Let’s beat Reddit
I’d hope that it would be federated. I’m feeling increasingly convinced that federation is the path forward for most forums/social media.
I love federation but I just don’t see it reaching the masses. People want connectivity and simplicity. I am willing to accept a centralized solution if it’s a non profit who takes care of moderators. Centralization isn’t always terrible, look at Wikipedia.
Phone calls are federated. Email is federated. Text messages are federated.
I’m certain that federated forums can be made easy enough, too. We just need to keep working on improvements. We haven’t yet seen their final form. :)
I agree, all those are super easy to use for an end user. I think maybe we need a website where a user can just check a couple boxes about what there interests are and it will automatically choose their instance for them. Would make it easier for those new to the fediverse to get up and going.
I have a feeling this post is some sort of joke, but as a serious comment, I think decentralization would work better if there were some way to automate assigning new users to instances. This part of onboarding is something that people I know (who have looked at Mastodon then turned down the idea of joining it) have cited as an annoyance. And I know I personally spent some time researching different instances in order to pick my instance, personally.
Contrast Revolt, a relatively recent (in contrast to Matrix) Discord alternative, which a few people people I know jumped right on – despite Discord not having any major/recent “sins” other than messing with the usernames. I mentioned that I’m surprised people so readily picked this up, and someone pointed out that there’s just one centralized place to make a Revolt account.