For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—
And what I’m trying to say is that the big dogs don’t have quirks. They are intuitive to the point where 98% of people can figure them out in seconds the moment they look at them. They have spent billions of dollars over decades learning how to create as little friction as possible to get new users onto their platforms.
There isn’t a single fediverse platform that is as easy to onboard new users to as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. There’s just no comparison.
Edit: I also forgot to mention earlier: some instances have defederated from major ones and vice versa. What instance you choose can matter an awful lot. Additionally, people are going to be confused when they see multiple variants of the same communities on different instances (e.g. News)
PieFed closes most of those gaps. It’s not quite as fully featured as Lemmy, in particular the search function (but then again, Reddit’s search doesn’t work either?:-P), but it’s super easy to get started on the Threadiverse.
For one thing, you don’t even need an account or to download anything at all to start using it immediately to browse content from all across Lemmy. And the Categories of Communities featuring topic areas, which you can customize yourself and/or share with others, provide that multi-Reddit feel that people, especially from Reddit, really crave. See e.g. Arts & Crafts, and note the subheadings beneath, such as Photography. There is simply no comparison between this and e.g. the default setting for Lemmy being to only show Local content (a setting which lemmy.ml still uses today) for those without accounts.
Then if you decide to create an account, a wizard walks you through various settings, asking the user for their preferences and automatically subscribing to multiple communities based on the answers. Multiple types of News, multiple types of Politics, how many posts do you want to see with the keywords “Trump”, or “Musk” (no filtering, just a little, or block them all), etc. Or just don’t bother subscribing to certain types of (high-volume or stressful) communities at all, so that it doesn’t flood your Subscribed feed, yet still be able to access them immediately with the Topic Category at any time.
It’s not perfect, but it’s damn good:-). And for those who do want it, testing is underway for an app (Thunder).