For those who were skeptics about the fediverse: what made you change your mind?

I’m still a skeptic. But Reddit is dead as far as I’m concerned

So anyways here I am I guess

Agreed. In fact, it kinda died awhile ago. I have no idea what I’m doing but I also know I’m not alone. Good luck to everyone trying to figure this shit out.
- Which part are you not getting? Maybe someone can help you with it.
This is the most relatable comment I've read today. This is my first day here and this is my first comment. My cherry has popped.
- Wait oh my god
  
  I was your first? <3
- Wait oh my god
  
  I was your first? <3
This is how I feel about it, too

Sir, ma'am, I have no idea what I'm doing. Everything was fine and now both reddit and twitter are dead and I'm just trying to keep up with cat pics. Don't really care to learn about the intricacies of whatever a federated social media is.

Exactly this. I went on to Lemmy because it was recommended as a Reddit alternative. I needed to pick a server so went for the one that looked like it had the most activity (world in this case) signed up and started looking for communities I liked.

I feel like people are making it more of a big deal than it is? Or maybe I’m missing something I don’t know.

But the many apps that have followed from the death of Reddit 3P’s is crazy. I’ve got 3 installed so far and I’m quite enjoying testing them all.

I was only a skeptic because the UI of Lemmy is hot garbage when you first get here, and they are crippled by the fundamental point of the infrastructure: That there's no single "correct" place to go. Lemmy the software can't really endorse a single instance.

But it seems like lemmy.world is that one. They should honestly just self promote as if they "are" Lemmy, and let people figure out the rest after they're here.

For me, I just really wanted to stop using Reddit and forced myself to figure it out. It hasn't been an awesome experience, but it feels like the right thing to do. Getting Liftoff on my android phone has helped. I'm still skeptical. And would happily ditch Lemmy if something better came along.

That there's no single "correct" place to go. Lemmy the software can't really endorse a single instance.

I don’t think this really matters beyond signing up for an account. You can follow a community on any federated instance, from any federated instance. So it’s practically transparent to me as a user whether your community is on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or wherever.

I think communities will naturally consolidate and diverge when and where needed. I could be wrong, but it should be interesting to watch.

the UI of Lemmy is hot garbage

Couldn’t agree more until I discovered https://wefwef.app. If you’re not familiar it’s a WebApp interface that’s trying to be a clone of Apollo and it’s made me believe this could actually work.

I was skeptical of Lemmy and Mastodon thinking they will never become mainstream. It's like able to run your own phpBB forum does not mean there will be a community. Businesses are wary of obscure software that are hard for customers to understand.

That was before the recent Reddit protest. Seeing how Reddit handles the protest, I have a feeling that this will work, especially when u/spez said he follows Elon footsteps.

In the last week, I started to see communities forming and I'm now sure there's no going back for Reddit and Twitter.

To be honest I'm still skeptical of the Fediverse as a long term endeavor, but I'm going to give it a fair shake in the meantime.

That said, I was never much of a heavy user of twitter or reddit anyway, so watching the Fediverse explode while various corporate entities implode is just popcorn entertainment.

watching the Fediverse explode while various corporate entities implode is just popcorn entertainment.

Agree

To be honest I’m still skeptical of the Fediverse

The first time I heard about the fediverse I thought it was something different, I thought it was decentralized in the sense that users act as servers in a torrent-like system. This federation thing seemed strange to me at first but I think it's still better than the usual platform controlled by a few people.

The only thing I see problematic to integrate into a reddit-like site is the presence of multiple communities with the same name belonging to different instances. Right now this is probably not helping lemmy's image.
- The only thing I see problematic to integrate into a reddit-like site is the presence of multiple communities with the same name belonging to different instances.
  
  That's what makes it better than reddit. It can't so easily be controlled by just a few people, because if one community/magazine on one instance gets overrun with toxicity, you can start a mag/comm with the same name on another instance.
- Honestly the torrent like idea you propose sounds better to me, but I have heard it's almost technologically impossible... at least not without train loads of money dumped into solving the problem... hopefully future advances make whatever the hurdles are easier.

