Let people just use what they want, okay? It's their choice.

As long as its not twitter :-)

98

We get it, no matter how many times people get fucked by venture capital pushing enshittification, most people don't actually care enough about the issues at hand to deal with even the minor discomfort of learning something new that isn't highly polished. They'll take getting fucked by corporations every time.

Edit: lol

62

I mean.....you say this with an air of sarcasm, because you DO care about decentralization. But I've been saying since I got here, with no sarcasm, that Lemmy is not a competitor to reddit. Mastodon is not a competitor to twitter. The fediverse is not appealing to the masses on it's own current merrit. And why?

Because it's main selling point is that it's decentralized. And any average woman named Britney, or any average guy named Todd, does not give a shit about that. At all. At all. At all.

They don't know what it is. They don't care what it is. They just want to see what Taylor Swift is saying online. They just want to follow Nascar. They just want to follow all the accounts that you view as corporate branding. That's what they WANT.

I've said in other threads various ways to get the concepts of the fediverse to be looked at. But it takes us, the fediverse, to appear to be appealing to the masses instead of scary.

It needs to feel like a walled garden. It can act as a decentralized service on a technical end. You can wizard of oz the shit out of it. Stay behind a curtain and keep all the scary technical stuff hidden. The technical stuff can still work, but you guys are pushing it front and center like it's a selling point. It's not. It's scary to them, and bluesky looks and feels just like twitter, without the fascism. That's all they want.

Nobody is over on bluesky asking if bluesky is truely decentralized. Nobody there knows what that is. Nobody cares. It would be like me inventing my own currency that only works in an office I work in. Then wondering why the other offices in that building aren't adopting my currency. They don't care about my currency. It means nothing to them.

The fediverse had years of a headstart, and learned nothing. I don't have the technical skills to build. What I do have is the ability to blend in with any crowd and understand what they're feeling. So I understand them. I understand you. And I understand the difference in mentality between them and you. I also understand that you guys DON'T understand their mentality. And they don't even know your mentality exists.

The best way to describe it is, they are like a bunch of flies. They just want to fly to the nearest lightbulb. And you guys are putting on one of those blacklights to expose all the filthy stains around you. And the flies literally land in and eat shit happily, so they don't care about the stains. Yet you're so tunnel visioned that all you see are the stains, and are certain the flys will care. Then a neighbor turns on a porchlight, and they all fly over there.

Also the previous big light was a bug zapper.

81
- This is so correct it's actually unreal. Really well put, solid comment.
  
  21
- While sometimes I think…do we really want it to get super popular? But also even if the popularity comes with the assholes…blocking and curating can help and in the end, it IS still decentralized. So let’s say that convinces the average Lemmy user that yes, let’s grow this shit.
  
  How do we get some of the big names here to promote it? I tell anyone who has a complaint with standard social media about the fediverse but I have minimal influence. I HAVE included it on surveys and contact with podcasts I follow, to promote it more, again limited influence.
  
  I feel like we need like…whatever…a Taylor Swift type to take it up as something they push and then other big names will follow.
  
  As you said, I don’t care about that really but many others do. Lemmy and occasional checkins with Reddit are my only social media. But if it gets more people here, it could be worth it. I personally would just love more communities to be more active because I like Lemmy…but right now I only see the biggest “Reddit copycats” getting the major activity.
  
  8
- Extraordinary well put.I wish more people would understand that building communities by attracting users from outside is much-much-much more important than to brag about fediverse in your small nerd circle and defederating another server.
  
  6
- Related blog post that puts it similarly well
  
  1
- It needs to feel like a walled garden.
  
  Imagine that.
  
  1
It's not about "minor discomfort." The Fediverse has too much UX friction for someone that isn't in tech/used to a product that isn't mature in features or content. Even if they are fine with that, they need to spend time to figure out what server(s) to trust, or at least an organization they can sue if things go wrong.

Ranting about "normies" instead of listening and understanding what their needs and concerns are is not conducive to growth, but it'll certainly help it decay.

55
- Exactly. Most Fediverse fans always go on a rant about "corporations", "enshittification", whatever, when they don't understand that not everyone will take/have time to learn about these things. Not everything is simple as in just click a big "download" button or "create account". It's those new extra steps that confuse those people, some who are of old age, or never saw a desktop computer before. It needs actual designers. Same thing with other FOSS projects.
  
  37
- and when they do figure out the unintuitive UX, they’re met with an avalanche of reply guys and, if they’re Black, a fuckload of overt and covert racism that everyone else will ignore…
  
  there’s a reason why most people on the fedi are white men in tech
  
  only the queer community seems to have managed to carve itself a place on the fedi, and even it has big issues of rampant racism
  
  11
- But, but eMAil!!!1!!!
  
  7
- What UX friction? Lack of Taylor swift on the platform? Delusional.
  
  -11
Tech enthusiasts vastly overestimate how much hassle people are willing to put up with in order to do something, and this is a classic example.

