I’m fairly new to the Fediverse, and I’d like to share my onboarding experience. Personally, I appreciate the concept of decentralization and the community-driven aspect of Fediverse. I’ve used Mastodon and Lemmy, based on ActivityPub, for a while:
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I find it difficult to get all the updates I need on a particular instance, and except for a few very large instances, most others appear quite quiet and like the Internet ten years ago.
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The content and style of each instance tend to be quite diverse. To find someone to follow, I must switch between different instances with lengthy domains.
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Fediverse isn’t truly decentralized; instances operate under the will of server owners, who can ban and remove content as they please.
These reasons prompted me to explore more decentralized networks, I mean truly decentralized networks, such as Nostr.
However, creating a Nostr account and saving the Recovery Phrases is challenging (I lost my first Nostr account due to the loss of Recovery Phrases). And generally speaking, the user experience on Nostr is much worse than Mastodon, full of scam and ads.
I believe people should leave Twitter due to shadowbans and robots and Facebook due to privacy concerns, but I’m struggling to choose a platform to migrate to. Each has its drawbacks, making it difficult to decide.
I’d love to hear your opinions on this.
I was rooting for Kbin but their lack of official API at the beginning gave them a very late start. And now Artemis App is stale development when it was so promising. At this point I’ve worked on my Lemmy account and plan on staying here on the long run. Hoping some QOL updates come to Lemmy and the apps (community grouping, better hot algorithm…) to make it a perfect platform. In the end it all depends on critical mass of users. The more users on a platform the better it will be. It’s still light on niche communities and themed communities feel spread thin across instances (where groups would really help) and big communities like Technology news and meme group overpower the small ones on the home page.
better hot algorithm
Next lemmy version adds a “scaled” sort which will factor in the size of communities so less active ones get exposure too.
@LazaroFilm I know what you mean about overpowering. I actually block all the big meme communities. That way, viewing all and sorting by new is still inreresting and helps me discover communities.
