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.
The only way the Fediverse gets ready is by going thru the growing pains that Reddit had to when we all fled from Digg. It also wasn’t ready then but the community stepped up and became mods and built apps and made it awesome. We will do it again… and this time it’ll be distributed and much harder for one person to screw over all of us
All of that didn’t happen overnight. It took literally years for all that to get baked.
It was at least 2 years before Imgur was created & then after that stuff like RES & mobile apps
Okay. So we’ll do it again in less time because we have lessons to draw on. This version of Lemmy is already better than early Reddit for anybody that remembers.
But it’s not about replicating what Reddit was about, then or now. It’s about getting back to what we had before the centralisation of the net but with the lessons learnt. To build a more egalitarian platform without the necessity to drive engagement at whatever cost.
We don’t need to, nor should look to set up tooling with what we learnt from Reddits failures. We’re building a new, better experience of the web and we definitely shouldn’t be looking to just migrate the user base from one site to a bunch of federated servers. We need people to definitely experience a cultural cleanse. Not to just have an exodus from there with all the bad habits and aggressions. We know where that path leads.
We are on the cusp of a potential paradigm shift of the internet and we can shape what it becomes!
Exciting times!