David Pierce: So Where Are We All Supposed to Go Now?

Long-term, I’m bullish on “fediverse” apps like Mastodon and Bluesky, because I absolutely believe in the possibility of the social web, a decentralized universe powered by ActivityPub and other open protocols that bring us together without forcing us to live inside some company’s business model. Done right, these tools can be the right mix of “everybody’s here” and “you’re still in control.”

This is the dream, and it's a big reason why I too am optimistic about more companies embracing open standards.

Discord is probably the tool best-suited to capture users’ social needs right now. It’s definitely the best Reddit alternative we have. [...] But, uh, have you ever been in a Discord with thousands of people? It’s pure chaos, and requires you to either devote your life to keeping up or resolve yourself to missing everything.

The beauty of a lively Reddit community is that tons of things get posted, the good posts rise to the top, and the best comments on those posts are surfaced first as well. Basically, the bigger a subreddit is, the more likely you can check it out for 5 minutes a day and see the best stuff and the best comments without any fuss.

On the other hand, a busy Discord server is a firehose…or I should say it's like 145 firehoses (one for every channel) and every comment from every person carries the same weight so you have no idea what good stuff happened that day without reading everything, which would take you more hours than there are in a day on some servers. Seriously, look at the screenshot at the top of this post and tell me how you would go about finding the best things posted to this large server? It's impossible, god I hate Discord 😅 (except the one tiny server I'm on with like 8 people that's more of a group chat).