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.

  • Lettuce eat lettuce
    16•8 months ago

    Everything has positives and negatives. It’s up to you to evalute what you want and what you’re willing to put up with.

    On one end, traditional social media is totally centralized, controlled solely by the corpo. On the opposite, you have total decentralization like P2P networks for torrenting.

    You pointed out the problems on one end, very little regulation of spam, scams, total decentralization is often very much isolationist.

    To me, federation is the best of both worlds, and I’m willing to deal with some of the frustrations of that structure.

    I personally enjoy some regional centralization like you get in the Fediverse, if you really don’t like any instance’s policies, you can spin up your own personal instance and federate with the instances you want.

    For me, the unifying nature of the All-feed allows me to enjoy the specific content I am seeking while still being stationed in a specific instance that generally caters to my preferences.