Twitter’s dying, Reddit’s changing, everything else is entertainment – and there’s nowhere left to hang out.
Lemmy and kbin, find a community and stick with it or join a bunch. If you really don’t want to use discord for a hangout then there’s revolt and guilded for voip clients. You can also try mastodon and matrix, or really a combo of things.
I’m on discord but not for the sociability so much. However, there are some hyper specific subjects that get served up there. Personally, I find it very chaotic.
Discord is pretty similar to IRC 25 years ago: just a constant stream of conversations and you’re SOOL if you miss anything.
Discord seems to be sort of adapting to that? In the /r/iosbeta discord, they have topics that sort of act like reddit posts. But yeah, so far, I’m just all over the place. A couple of lemmy instances, Kbin primarily, and a lot of mastodon, with discord filling in when I’m bored. Although discord is very bad as a replacement for reddit/twitter, the nostalgia and it feeling very IRC is kinda nice.
The one thing Discord has over IRC is logging. If someone could develop an IRCv# with constant channel logging and a history like Discord, I would be there immediately.
There’s a learning curve with using federated platforms wether it’s Lemmy, kbin or Mastodon. Things will definitely improve as these platforms get more fleshed out but as is, it’ll probably come off confusing to a casual user.
To give Reddit and Twitter credit, they made it convenient to join communities as you just need a single account to interact with hundreds of thousands of communities and millions of people. It’s convenient as a user that you only need one account as opposed to 30.
If anything, we might end up reverting back to using smaller forums until the fediverse has time to catch up. I think it’s unsustainable as a business model and we’re seeing this with the self-destruction of both Reddit and Twitter where they’re leaning too far to try and make a profit where it’s affecting user choice and experience. Most people that ran web forums back in the day didn’t do it for the money but instead they wanted to foster a community. Yes going back to that might cause the internet to get a bit more fragmented, but I think it’ll work out for the best as both forums and the fediverse puts users first.
This writer has some of the worst takes, I wouldn’t trust him. He’s probably my least-liked Verge writer.
I mean, he’s anti- Twitter and Reddit, and pro- Kbin and Lemmy so his take isn’t that bad…
I think he underestimates the readiness of Kbin and Lemmy, though. Sure, they’re rough around the edges, they’re not full-featured reddit clones, but we can (mostly!) talk to one another and there’s a lot of excitement about being on the frontier, instead of just another pre-packaged marketing-focused software appliance. We’re doing OK, and we’ll only get better!
Even techies have issues deploying, maintaining and upgrading kbin and lemmy instances and even for those that work, the admins say they are held together by wishes, prayers and digital duct tape. From just the casual user’s perspective, the software is buggy, not intuitive, a lot of data gets lost in transit between instances and there’s a lot of downtime due to influx of new users (which is still a miniscule amount compared to what other social networks usually handle).
I don’t think he’s that far off when it comes to readiness. I want this to succeed but it’s not ready yet for the mainstream, maybe in another 6-12 months.
I’ve been watching the Vergecast podcast lately, and David’s take on a lot of this stuff is kind of wishy washy. I definitely think Alex Cranz and Nilay Patel have a better pulse on things.
Did that author actually call BS part of the fediverse?
oh my god the initialism for BlueSky is BS hahahahahaahahaahahahahaahaa
they must have realized? why would they be ok with this???
They were too busy being enamored by (wanking over) how it references blue sky research. When they were part of twitter, the name made some semblance of sense, but is particularly stupid now that they’re trying to make their own service.
I don’t think he called bullshit as much as he thought it has potential but not ready yet. Lol! I love the fediverse. Let everyone else find the next best thing that will, once again, get ruined.
haha what you are missing and what I’m laughing about one comment over is that BS is the initialism for BlueSky. The parent comment is saying, “Did the author actually call BlueSky part of the fediverse”
this is fucking hilarious and I will never stop laughing about it
Twitter isn’t dying. The users and content is still there. The people going to Mastodon are the niche group of techies. Mastodon isn’t for your casual or average twitter user.
I think news and ads ruined social media today. I do miss the days of MySpace and people used to log on , hangout and message each other. You used to to connect with your friends online. Today, social media isn’t really used like that anymore.
Outside.