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.
Or to put it in other words: what features are lacking?
Do people seriously miss ‘awards’ and other not very interesting functions.
Moderation tools and bug stability are the things I want to see
Those are being worked on right now.
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]
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.