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.
Federation is a pretty unique concept when learning about it and can be confusing at first. Then after you understand it, you need to choose an instance from god knows how maby and you don’t even know how to find what is out there. The first 2-3 days of my migration to lemmy was research. And while it is not hard with just a bit of tech literacy, it’s not as easy as finding one site and register - which can be easily done by most people with little tech literacy.
I think you heavily overestimate the technical literacy of most people. I’d say majority started with 0 and stayed that way, because they only ever use stuff that causes little friction so that even they can use it. It’s not that people lost it, it’s that the way tech evolved it allowed people with none to go in.
I agree with the general notion that it is a nice filter for the feddiverse and might keep some of the most stupid at bay - at least for a while.