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.
I sold computers at best buy for a few years around a decade ago, and this particular experience burned itself into my brain:
Me: introduce myself, ask what he was looking for Guy in his 30s: wants to look at chromebooks Me: tries finding out what he’s using it for to make sure it’ll be enough Guy: web browsing mostly, asks me if he can get his email on it Me: yeah no problem, what email client do you use now Guy: Gmail
It was hard to not laugh, but I am reminded of this when I think of the average person’s technical ability.
Why would you laugh? You asked a question and he answered.
I think mostly because it was unexpected for his age, usually questions like that came from much older people and it was surprising to me that someone barely older than me didn’t understand web based email. He seemed like a smart competent dude, so it was just not an answer my brain was ready for. Laughing might not be the best gauge for anything for me, laughing is also my fear response.