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.
This feels like the same anti-FOSS FUD that was there 20 years ago against linux: ‘it’s not ready!’ and ‘who will provide support?’ and ‘it’s too hard for people to figure out!’ and ‘how can you make money if it’s free?’ and so on.
Of course, the whole world runs on Linux now and it’s eaten the lunch of every single proprietary competitor… it just took more than a week to do it, which is far too long of a cycle if you’re a clickbait “journalist” on corpo-owned media.
The Verge peeps are rather enthusiastic about Activity Pub based platforms, I wouldn’t attribute bad intent there.
Linux is used by most of the world but it’s either backend where techies take care of things or super streamlined experiences like Android etc.