I run a few groups, like @fediversenews@venera.social, mostly on Friendica. It’s okay, but Friendica resembles Facebook Groups more than Reddit. I also like the moderation options that Lemmy has.
Currently, I’m testing jerboa, which is an Android client for Lemmy. It’s in alpha, has a few hiccups, but it’s coming along nicely.
Personally, I hope the #RedditMigration spurs adoption of more Fediverse server software. And I hope Mastodon users continue to interact with Lemmy and Kbin.
All that said, as a mod of a Reddit community (r/Sizz) I somewhat regret giving Reddit all that content. They have nerve charging so much for API access!
Hopefully, we can build a better version of social media that focuses on protocols, not platforms.
In general, it works pretty nice, but there are some limitations.
The biggest one for me is discoverability. The federation means that there is more fragmentation and it’s harder to find the right community for something.
For example, there are country/city communities for my country/city on multiple instances. And since it’s hard to find the “correct” one, it fragments out much harder than Reddit did. Combine that with generally lower attendance numbers and you get really tiny communities.
This is not aided by Jerboa, which doesn’t open internal links internally. So if someone posts a link to a community and I press it, it instead tries to open it with my email app.
Finding “the right community” is definitely an issue, and I’m sure will continue to be one for a while. But remember Reddit had the same issue, with multiple redundant subreddits when one would have been better.
I’m sure things will consolidate over time, with less popular communities going quiet and their subscribers moving to more active ones.
That is true, that was an issue on Reddit as well. But here it’s even worse, since you can have a community with the same name on different instances. It basically adds another dimension to the discoverability issue.