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.

  • Tibert
    10·
    1 year ago

    I find Lemmy works pretty well for a decentralised network.

    It is possible to see what everyone has been subscribed to when sorting by all, and so subscribe myself to it to get it in my subscription feed.

    There are nice apps like Liftoff which can manage multiple accounts at the same time, and even view instances all feed without an account on them.

    Mastodon on the other hand is a bit lackluster in comparison I’d say. The subscription model is pretty had to start using as I need to either find # or people to subscribe to, and even subscribing to them. And even after doing that the posts aren’t that interesting or feel empty due to no comments/likes/boost.

    Maybe I subscribed to the wrong #, but I find Lemmy much more enticing than mastodon.