Digg.com was my favorite website for the longest time. Back in the day, it’s where I got most of my news — especially tech news. It was the original front page of the internet. I watched Diggnation religiously every week — beer in hand, Ethernet cable firmly clicked-in to my soft-modded original Xbox, and beamed directly into my fuzzy CRT TV via RCA cables.

It was a real bummer when they sold out, and a new company who promised not to ruin anything promptly ran it into the ground like it was their job.

That was over a decade ago. Now its founder Kevin Rose has bought it back and Digg is in Beta, in the form of a shiny new app — still invite only for now, but it’s coming along nicely.

It’s not a ghost town, but it’s pretty slow currently — like when Lemmy was getting off the ground. You know; right after Reddit jumped on the enshittification train in preparation to go public, and people started deleting their accounts.

It was slow for a while, but now it’s a nice little community. I wouldn’t say it’s thriving, in the same sense that Reddit still is, but it’s nothing to shake a stick at.

Welcome to the Threadiverse

The microblogging side of ActivityPub is called the Fediverse. The updoot-powered link sharing economy is called the Threadiverse. The Threadiverse is underrated.

I think after Lemmy didn’t turn out to be the same kind of overstimulating firehose as Reddit, a lot of people just moved on or went back to Reddit. But a lot of people stayed, too.

Me? I kinda fell off for a while. I’d check it once or twice a week, but every time I’d fall back in love with it. Why I kept second guessing it, I don’t know.

I think because there aren’t any great apps. Not on iOS anyway.

But the website is pretty damn good. I always set it to the i386 theme for that retina-burning nostalgia:

I love the way it looks; intentionally retro. And it actually functions very well as a progressive web app.

It’s one of those things that just works. It has a purpose, and it serves it well. But things like that get boring over time for me. Not that it’s a bad thing; if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. But I am a sucker for the latest and greatest. New approaches that are still in their infancy.

I just like betas

Nostalgia aside, even if I had never used it before in my life, I still would’ve likely signed up for the Digg.com closed beta. I’m always on the hunt for anything I can join before it’s ready. Recently, that’s been Surf Social and iOS 26 beta. I sign up for TestFlights of everything with an open spot. I joined beta programs on Android back when I used one of those things too.

There’s something about trying out an early, private version of new software. It’s like the non-programmer equivalent of feeling like an 80’s hacker, sitting behind that cliché black and green monitor full of technobabble.

You’re helping devs iron out bugs and giving them a feel for what the users might want, but you’re also in this little community of early adopters too. It just feels cool and you get to try something new.

Enter: Piefed

I made a little blurb about Piefed not too long ago:

I hung out on Lemmy a lot when Reddit started going downhill. If it wasn’t for Digg.com being revived, I would be so stoked about PieFed right now.

I’m re-thinking that. I actually am pretty fucking stoked about it now.

I was checking the App Store to see if any new Lemmy clients have dropped lately, and I came across Blorp for Piefed.

As I’m writing this post, Blorp was last updated yesterday. Almost every other Threadiverse app has gone months, and some over a year, since their last update. I think even a lot of devs realized it’s probably not ever going to blow up as much as Mastodon did after the Great Twitter Exodus.

It’s hard to justify App Store maintenance when no one is helping foot the bills.

Or maybe it’s because a lot of indie platforms just work so well as a web page.

Websites are good, actually

The irony in all this is that the reason I even decided to try Piefed is because it had a new rapidly-updated app. And the app is good. But I like the website better:

That’s the retro Irix - 1998 theme, and I like it even more than the i386 theme on Lemmy. I’m a sucker for 90’s UIs.

One major under-the-hood difference is that Lemmy is built on Rust, while Piefed uses Python for its backend. I’m not so technical minded, so here’s a much better post on the differences from Jeena.net.

To be completely honest, I’m not leaving Digg or even Reddit. Both have different vibes and the Threadiverse is its own thing too. I’m just happy there are so many alternatives coming out for different things across the social web. I’m a firm believer in using different platforms for different things, and I’m just as addicted to information overload as the next guy.

Even if the new Digg faceplants, we have some solid community-built alternatives now.