I use RedReader without an account, connected through a VPN. It's FOSS, but with these settings, it's really slow. Okay for text and images, bad for videos.

I've been SLOWLY getting into the Fediverse for a little over a year now. My biggest gripe has always been discovery and availability. I feel like there is a lot more effort required to find people/communities I am interested in. Then if/when I do find them they are often not very active.

So yeah I'll say what everyone else is saying that UX needs some work. I used Lemmy for a while last year and just couldn't get used to the interface, I'm not Feddit and like this interface more. But it could use some work on mobile imo.

Nothing will ever be truly perfect, it is rather an arms race where defenders construct barriers while attackers jump those hurdles - often easily but it does act as a barrier and some bad actors simply give up rather than do so.

In this case, PieFed has several relevant options, one being a per-community setting that only counts subscribed members of the community, which has the effect of reducing the impact of drive-by downvoters from All, but obviously won't stop a coordinated attack vector. The former scenario is real though, so the feature has actual benefits despite not stopping everything bad that could possibly happen, as it does improve the state of things incrementally.

Another such feature is the option to only count votes from "trusted" instances. This allows for finer-grained control so that e.g. you could remain federated with an instance, but not allow them to constantly brigade your content. Obviously someone could make accounts on trusted instances to do so, but the subscriber numbers being so low overall for the entire Threadiverse and for Piefed specifically seems to suggest that if it is happening, it is not a huge deal (yet). And the usual measures still apply, e.g. if an account only ever downvotes without ever posting or commenting, then it is likely a brigade account in (a not very decent) disguise.

Sometimes they will get more sophisticated, like repositing comics that seems an easy way to quickly generate many upvotes for the new account. But these seem to be shut down quickly... somehow, and anyway at that point whatever their intentions ultimately were, at least they were positively contributing to the Threadiverse community in the meantime, haha!

Purity testing sucks but "left unity" as a concept has been compromised by tankies

Digg just crying in the corner right now.

From a technical standpoint: No.

I'm on probably my dozenth account now. The majority of my jumps are because the instance I'd chosen became unstable, had long and/or frequent outages, or just died and went away completely with no warning.

Even the biggest instance I've ever joined, lemmy.world, choked whenever there's a large exodus from Reddit or a lemmy upgrade or a bug farts in Belgrade.

The instances with fairly open enrollment will likely break under the load. The smaller instances with ridiculous sign-up requirements and/or a need for manual approval of accounts will discourage people from using Lemmy at all.

And because of those technical issues...

New instances will pop-up quickly from determined Redditors, because the stuff that's already around can't keep up. Then those new instances will become the heavy hitters. The ones we have now will be vulnerable to atrophy and becoming insular. The overall Fediverse will be vulnerable to the silo effect, diluting its value to folks, as it will basically be RedFed versus OldFed.

From an end-user standpoint: Also no.

The "culture" would shift practically overnight. I've already seen that happen. When I first got here, people were actually kind to each other. Users stood up for others and disparaged others for being hostile, aggressive, overly negative, etc. Then we had the API-calypse surge. Now those radically kind days are long gone. It happened fast. I tried to keep it up in my own small little corner, but even I don't do as good a job as I should.

While the Fediverse may be "strong" overall, the individual pieces are too fragile to handle a significant Rexit onslaught. If even a small fraction of all Reddit users came to the Fediverse en-masse, this place as we know it would be gone.

There's just one little hurdle: choose an instance when joining. Maybe it could just be some sort of "choose for me" and every instance gets equal new users, random. Of course with the option to "nope, I'll choose instance myself". Everything else is technical and a casual new user shouldn't be bothered very much by it. Some are very interested and dig in to the knowledge, some just want to scroll cat pictures and call it a day, and that is fine too.

VPN is irrelevant here if you will need a government ID to access it, what difference does it make what country you pretend to be from

On mobile Voyager is quite nice imo

I hadn't really tried to be honest, just using my old account until they start asking for age verification, then I'd look at other solutions.

Well, we have seen that when right wing disagrees, they go to the extreme and fucking shoot each other a la Charlie Kirk and that guy who tried to shoot Trump, so...

Byt yeah perfect is the enemy of good...

Yeah IMO getting popular ruined reddit.

I've genuinely been thinking about starting nsfw fandom (anime/games) communities centered around more female or queer orientated audiences but I don't know if I'll want to deal with moderation and having to keep it active...

Edit: I also wish we had more silly mini comms of things. I have a family member who finds a new cat sub like every week, but we don't really have that here.

The true reddit hornyposting is all in OldSchoolCool

It reminds me of this:

https://lemmy.zip/post/47438646

But yeah making the process of signing up and using the fediverse easier for users will go a long way. As much as I dont like bluesky, one thing they did right over Mastodon is making the sign up process dead easy for end users.

i just arrived bc that was the last straw of the constant reddit enshittification. so there is at least one.

Teens will probably find a way to verify using fake info. It seems like it's generally the old and jaded who are willing to dump things out of stubbornness.

Good to know, thanks. I've been really meaning to check it out.

How will it die?

May I ask what your prior instances were?