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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  • GreyEyedGhost
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.