30
- Seriously the number of people on here complaining about Windows bloat. I'm not even 100% sure what the hell that's supposed to mean. I'm a normie and my windows runs fine.
  
  Edit:spelling
  
  10
And no matter how many times FOSS developers are shown that real people don't care about products with shitty UX, they won't put time in making their product accessible.

See how that goes?

Wanna fix federated platforms? Make the backend dumb and the frontend smart. No one that has a life wants to learn about instances and all that bullshit, decentralize the storage and let anyone create a frontend where people can connect and check the content, one credential to access everything, defederation doesn't affect the users, no admins just moderators.

9

Apply that to Linux now.

52

posted from my thinkpad running Arch

30
- btw
  
  14
- posted from my thinkpad running ~~Arch~~ Mint
  
  1
ಠ_ಠ

(I use fedora btw)

7
Challenge level: impossible

5
I used to be annoyed at Linux, for a similar reason.

2
except. EXCEPT! i came here to get away from the other places. every other post is about reddit, bluesky, or fucking twitter. holy fuck.

linux is actually dope. i used debian btw

1
- Lemmy's become the place to talk about other places.
  
  0

They would have come to Lemmy if it was the platform they wanted. We can bitch and moan about them wanting something that we think is against their best interests, but what'll that do?

26

They would have turned around and went back to Reddit after realizing they signed up to an instance where the admin decided the users can't check the content from certain instances.

3
I'm making fun of them the same way I'm making fun of Trump voters. They don't like me pointing out that they're going to get what they chose.

"But it's my right to be ignorant and not have to learn about the issues!" -Bluesky users and Trump voters, somehow.

-3

Are we ~~there~~ federated yet?

21

Nice one!

3

Any social platform, from fb, to reddit and youtube worth only as much as the number of people using it. Less people = less creative mind = less potential friend = less incentive to come use the same platform = less public for creative mind. So social media can only work as a monopoly or quasi. Or it is of no one interest to come on it, if all your friend/favorite creator, are on the other platform.

Ergo, you have to do some proselytism so everyone join the platform you're using. That being said: did you create your account on bluesky?

16

I currently don't have a BlueSky account. Might do, but I'm not so sure. I don't have a reason to yet.

3
- For me, there is far more content available if I want to doom scroll, especially about a particular topic.
  
  6
For the most part yes, but not always and also once it gets too big you lose those same creative minds to the sea of trash and mediocrity

2
Well that's not true at all. I don't think most of us are going on social media to communicate with billions of people. If we can communicate with tens of thousands of people, or perhaps less than that, but those are high quality communications, that's good enough for many or most of us.

Which is to say, quality of other users, quantity of users, and quality of service are all important when trying to evaluate the overall quality of any social media provider.

Of course your goal could be different if all you want is exposure. If you want to advertise, then large numbers of users might be your priority. But most of us are not doing that.

2
- If none of your family /friend are on facebook, you wont use it. If you cant find like minded people on Lemmy, you wont use it.
  
  Less people mean on average you have less chance to have your friend/family there, or like minded people or 'quality' people. Just on average.
  
  We can argue that some platform get all the good people, but I think that is mostly a false belief
  
  1

I use Arch btw

15

A Slackware user and Gentoo user sitting at the bar both grunt and turn back around

3
- i first installed arch on my pogo plug server back in 2010 or so. can't believe people still using it to try to sound cool. use gentoo!
  
  1

I feel the same way about linux. Every post remotely related to tech brings on the linux bro trying to convert you to their religion of linux

13

I used to be mad about Linux for the same reason. In more recent times I have a different feeling, but I can't deny how annoying they can be.

6
- I've just made peace with it tbh
  
  3

And don't complain about BS to get content, and then post it here, ofc

9

I don't get it, could you explain?

5
- Probably mean the weird double standard where a big portion of the content on lemmy is bluesky screenshots and no one complains about them, but somehow whenever you mention bluesky as an alternative to twitter people will completely ignore the features that make it more popular than mastodon and demonise it to make it sound as bad as twitter.
  
  13
- You got the correct answer from the complicated pseudo 😅
  
  2

Feels like something musky would say

4

No, musky would strawman the entire fediverse and slippery slope BSky, or some baby reaction like that.

11

That goes for everyones screeching about Facebook, x, ig, TikTok, etc right? Right?

4

Should have had the Mastedon logo on Shrek's head

4

Is it Elon?

3

charge a sub for 'special' instances. take credit cards. extra emojis

1

Now at 22.3 million users.

1

Redsky

1

Boy telling people not to talk about Elon's competition and then pretending it is something else.

The future is so bright I've gotta wear shades.

-1

Feels like something a millionaire boot licker would say

-11

is that a millionaire who licks boots, or one who licks the boots of millionaires? also, what?

1

Bootlicker, genocide, Bluesky...

-13