I watch YouTube way too much to ever be satisfied by any form of subscription feed. On places like Twitter all I want is the feed of people I follow, but not so much on video platforms.

If we lived in a sane country all 4 major tech companies would have already been brought to court over this in like, 2016. (Microsoft for the second time…)

How is that functionally different than just having the entire thing be centralized, though? At that point the decentralization is just a footnote that makes the website more confusing. The main instance could be sold off one day and walled off from the other instances and nobody would be able to do anything about it.

It seems like your use could be covered by a revived RSS reader-like system, because you want more of a news ticker than social media. That’s fine, but that’s not how a lot of people use Twitter.

On Reddit you post underneath a community. The decentralized abstraction only slightly complicates this. Reddit is just a centralized version of old forums, where you had an account for all your niche interests. Lemmy is the middle ground between those old forums and a central account because you can access all the content from any fediverse account.

On Twitter, you post detached from any community, the only way to be a part of one is purely based on social groups. The average person doesn’t want to have community instances even if they can talk across multiple, they want a social media that can represent themselves and all of their interests on one account. And if you say the solution is for everyone to just join the biggest instance, how is that really any different from a centralized social media anyway? It’s just over complicated for what Twitter is.

Bluesky and Threads will crush Mastodon. And unfortunately, between those two, probably Threads will beat Bluesky.

Mastodon isn’t enough like Twitter imo. It’s too complicated and the separate severs just make things even more difficult. Reddit was always focused on posting under a community, Twitter is community optional. Community optional doesn’t translate well to decentralization at all imo.

Lemmy? Maybe. Mastodon? Not a chance.

Lemmy functions perfectly as a Reddit replacement and only adds a mild amount of complexity on top of using Reddit. Mastodon is only similar to Twitter’s use case if you’ve had a few beers and are squinting.