this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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FYI, as great as Mastodon and the fediverse are, there are issues that prevent their mainstream adoption:
https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/06/12/why-did-the-twittermigration-fail/
The biggest issue is normies are stupid. That’s basically the gist.
Yeah but normies are what make platforms thrive. I fear Lemmy may just become an anti-Reddit circlejerk but then die out due to lack of content.
I'm hoping it at least sticks around as a niche nerdy corner of the internet now, I'm kinda over the Reddit thing already and am now just using lemmy for the same stuff I used to use Reddit for.
Community closer to the first wave of reddit users (when I joined) seemed very friendly but I think with the massive infux of redditors it's gone back to Reddit culture
For real? Who do you consider a “normie”?
Mainstream users are why any social media thrives and has content. Not sure hostility towards anyone is going to help when they check it out and see this is one of the top comments…
This is literally the attitude that will kill fediverse alternatives chances of competing with Twitter and Reddit. Bluesky seems to be on the right track by focusing on product first before introducing the complexities of instances.
What if I told you we don't need to compete with them?
I hate to sound negative, but right now growth in the fediverse (especially Reddit clones like Kbin and Lemmy) are being driven by people who no longer want to use Reddit. But over the past few weeks, most discussions are still circle-jerking about how bad Reddit is and how glad people are to be on Lemmy. You can only beat a horse for so long before you need other content posted on here to keep most people engaged.
I'm not seeing much at all of that currently. A week ago? Sure. Now it's been consolidated to a mega thread.
I was able to move from Reddit to Lemmy with minimal learning curve but I tried Mastodon about a year ago and it felt impenetrable and confusing. The author is absolutely right that people don't see decentralization as a selling point. Anecdotally, the people I have talked to about federated alternatives have nothing positive to say about their experiences except the small handful of people that use things like Lemmy or Kbin.
My girlfriend noped out of lemmy pretty much immediately after I tried to explain how to set it up and use it. Objectively, it's a lot more confusing than signing up for something like reddit. She's also pretty tech savvy, so I can't imagine normies making the transition in mass.
If these federated alternatives are going to become mainstream, someone will have to step up with an implementation that greatly improves usability and accessibility. Meaning that federation will probably have to be masked to a large degree to reduce confusion. Maybe something more like a distributed network instead of a federated one.
As soon as you start talking techbro nonsense like federation and decentralization, people's eyes glaze over. People don't care how things work, they just care that it does what they need it to.
Hate to say it but a lot of us in tech, especially the devs, are really out of touch with end users. They aren't philosophizing about the internet. I understand why people are excited about the idea of decentralization, and why it matters, but it has to be presented in a way that's much simpler for people to understand if we actually went people to get on board.
Nah, I don't buy it, people have been telling me that they don't understand Twitter, what it is for and so on for years and most of my normal friends never got a Twitter account, while most of them had a Facebook account. It's not about federated vs. non federated, they all have a federated email account from their school, university, work, etc. and everyone has a username@domain.tld address and nobody is complaining about that it's not just @username for email. It's more that it's not useful for them to have a Twitter account or a Mastodon account or a Lemmy account. If it were useful they would just deal with the complexity like they do with the complexity of Facebook and Email.
Your Twitter example is spot on. Why would I want to follow specific people? It's about the content on the platform. Tildes suffers from the same issue, it's generally not an interesting place to be so people don't stick around very long.
Personally, I like to follow specific journalist and news orgs that report on topics I'm interested in. That def helps with the breaking news aspect. Besides of course following talented shitposters like dril ofc.