Ask Lemmy

I still haven't fully abandoned reddit. Reason: There are a number of niche communities I'm part of that just have zero or near-zero population here. Fediverse just doesn't yet have the minimum critical mass of users necessary to be a viable alternative for anything but the most common and basic topics.

As far as making the switch for the common/popular stuff, there were difficulties that I ran into but I've mostly adapted. My first big mistake was trying to use Jerboa (I thought it was the 'official' app, but quickly discovered that it loves to shit itself if the app version is out of sync with the server version by even a sub-sub-dot version number. It also crashed a lot. Another early mistake was joining a small instance and not realizing that their view of "all" communities was not the same as the view of "all" communities from a bigger instance...and so my earliest view of the fediverse was pretty crippled until I started creating accounts on other instances. My next problem was the learning curve: I didn't see a lot of the communities I wanted while on that small instances and so I started creating them, only to later discover that many of those communities already existed on other instances and were well established. Fediverse has a MASSIVE community discoverability problem that needs to be solved before more of the masses will be attracted to it.

Now that I've got a good working client that I like, have local accounts on the main instances where most of the communities I participate in are located, have re-found replacement communities for the ones I lost access to when beehaw de-federated, I estimate that after about 2 more years at current growth, fediverse might also be a viable alternate to those niche communities I'm still going to reddit for. I'd estimate that I'm 70% fediverse + 30% reddit at this point.