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.
It’s easy to forget outside of communities like this how low tech literacy actually is.
I think I don’t understand probably 95% of how the internet works and I’m fairly sure that I’m above average in my general understanding.
If the Fediverse really wants to break into the mainstream, and I’m neither saying it does or it should, then these things need to become easier and straightforward.
Joining a server isn’t hard, but finding content outside of the server you have chosen can be. Lemmy seems to be better than Mastodon here, but still.
People don’t care about federation as such. They want their social network and they want it all, regardless of which server it sits on, and they want it easy.
The vast majority of social media users are convenience junkies. They want their bread and circuses, and they don’t care who hustles it to them. My personal opinion: I don’t want the fediverse to be “easy” for EVERYBODY. Because everybody means you also get the shit along with the shinola. Dumbing things down helps nobody. Encouraging others to smarten up and go a little ways out of their comfort zone is the way to go.