I wasn't skeptical, I only didn't know anything about it, I knew a bit about Mastodon, but never got very interested about it because my Twitter usage is very minimal (I don't even think recent limitations would affect me tbh), but Reddit site like? You son of a bitch I'm in.

I knew about it when the API fiasco started (or intensified) so it was only a matter of time for me to make the jump, since there is no way I'm gonna be using official Reddit app, I have been avoiding for so long and if they lock me out from a superior mobile experience then fuck it.

I hope all the communities I followed there eventually make the jump here.

I don't think people are skeptical, but what I do see is people expecting a new system to be the same as the old one, with all the same bells and whistles and activity. That is where skepticism kicks in. Those users are basically followers of the tech and probably should not jump in on the new stuff until they have no choice because the crowd moved over.

The truth is that we passed the point of no return with Twitter and Reddit where the quality of the product became so poor, and we (the actual project) became treated worse and worse that it was not going to improve. At least, it won’t improve as long as there is money, or someone with a colossal ego involved in the leadership of the company.

Client software. It’s been the turning point for me each time so far.

Ivory turned Mastodon from quirky interest/hobby-tier to something I’ll actually use.

For Lemmy https://wefwef.app has had the same effect for me.

I tried it months ago and there was no good way to have a consolidated access point, it basically required dozens of browser tabs to use it for anything and the interface was still bad. The development and client apps have changed everything, it's a unified and seamless experience now where it just wasn't before.

I first joined Kbin a few days before the blackout, and I found it a little confusing (magazines? microblogs?), and didn't use it much. But Reddit was going downhill, so I downloaded Jerboa from F-Droid and gave Lemmy a try. I liked the UI and found it less confusing than Kbin, so I made an account, and here I am.

Magazines is such a dumb and confusing name to call it. Communities is already perfect.

Time will tell, but it's working for me at this point. I actually had Lemmy bookmarked on my desktop browser for quite a while and never used it. Mainly because it just wasn't very active. However after the exponential growth resulting from Reddit's shenanigans, it's busy enough to keep my interest.

There was a bit of a learning curve in understanding how instances work and how communities are addressed. It didn't take long to get used to it. I don't see where that would be a show stopper for anyone willing to put in a modicum of effort. I don't know maybe that's a good thing, filter out the lazy ones.

The big positive for me is not being beholden to corpo profit mongering. We'll never see corporate enshitification here (assuming we keep the Meta and Twitter types out). The Fediverse may suffer some growing pains, Lemmy and kbin in particular, but it seems to be coping so far. My main concern is scalability. If exponential growth continues things could get overwhelmed. Though It will probably settle down to a low roar pretty quick here.

Gab and Truth Social were always the most mentioned examples until Elon/Twitter/Mastadon. I'm still cautious of communities becoming overrun by Nazis.

Feels unlikely to me, personally. Those places were designed for shitheads, and there just aren't that many shitheads to overrun regular places.
- Our instance is currently voting to delist a an instance that the vast majority consider a nazi instance.

I'm still very sceptical. While I love the idea of the fediverse, I honestly don't think it will ever be more than a niche platform. It will probably remain active among "enthusiasts" but I can't see it ever going mainstream.

It's just not simple enough. If some non-tech person wants to join Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or Instagram, they just go to the site or app, sign up, and that's it. No decisions need to be made, there is nothing to understand. My 70 year old mother could do it.

Joining lemmy is a commitment. And more importantly, it requires decisions to be made. Which server should I join? What difference will it make? Am I doing it wrong? Why are there different communities with the same name but on different servers? Why is there no 'lemmy' app? Etc.

Those of us who are here have made the effort to understand these things, but the general population won't bother.

To be honest, most of these issues could be solved using abstraction, and lemmy world already does that to some extend. Giving the site the look and feel of a single website, with one simple way to join and participate will be vital. I'm not saying to remove those decisions, but rather have them on another layer so advanced users can still easily access them, while other users who are either new or don't care too much about it can just use a common preset.

