

I’d also add that the Threadverse brought some really new and interesting things to the table.
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By default with all current Threadiverse software packages, instances are public, and there are many public instances. This means that while an instance might have downtime, it is very, very likely that I can continue to browse content, and if I’m willing to set up an account on a second home instance, even post. Early Reddit had a lot of downtime issues, and when it went down, it was down.
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There’s a lot more technical advancement on the Threadiverse than was happening on late Reddit.
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The third-party software ecosystem is very strong. It’s not just the PieFed, Lemmy, and Mbin guys writing all the software. There are a ton of clients, monitoring systems, status dashboards, you name it. Reddit had third party software too, but I feel like people are a lot more willing to commit effort to an open system.
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I think that having competing instance policy is important. I don’t know yet whether, in the long run, this is going to wind up with largely- or entirely-decoupled Threadiverse “networks” of federated hosts split along defederation fissures, kind of like happened with IRC. I hope that it can remain mostly-connected. But I don’t want to have some party somewhere deciding content policy for all of the Threadiverse. With Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, whatever, there’s some single central controlling authority with monopoly access over the entire system. That doesn’t exist on the Threadiverse, and I am a lot happier for that. There will probably be people out there saying things that I don’t agree with or like, but that’s okay; I don’t have to look at it. The same is true of the Web. I really take issue with someone whose positions I don’t agree with acting as a systemwide censor (I’d also add that while I’m not really enthusiastic about the Lemmy devs admin decisions on lemmy.ml, I have not seen them attempt to do this even Lemmy-wide, much less Threadiverse-wide). That’s a real difference from Reddit. If your instance admin says that tomorrow, all content needs to be posted in all caps, you can migrate your community or home instance or community usage to another instance, and other users who feel the same way can do the same. With any disagreement with Reddit site-wide policy, your option is only to leave Reddit entirely. It’s Spez’s way or the highway. I don’t think that that’s reasonable for a system that aspires to be a system for the whole world.
It apparently wasn’t actually his last words, as is often incorrectly reported to be the case, but something that Oscar Wilde apparently most-likely did say on his deathbed and near the end of his life:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/10/22/wallpaper/