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.
All this pearl-clutching makes me want to punch a wall.
I initially rejected Mastodon, being overwhelmed by its decentralization. I even proclaimed it “too complicated.”
Not even 8 months later and I’m fine. It’s all fine. My hysteria was sound and fury, signifying nothing. This hysteria is also pointless.
Is the fediverse the exact same experience Twitter and Reddit were? No. Do they need to be? No.
No one pearl-clutched when Facebook wasn’t exactly like LiveJournal or MySpace. No one pitched a fit when texting replaced IM. Folks organically flowed from one platform to the next as need and want allowed.
Technology solutions change and evolve. No platform rules forever.
The conspiracy theorist in me leans towards this being manufactured “concern” because the monetization solution to decentralized architecture isn’t ready for prime time, and “Late Stage Capitalism” is trying to herd the sheep into a temporary enclosure of fear until their new “farm” is ready. This explains why all the financial and corporate entities are singing the praises for Bluesky, and casting doubt on Mastodon. Last I saw, there is no word on how Bluesky is going to be supported, but it has a Board of Directors, which tells me it will be ad and subscription based, which means it needs a lot of people.
Having a Board also means that Bluesky can go public and can be sold to yet another nitwit.
So if long term stability means I am going to have to wake up and do a bit more to shape a fediverse solution to my needs, it’s worth more to me to do that than to go all in on a platform that is going to force ads on me and wind up being sold to the next billionaire imbecile.
I think that is disingenuous. People did complain (and pearl clutch) about reddit as it’s tree comment structure was vastly different than what people were used to and the upvote / downvote didnt make any sense. But people adapted quickly just like they always do. This move to lemmy is exactly like how the digg -> reddit move went.
I wasn’t there for Reddit, but was there for the MySpace/LiveJournal/Facebook/Twitter migrations. There will always be those who are confused, but I have not seen this level of histrionics, most of it coming from those with an agenda.
Regular folks will figure it out.
We really need to start asking ourselves what a “future-proof” social media could or should actually look like.
Does any media company actually think about it? I know there are some big tech ideas like Meta or whatever but I’m serious, it feels like no one running anything has any real thoughts about the future except for in terms of propaganda or advertising. No one actually cares about the social part of social media which is why people have to build it on their own… Hence, the fediverse.
IMO, when corporate media asks about “future-proofing, it’s not about the tech, it’s about ensuring the persistence of the human farm: how do “we” create a social media platform that can’t be escaped.
A big reason why I have gone “all in” on the fediverse is because the folks who figured this out will figure out the next, just in case Meta, bluesy, et. al. EEE the current platform.