Will fediverse ever be a thing?

I think reddit is the first of many. People are looking for consistency from social media and the fediverse gives a weird inconsistent consistency away from corporations

i think it very much is already. it's incredibly that these very different servers work together already. we just need to figure out a much better UX for different application crossovers like mastodon->lemmy. There's millions of active accounts across the whole verse!

I think the idea is awesome. The only main issue I see is user growth. I guess with time the user base could grow, but if it stays stagnant, there will be a lot of abandoned communities and users will continue to come and then go.

I have a discord server that consists entirely of people I've met in person, from high school, college, and work. It has less than 20 people on it. I think that there's going to be a ton of growing pains, especially with how immature the software stack is, and how fragmented the communities will end up.

For many people who operate or join instances, they will end up interacting with a very small number of people in the instance just like the discord server I made; a few people and not much content initially. Sure, people will begin migrating, but this type of link aggregation site works best when there is a lot of people. Considering the focus that this server has, I can see it succeeding, but it's going to take a while before we see the type of massive growth that Reddit saw, particularly because of the adaptation to federated content. Having 10 technology communities across 10 instances makes it more difficult to see content that is relevant or get any amount of interaction other than with the same select people

I'd like to see this and other issues like better linking of communities from within an instance or browsing communities on another instance resolved soon. The user interaction needs to improve and be more seamless for people to not give up immediately, considering all of the other tedious work people will need to do to find relevant communities. Also, federation seems to be struggling on some servers; on lemmy.ca, this post has no comments, whereas the original has 4-5. kbin.social is broken because of cloudflare. Things are too inconsistent and clunky to be usable and most servers are practically dead.

I hope it does because it's a great idea. However for the fediverse to work all the parts of the fediverse need to work right together.

I've witnessed several mastodon servers apparently all on the same software version not playing nicely with Lemmy all in strange different ways, one of the instances in question is one of the largest.

It would be interesting to see how things pan out over the next few years?