Wefwef was easy to use. It was an easy choice.

Things will get Reddit levels before too long, too.

What got me off Twitter last October was the incident where Elon Musk decided to carry a sink around the Twitter offices, like a stupid, pretentious, overly dramatic jackass.

Then I joined Mastodon.

Nine months on Mastodon showed me that the Fediverse is great, and we've since learned that Elon Musk is lucky he was born into wealth, because he clearly doesn't know his ass form his elbow.

The truth is that we passed the point of no return with Twitter and Reddit where the quality of the product became so poor, and we (the actual project) became treated worse and worse that it was not going to improve. At least, it won’t improve as long as there is money, or someone with a colossal ego involved in the leadership of the company.

I am fueled by my deep, loathing hatred for the snoo site. Plus I found a really great local instance where people are pretty chill.

I had tried mastodon a while back and didn't like it. It felt like it was trying to copy twitter, but didn't really have any of the good points, and the "many small instances" thing put me off entirely from it.

Once kbin showed up I gave it another chance and actually really like kbin. It's very similar to how reddit works so it isn't jarring at all to use, and for the first few days federation wasn't on so it was possible to really get acclimated to it as it's own thing. It's easy enough to just think of it as "using kbin" and not really stress about the federating aspect.

The community on mastodon is pretty progressive which is kinda a culture clash for me, and a lot of the content I'm after really isn't on there. Whereas most kbinauts and lemmy users seem to have come from reddit, so a lot of the content/culture was brought over as well, making it an easier transition.

Twitter and Reddit got so awful I needed to leave. Lemmy is fantastic and underpopulated, but Mastodon isn't what I would want. I can search for hastags, but there's no other way to search beyond the instance I'm in. That's not what I want. I want a space that I can curate AND I want a local community. I got the latter, but the former...not so much.

So in a sense, I'm still a skeptic. But what else is there?

Just signing up and ignoring the FUD.

Honestly, the loss of Reddit is Fun. I'd say that roughly ~95% of the time I spent on reddit was through mobile, I hardly ever used it on the computer anymore (although funnily enough, years ago it was the opposite, I almost exclusively accessed it via computer). Opening up RIF repeatedly on the day it died, just from muscle memory, is what made me finally decide to look up how to join Lemmy. I had been considering it for awhile, but sticking with Reddit was juuuust easy enough to keep me from doing it, even with the drastic quality drop in reddit over the years. But by blocking RIF/etc, they removed that "easy enough" part, which meant nothing was really keeping me from deciding to finally make the jump.

Still can't say I fully understand the fediverse, I definitely don't. But I do understand it slightly more than I did before, and certainly enough to at least try to interact and comment!

Not difficult. After a couple days it’s simple. 3rd party apps are getting updated like crazy so that got my hopeful. And I like the pleasantness of the users currently.

I have always been open to trying new technologies, so fediverse and by extension Lemmy / Kbin, made sense to me as a suitable alternative to Reddit with huge potential.

My fears are mostly centered around people rallying to competing platforms - squabbles / 4chan etc. and as a result diluting the knowledge in utility based spaces (read: sub-reddits) like /r/programming, /r/chess etc.

I am glad that platforms such as Reddit / Twitter continue to alienate their user base, which is pushing the people off these platforms.

I am also surprised at the speed with which developers have pushed apps for Lemmy / Squabbles, which would also increase adoption.

I am browsing with wefwef.app and it has honestly made it all so integrated and smooth that I don’t think in a couple of months there would be any reason to go back to Reddit.

tumblr and reddit and twitter shit the bed (and it looks like youtube's reaching for the exlax), if it was only one, i don't think i'd have made the jump. I've also discovered that I don't actually care about the difference between a handful of people and a few hundred thousand in mini-communities like these.

Since Reddit started their self destruction a month ago this place has gone from a small niche to rapid expansion and being a legitimate alternative. That's why I'm here. We'll see how far this goes I guess.