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.
So I’m a millennial who remembers getting shit on by boomers for stuff they never taught us how to do. If I’d struggle with something like, oh I don’t know, cutting down a tree inevitably someone would crawl out of the woodwork to complain about kids these days and their lack of basic skills.
A lot of stuff around difficulties onboarding users to the fediverse sounds tonally very similar. Yes it is simple, if and only if you already have a bunch of basic knowledge in your head. That knowledge is easy to teach, but it needs to be taught with a welcoming and warm attitude or it’ll just be another corner of the internet populated by increasingly bitter and irrelevant grognards driving away new social connections.