both companies notably ruined the internet in the 2010s by consolidating discourse then taking various steps to destroy the user experience and the feel of the communities for profit.
so, broadly, the web went from cozy, small hobby forums in the 90s and 00s, then with the 10s as a transitional period, the 20s being practically complete corporate control of online discourse.
it’s a bummer. but nothing lasts forever. where will we go next?
There’s a big diaspora right now.
If the fediverse can get more user-friendly instead of being a bunch of programming linuxites lying that their stuff is totally intuitive, it could be a lovely new home with lots of flexibility.
This is my least favorite part of the fediverse. I’m pretty tech savvy, and the jump to Mastodon when Elon took over and Lemmy when apps stopped working wasn’t easy. Having to pick an instance to sign up with was a huge roadblock for me.
Mastodon discovery seems harder to achieve than Lemmy, probably because there are only a few Lemmy instances with active communities, so as long as your instance is federated and there are enough users to have subscribed to most of the communities, you’re good.
On Mastodon I always felt like the number of different instances and different people posting (each being their own mini community) made it harder to assess whether you were actually seeing everything
Although part of the difficulty is that if you’re coming from a centralised place like Reddit, Fediverse takes a bit to wrap your head around. Lemmy had a whole issue going for a while, where people logically flocked to the largest instance that they could find, possibly out of the misunderstanding that you had to pick and choose an instance.