laxu

I like it as an idea but fear it would be used by bots and scammers.

Yes I think SSO would be a benefit.

People are generally used to doing one of these:

1. “Go to this website and register an account.” This is e.g Reddit.
2. “Go to this website, register an account and you can access all these other services too”. This is stuff that Meta, Google etc offer via SSO. SSO is largely invisibile to the end user.

Fediverse at the moment has a lot of “huh, why do different instances have different stuff and why can’t I just access all of that? Oh, I can? But why is it so complicated? Why can’t I just use it from one place?” that is definitely a hindrance to adoption until enough people are there to tell “do it like this” or the system becomes more user friendly and abstracts some of the inconveniences.

As it is, e.g Lemmy can’t even do pagination right, so there’s still a lot of work to be done before it’s a polished experience.

I never really used Usenet but IRC I definitely miss. Its main problem was that keeping yourself connected and seeing messages when you are away involved having bots that replay them to you or some screen running on a remote server that lets you connect to it.

All these various communications apps we use today are largely just worse, but prettier versions of what IRC could do.

Then you don’t remember what search was like before Google. Google changed the game and was for a long time so superior to Altavista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves etc for search results that it became the defacto search engine.

Of course, eventually it all goes to shit and Google is getting there by serving more and more ads across all their services.

Unfortunately only content. I spent some time subscribing to similar Lemmy communities that I had on Reddit and many of them just don’t have the content yet and I can’t exactly generate it alone.

You could make the absolute best software platform (not saying Lemmy is it, it’s somewhat buggy), but if people don’t adopt it, it won’t succeed.

The “winner” is often not the best platform either. WhatsApp is popular but kinda shit, same for Instagram, Tiktok etc. Threads might win over Mastodon for a Twitter replacement, just because it comes from a huge entity like Meta and people can use their existing accounts.

Unlike Twitter, Reddit has not yet fallen off the deep end where using it on e.g old Reddit on desktop computer is a terrible experience. I think the upcoming months will show if replacing mods etc ends up biting it in the ass.

With Boost finally closing, I am without Reddit on my phone. I’ll have to see if losing the “let’s browse Reddit a bit on my phone because I’m bored” option does good things for my mental health and daily life overall.

Closest I can think of is sitting in an onsen (hot spring) in Arima, Japan, and suddenly feeling like I am one with the world - totally relaxed, without a single worry in my mind and feeling that everything will be ok. Can’t say how long it lasted, 5-15 minutes? Haven’t experienced that sort of peace ever since.