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.
All this pearl-clutching makes me want to punch a wall.
I initially rejected Mastodon, being overwhelmed by its decentralization. I even proclaimed it “too complicated.”
Not even 8 months later and I’m fine. It’s all fine. My hysteria was sound and fury, signifying nothing. This hysteria is also pointless.
Is the fediverse the exact same experience Twitter and Reddit were? No. Do they need to be? No.
No one pearl-clutched when Facebook wasn’t exactly like LiveJournal or MySpace. No one pitched a fit when texting replaced IM. Folks organically flowed from one platform to the next as need and want allowed.
Technology solutions change and evolve. No platform rules forever.
The conspiracy theorist in me leans towards this being manufactured “concern” because the monetization solution to decentralized architecture isn’t ready for prime time, and “Late Stage Capitalism” is trying to herd the sheep into a temporary enclosure of fear until their new “farm” is ready. This explains why all the financial and corporate entities are singing the praises for Bluesky, and casting doubt on Mastodon. Last I saw, there is no word on how Bluesky is going to be supported, but it has a Board of Directors, which tells me it will be ad and subscription based, which means it needs a lot of people.
Having a Board also means that Bluesky can go public and can be sold to yet another nitwit.
So if long term stability means I am going to have to wake up and do a bit more to shape a fediverse solution to my needs, it’s worth more to me to do that than to go all in on a platform that is going to force ads on me and wind up being sold to the next billionaire imbecile.
Mastodon can be heavy on censorship by banning IP addresses rather than individual accounts. Not banning an account, but IP. So when one instance bans an IP, that means that IP is blocked from all users on that instance.
Twitter has never banned IP addresses, only accounts. Twitter does not keep a list of naughty words that result in immediate ban after posting, and suspended users can still reaxh Twitter to discuss the issue.
It seems that federated platforms are more ban happy than the corporate platforms. If Lemmy and Mastodon really want to challenge the bigger companies, protect offensive posts, protect mockery and insults, people challenging or correct someone’s statement, and distinguish them from actual attacks and degrading words.
If Lemmy and Mastodon really want to challenge the bigger companies, protect offensive posts, protect mockery and insults,
This sounds awful and was exactly the kind of thing that made me want to leave Reddit.
Exactly.
Why the fuck would "protect offensive posts, protect mockery and insults " ever be the kind of ethos anyone would ever want? Yeah, I would totally love being called a fa**ot 37 times a day, and totally want to be sure anyone can do that.
Fuck that shit.
The only reason anyone wants to protect offensive content is that they want to be able to post offensive co tent themselves without consequence. They might as well admit that they just want to say slurs and be done with the pretense.
And just to head things off: no, I am 100% NOT a free speech absolutist, and I think such a mentality is extremely harmful. It destroys communities and it destroys people.
