Twitter’s dying, Reddit’s changing, everything else is entertainment – and there’s nowhere left to hang out.

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.

  • Lengsel@latte.isnot.coffee
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • snowbell@beehaw.org
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.