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.
For social media, it’s a double edged sword. You’re right in that creating a small barrier to entry will prevent low quality users to an extent. But social platforms can’t survive on low volume, high quality alone. There needs to be a certain critical mass of users for a platform to be successful. With forum type platforms, the numbers supply the diversity of content so that even small niche areas have regular content. For social platforms like mastodon, it’s about communication and most people want to be where there IRL friends are.