The first half of the article completely lost me but then I understood in the second half. It’s a movement and it will only get better and I like it more than reddit already.
Mastodon, Lemmy and their many peers are all uniquely part of the same interoperable network of loosely coordinated builders, intrinsically motivated by the daily experiencing of their self-made spaces. Far better than your regular social-engagement network, the fediverse is a movement. And unlike the walled silos whose only metrics are captive users & clicks, the success of a movement is measured in its ability to inspire change and drive coordinated action.
Twitter and Reddit may have only lost a few million users to Mastodon and Lemmy so far, but these are nation-sized numbers, comparable to what Scandinavia is to the United States of America. The incumbents have allowed the fediverse to reach critical mass. It’s only gonna get bigger, but it already works well enough that I’ve no need for any other social network. It’s nicer here.
This resonates with me. Although they are still lacking for the long tail of small niche communities, Lemmy and Mastodon now have enough people and content that I rarely find myself going to Reddit or Twitter. The fediverse is not perfect and there is a lot of room for growth, but it is now large enough to be viable and hopefully sustainable.
But I think there’s a big difference here
I tried to use mastodon but I feel that microblogging inherently require some centralization, it’s impossibile to find people to follow and the feed is always a mess with bunch of stuff that doesn’t interest me.
On the contrary I’m using Lemmy since a while and it works much better for content discovery, communities act as a"human algorithm" the same way they work on Reddit and it help much with the federation approach.
What I arrived to realize is that some form of social media are more adaptable to the fediverse.
For example, I hardly see any decentralized version of TikTok
