. Since I switched to the Fediverse I have found that post quality is higher here than on Reddit, there’s less flaming, fewer low-effort overdone joke comment chains etc. Also it reminds me that there is better shit to do with my life than spend 3 hours a day reading a bunch of hyper-specific subforums that I’m subscribed to.

    •  WorldlyCaregiver   ( @WorldlyCaregiver@beehaw.org ) 
      5•1 year ago

      There are lots of cases though where it’s beneficial to have the social media be as accessible as possible. I’ve seen many thoughtful and insightful posts from people who wouldn’t be able to figure out the more technical social media. Their knowledge of the Internet and computers had nothing to do with their ability to contribute to the subject of that particular site (like books or tabletop gaming subreddits). Especially for those “help me find the source of this gif” subreddits where it’s important to just have as many people as possible see it, that’s what maximizes the chance of someone knowing the source.

      (That, and I liked the joke comments on r/nottheonion. It did- and still does- have an amazing sense of humor to me.)