this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Jack I-regret-what-I-have-done-but-this-time-I-will-not-screw-you-up-!-pinky-swear Dorsey knows how to create artificial scarcity and the hype around it.
Edit for an addition: Just stumbled upon this thread here on Lemmy.
@0x815 @hedge but people fall for it themselves. I mean, they know all facts there.
Yes, obviously, but I don't understand why tbh.
@0x815 comfort of group think. For most people, ease of use is what draws them to social networking. Federation is something they don't grasp that easily, and they don't understand danger of concentrating power on one platform.
I still think it is great Fediverse is here and evolves. It won't attract huge numbers of users, but it might not need to to keep going.
I work in software and tech, and it took me a little while to wrap my head around fedicerse stuff; and I still get some blank stares when trying to explain it to others. It’s a bit of work even to build up a good set of follows, and even to pick where to park your account; whereas something like Twitter (and I guess Bluesky) gives you immediate access to everyone saying stuff on the platform.
I think once Mastodon and other services hit a kind of critical mass, it won’t matter as much, as all the interesting celebs and official accounts will already be federated to most servers. But even now it seems like you have to take a more active role in building out your home screen
I also work in software, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the federation concept. There are a lot of buzzwords thrown around.
I remember when I first signed up for Reddit it just asked for a username and a password then boom you were in.
To get started on lemmy, the process isn’t quite so straightforward. I’m new here, like 20 minutes new, and I’ve already seen some people suggest that we should push new users into looking for new instances to sign up on (push them away from lemmy.ml and beehaw.org). There already is the knowledge hurdle of instances, accounts, communities, local/all, federation, etc. It’s not going to be easy to grow the user base if the vibe is that it is set up like some tech bro crypto scam.
There's a post on [email protected] that was talking about this. The sign-up process needs to be streamlined a bit so that new users can come in more readily, and not be turned away by the knowledge barrier and unclear sign-up process.
It definitely doesn’t need huge numbers. It was ticking along very happily for a good few years before Twitter had a seizure and set fire to itself. It’s fantastic that the fediverse has grown, but unlike purely commercial platforms it can exist at a rate to serve the community on it and need be nothing more. No chasing the spectre of infinite growth, no appeasing shareholders, just community-good for community-good’s sake. Which is rather lovely.
I keep seeing people wang on about how Mastodon / the Fediverse will never be big enough, but, well, my experience of Mastodon is great. I follow nice people, have nice chats, and generally enjoy the vibe far more than I have done on Twitter for a number of years.
So why exactly does Mastodon need to be any bigger? Or by that, do people mean “I need X celebrity to be on there”?
Having been on Reddit for about 10 years now, I would say the need/want for Mastodon/Lemmy/etc to be bigger is to have more variety and more volume in content.
That being said, I also remember my early days on the internet participating on small forums. There was a sense of familiarity and community that I simply haven’t felt on big social media sites.
I don't know that Mastadon needs to be bigger, but lemmy really needs to grow to compare with reddit. I mean there barely is a photography sub for instance. No travel one I could find, or anything like bifl... And then getting the niche community together. I guess there may still be web forums out there. Personally I liked those, but they are actually more isolated because they don't federate at all. So lemmy is potentially a feature improvement over phpbbs etc. But you still have to build the communities and get people who are into X but aren't tech people to those communities.
I have been discussing this with friends for a while. Ease of use is a thing, but what is so complicated, for example, with using Mastodon over Twitter and XMPP over Whatsapp? The UI is different and you need to choose a client and so, but "ease of use"? They are all easy enough imo.
But I fully agree that people don't understand the danger of a centralized power and the social consequences it has.
Fedi isn’t hard to use, it’s just slightly different than centralised services with an extra step or two. None of which are hard to grasp, literally everyone online has federated communication in the form of email, but we can never underestimate the capacity of general users to put more effort into resisting change than actual change would take. It’s infuriating 😅
It’s why Apple is popular, ease of use for the average person is important. The more streamlined and fool proof you can make things, the easier the adoption is. (Apple might have been a bad example because their whole thing is much more complex)