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.
People should leave Twitter, Facebook, etc. because they are Nazi bars. If you hang out at a Nazi bar, you’re a Nazi. Case closed.
However, not migrating to any platform is a valid option. You don’t have to do the Fediverse. You don’t have to do Nostr. You don’t have to do forums. You can just make a website for yourself with a blog, and communicating with others by email, XMPP instant messaging, or IRC.
Pick one you do like and just use that. I originally overthought the Fediverse and made accounts everywhere and thought I wanted all the things. Turns out it’s perfectly fine to just use one and get content federated over from the others.
Also, most phone apps allow you to store credentials for multiple instances and quickly switch between them which is really handy.
been on lemmy.world, accessing via voyager on ios. its basically identical to reddit from an end-user perspective. sure its janky sometimes and content doesn’t get refreshed as frequently as a website that has millions of daily active users but the content is generally more enjoyable and im getting just as much of a dopamine hit of infinite scrolling as i was back in the day, with significantly less annoyance on top.
oh yeah man. the internet was just dead in 2013 ???
I don’t mean to be critical, but you complain about having to use multiple instances, then refer to Facebook and Twitter, and I can only assume you used Reddit or something similar, as well. So, two or three silos are two or three silos, whether it be those I listed or Lemmy, Mastodon and kbin (is that even the same as the other two? I don’t know). Now, I can appreciate you wanting something more unified, but we didn’t have that before and we’re closer now.
OTOH, if you’re talking multiple instances of a single fediverse app such as Lemmy, that’s entirely up to you and where you decide to hang your hat. I pretty much just use one and it works well enough as long as defederation doesn’t hit you.
