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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Fediverse isn’t truly decentralized; instances operate under the will of server owners, who can ban and remove content as they please.
That’s called moderating and every platform will have moderators/admins to keep things regulated to some degree. That’s just the way it goes. If we didn’t have anyone or anything to moderate, people could submit content that would make an instance or site grounds to be removed.
What the Fediverse means by decentralized, is that there are multiple instances, not one giant singularity like Reddit is. Reddit is one big source that has microcommunities. Lemmy and KBin are places that have different servers, almost like going to a new site.