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.

  • @batcheck@beehaw.org
    5•2 years ago

    I don’t know why people look for feature parity between Lemmy/kbin and Reddit. With a bigger audience, its bound to happen that Lemmy/kbin will catch on features. People waited years and years for reddit to become what it “was”. The fediverse isn’t a stop gap. It’s the next potential platform once foss devs see the potential and have an audience to satisfy.

    These articles always feel like the push us towards looking for a commercial option when we already have the right option under our nose. Just give it a few dev cycles.

    • UnanimousStargazer
      3•2 years ago

      Or to put it in other words: what features are lacking?

      Do people seriously miss ‘awards’ and other not very interesting functions.

      • @tangentism@beehaw.org
        0•2 years ago

        It’s going to be the same when people bailed Digg.

        They all complained about the interface and lack of features but then spent all their time pasting ascii images comments and starting pun threads.

        I would rather there be a slow decline in Twitter & Reddit than a mass exodus. An immediate consequence is the loss of signal to noise ratio and that would be too much to take for a second time!

        [Apologies for the double post - liftoff indicated that it had failed to post both times]

        • raccoona_nongrata
          1•2 years ago

          A slow dispersal of users out into the wider Internet is probably best. It not only takes some pressure off the development side for all these platforms, but it also will hopefully help waves of new arrivals to these communities (like myself) acclimate to the culture change in a way that doesn’t destroy the community.

    • @rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
      1•2 years ago

      Reddit has almost twenty years of development under its belt. How much development has it done in that large amount of time. I would bet Lemmy developers will run circles around Reddit in terms of how fast they advance the platform.