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.
To be fair, there are some particularly nasty issues at play there. Beehaw defederating made it nontrivial to pick what instance to use, and right now I’m using two different instances because the smaller one I chose isn’t loading posts properly from lemmy world (which has the largest community for my city)
Those are fair points.
However, I would argue that people have a very short memory when it comes to website reliability. I remember Reddit 10 years ago, and it would have a fair amount of outages from time to time. People just shrug it off as normal.
Lemmy is a federation of communities running on different servers with different Lemmy versions, and the software was written by a group of volunteers. Not only that, but the number of users shot up from 47k to 2.2M in 2 months, that’s more than 4700% !
There’s no way a centralized private company would deal with this without hiccups. I think people need some perspective.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
