People in /r/redditalternatives are talking about a "Reddit 2.0" What website would fill that role?

Exactly this. Looking at the top response it details it's hard due to a ton of costs like operating costs and hosting costs and stuff, but with federation these costs can be spread around so that it's more manageable for each individual instance (as content doesn't need to be viewed from the original instance but gets spread around).

The mass-scale casual interaction producing flashes of surprising relevance can't happen when the conditions aren't pulling in so many people that the 1 in 300 million person with the answer doesn't casually happen across the question that only he/she can answer. That's the unique content from Reddit.

Link aggregation, message boarding, messaging, all that stuff is merely tech that lots of other places have. Reddit's moat is the user presence which other platforms can't just replicate. Reddit needs to die first so that 1 in 300 person stops going there and goes to other places and somehow runs into the question there, hopefully in a way that they turn up in Google search.

Is the fediverse where that happens? Seriously asking because I'm no expert on it. It doesn't seem like the concept can scale distribution at that level. There will be pockets of interaction, but not everything is shared everywhere.

People just want easy. They dont like change, and they don't want to use their brains too much.

We can only hope Meta comes to rescue us /s

Buddy, doomscrolling is your own issue. Are you old enough to remember "doomscrolling" cable television for hours at night? We're all choosing to distract ourselves from something else or we're just bored. It's nothing new.

I mean, if you're having trouble stepping away from something, it almost sounds like you're describing an addiction problem. Everyone should make it a practice to step outside themselves for a moment and assess all their habits.

You're not seriously suggesting that a platform prevent its users from using it, are you? LOL where have I seen that in the news this week?

@UnshavedYak for real. It's so refreshing not having to see loads of wasted awards on the most facile, idiotic comments. Or the obnoxious avatars people made in place of their pfp. It seems so hyperbolic but it genuinely feels great not having to see all that anymore.

Just to say, I 100 percent would pull RIF up in downtime but doomscrolling is not ubiquitous; I would pop into really specific communities to read about specific interests and shit that didn't expose me to current events. I am an extremely politically plugged-in person, despite avoiding it almost entirely on reddit (unless I was in the mood), but I found shit like RIF actually allowed me to be more selective about what content I want at any given time. That kind of fine-tuned control of my information intake, of course, is completely lost on New Reddit with its barrage of random recommendations.

yes

It's different, it's not that difficult, only mildly annoying with some compatibility issues for platforms that are still basically in their alpha phase (like kbin).

It's incredibly annoying, and pushes people right back to centralized systems.

Yet the community of active users continues to grow.

Genuinely I don't understand the issue? You can search the Fediverse from one instance using the Magazines tab in Kbin to find places to sub, or sub to communities you find in all feed etc? Is the issue to do with the duplication of communities at present and lack of clarity which ones are more active?

For me at least the federated set up works well, but I need more visibility of total community sizes when searching Magazines. The search shows me the number of users subbed from this instance, where as I'd also like to know the total number of users subbed across the fediverse to guage how big that community is overall.

Also as you mention, it would be good to see duplicate communities merged across instances - but some of that is the reddit migration with 1000s of new users creating the communities with the same name on multiple instances in a short amount of time. Consolidation will take time (and sometimes there may be a good reason to have two separate communities with the same name) but long term there does need to be tools to allow communities to migrate base from one instance to another or merge; otherwise there is a risk a community could die if an instance falls over.

But I'm not switching between instances - I was initially and realised it was pointless. I have chosen to be on 2 instances - Kbin.social and Feddit.uk, deliberately to keep my UK and generic feed separate for now, and also to have a Kbin and Lemmy experience. I personally strongly favour Kbin at the moment. I don't get the analogy of tabbed browsing or separate forums; you can see the whole fediverse from one instance (barring defederated instance like Beehaw). What am I missing?

Hardly. People are taking the federation and making it more complex than it needs to be. For the average user, you pick the most popular website, you sign up, you subscribe to communities. That’s it. The nuances of the fediverse are irrelevant to a new user.

With respect to lemmy/kbin I am literally browsing these threads from startrek.website and it feels totally normal.

True, and this is also a side effect of the mass migration from reddit. People have created multiple versions of the same community name on different instances. Things will consolidate over time, and people will navigate to the most active community (or communities).

But the other aspect of the fediverse is you can have more than one community with the same name; thats a benefit. Like why should there be only 1 "PCGaming"; different groups of users might want to form their own community which approaches the matter in their preferred way. So you could have 2, 3, or many different communities reflecting different ethoses, based on different instances. That's not a bad thing, but might be hard for people to get used to initially coming from the monolithic approach on Reddit.