But fediverse isn’t ready to take over yet
But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot. The growth that Mastodon has seen thanks to a Twitter exodus has only exposed how hard it is to join the platform, and more importantly how hard it is to find anyone and anything else once you’re there. Lemmy, the go-to decentralized Reddit alternative, has been around since 2019 but has some big gaps in its feature offering and its privacy policies — the platform is absolutely not ready for an influx of angry Redditors. Neither is Kbin, which doesn’t even have mobile apps and cautions new users that it is “very early beta” software. Flipboard and Mozilla and Tumblr are all working on interesting stuff in this space, but without much to show so far. The upcoming Threads app from Instagram should immediately be the biggest and most powerful thing in this space, but I’m not exactly confident in Meta’s long-term interest in building a better social platform.
I really don’t want to sound snobbish, but people are really entitled these days.
“Omg you have to pick a server?! I’m going to have to spend more that 30s figuring out how this works? There is no alternative!”
When did everyone become a spoiled toddler? Just calm down, take some time to figure things out, and be patient.
/rant
I’m honestly starting to feel like it might be a net benefit for the barrier to entry to be higher. Since I switched to the Fediverse I have found that post quality is higher here than on Reddit, there’s less flaming, fewer low-effort overdone joke comment chains etc. Also it reminds me that there is better shit to do with my life than spend 3 hours a day reading a bunch of hyper-specific subforums that I’m subscribed to.
There are lots of cases though where it’s beneficial to have the social media be as accessible as possible. I’ve seen many thoughtful and insightful posts from people who wouldn’t be able to figure out the more technical social media. Their knowledge of the Internet and computers had nothing to do with their ability to contribute to the subject of that particular site (like books or tabletop gaming subreddits). Especially for those “help me find the source of this gif” subreddits where it’s important to just have as many people as possible see it, that’s what maximizes the chance of someone knowing the source.
(That, and I liked the joke comments on r/nottheonion. It did- and still does- have an amazing sense of humor to me.)
My feelings exactly. I find myself more engaged here, but also not sucked into spending countless hours scrolling.
Well we went from an era where only a small portion of the population congregated online in forums and chats, which basically required you to either be a kid or a techie of some kind, to a world where your grandma was on Facebook because FB made it hella easy to signup and adductive as hell to stay. The Grandma (or even Parent) on Facebook types have never interacted with the internet in the ways we (rightly) romanticize
Remember that detailed computer knowledge is no mainly the preserve of Millenials and Gen X as we had to work around the abstractions all our life. Gen Z have grown up with smart devices that remove all this and older generations didn’t get interested until it was easy.
What’s crazy is it doesn’t even take long to pick a server lol. Spent all of a few seconds. Just as long as any other service honestly.
I think the jargon can make it confusing more than anything. Treat the instance like an email provider and do away with terms like ‘federated’ and people would get it.
It’s easier for new terms to embed into people’s consciousness if there’s marketing behind it but, by the nature of the fediverse, it doesn’t have marketing.
It’s a world of decreased attention spans, minimized further by bad diet, bad sleep, constant stress and dopamine triggers; not to mention barely a few years off the start of a pandemic, with long term effects apparently right down that same line. It shouldn’t be surprising people find hard stuff intolerable, and those who can make things can also lower the technical barrier of entry.
So I’m a millennial who remembers getting shit on by boomers for stuff they never taught us how to do. If I’d struggle with something like, oh I don’t know, cutting down a tree inevitably someone would crawl out of the woodwork to complain about kids these days and their lack of basic skills.
A lot of stuff around difficulties onboarding users to the fediverse sounds tonally very similar. Yes it is simple, if and only if you already have a bunch of basic knowledge in your head. That knowledge is easy to teach, but it needs to be taught with a welcoming and warm attitude or it’ll just be another corner of the internet populated by increasingly bitter and irrelevant grognards driving away new social connections.
The internet is healing ha ha