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.
I don’t know why people look for feature parity between Lemmy/kbin and Reddit. With a bigger audience, its bound to happen that Lemmy/kbin will catch on features. People waited years and years for reddit to become what it “was”. The fediverse isn’t a stop gap. It’s the next potential platform once foss devs see the potential and have an audience to satisfy.
These articles always feel like the push us towards looking for a commercial option when we already have the right option under our nose. Just give it a few dev cycles.
Fediverse is not ready yet, that’s for sure, BUT we don’t need it to be “ready” to take on big tech giant backend to be usable user dispersion. IMO, smaller but high quality user that cross critical amount to sustain the community is good enough. I don’t need to engage with another 20k people, I just need to engage with maybe 1~2000 high quality post/comment(not lurkers) in different domains that I am interested in. All the rest can have their own thing and we never really cross each other and that is fine.
What I think Fediverse currently lacking is the following:
subscription can be abused, I don’t know the underlying detail, but if one user from small instance sub to another instance that have really big traffic, I guess it won’t deal well with that. There should be ways to tier or tag posts/comments so good informative one can be kept longer, but shitpots, meme, etc can expire quicker and not even archived. We really don’t need to keep all the stuff like tech giants do. (heck, even email provider starts to trim your old emails if your account exceed certain amount of storage(cause 80% is spam/notification mail that no longer serve any purpose.)
easier way discover existing community. I really don’t like to checking “All”, search community function is updated to a bit reddit like so it’s really mixed up with post/comment and actual community. And low traffic community can be buried really far down the list. ie. I created Rocket League on lemmy.ca, and periodically searching for another to see if there are better ones. Then I found out there is none and my community link keeps “sinking” in the result list. There needs to have better filter for searching.
there should have a say, a common bestof or community of this week community. Which helps with discovery as well. (up to instance admins decision of course.)
the web interface can still be improved. One thing that’s very hard to keep track of even on reddit is how the branching thread and responses can be all over the place. It’s still kind like that here on lemmy(but less user make it more bearable. I am not smart and do not have a better alternative, I hope someone can come up with a better more readable one.
Especially on smaller instance, since the instance needs to know there is a community you look for on another instance first. Apparently the community isn’t inherently known by the instance becore at least one user “opens it up” for the rest by searching on web by a full web address. It may happen you search for a specific community and not find it, even though it exists and might be booming.
We do have the community where you can post new comminities at least but it’s still not ideal. Though I think I see why it needs to be so, it needs to be easier somehow, while bot overloading all the servers.
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]
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Reddit has almost twenty years of development under its belt. How much development has it done in that large amount of time. I would bet Lemmy developers will run circles around Reddit in terms of how fast they advance the platform.
It’s pretty obvious that reddit has never really spent much money on engineering.