It didn’t seem to be working for me today, so I tried the web interface. I just couldn’t. It occurred to me that I didn’t love Reddit, I loved Apollo. Once it goes away for good I don’t think I can get used to any other way. I’ve always used Alien Blue or Apollo. Plus I don’t want to give them any more views at all until they change course to be more in line with what the community wants.
Anyway. Deleted it to remove the temptation to continue to browse until the end of the month.
Did exactly the same thing last week. The initial discomfort and disorientation lasted for about 48 hours. Spent some quality time understanding the whole fediverse concept, this week feel like I am “old hand” already.
While at it , explore the rest of decentralized services around: Matrix, Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Revolt, etc.
Bottom line: you’ll be fine. Once you get a hang of it, fediverse is far, far better than any Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and the rest.
Matrix is a protocol, rather than an app. It's also not part of the "fediverse" per se, as the fediverse generally refers to the social media platforms over ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, Pleroma, Pixelfed, and so on). It is a federated protocol, however.
The important thing about federated protocols is that it lets people use their own choice of client/app, and can talk to everyone else using the same protocol. So for Matrix, you get Element, Cinny, NeoChat, etc... and can talk to all the same people, unlike the way Discord or Facebook Messenger works, where you must use the same one.
Same concept for the ActivityPub protocol, you just pick your favourite platform such as Mastodon or Lemmy, and you can potentially interact with everyone else using the same protocol.
Unfortunately Revolt is just an open-source Discord clone, and doesn't federate.