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So where are we all supposed to go now? (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 year ago by misk@lemm.ee to c/technology

188 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] Thrashy 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Sure, I could, but for me the whole appeal of a federated service is its interconnected nature. If I have to create an account on the "right" instance to interact with all the communities I'm interested in -- potentially repeatedly, given that operators may choose to defederate from each other at any time and for any reason -- that has already defeated the purpose of the exercise.

I see this as a major driver of the "default instance" issue that both Mastodon and Lemmy have experienced. If you both have a hard time finding content off your home instance and have no guarantee of continued ability to interact with that content down the road, the safest choice of home instance becomes whichever is biggest, and from there the network effects just make the problem progressively worse over time. Federated services need some way to reduce the friction of traversing the Fediverse if they're going to avoid that.

[–] 1993_toyota_camry 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I guess I disagree with your assertion as to what is the 'purpose' of the fediverse. To me choosing associations is the point, so admins disconnecting from abusive instances fits well within that belief. If the fediverse meant accepting all input from all instances without question, I'd leave here as quickly as I did voat.

I don't mind creating a couple accounts on different instances as need be. Though I'm also the kind of person who had a handful of reddit accounts for various purposes, so I understand my perspective isn't likely the norm.

I agree though that based on your requirements, spinning up your instance might be the best bet.

[–] Thrashy 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't disagree with your points, necessarily. I just think that the way most federated services function, there's no way for the needs/concerns/feelings/whims of an instance operator to be met without also impacting the users of their instance in ways that might not have been necessary just to protect that one instance. I only ever had one Reddit account, and thought of my post history as something of a corpus that represented me to those who might be inclined to look, so to me portability of my federated Identity is important -- without it Lemmy is just a bulletin board with extra steps. That said, it's clear that our user cases differ, and that's OK! For my part, I'm gonna keep trying to get this thing self-hosted...