this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
207 points (99.1% liked)
Fediverse
17858 readers
1 users here now
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;
- What is the fediverse?
- Fediverse Platforms
- How to run your own community
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not in its current form. Anyone who's tried to start a tech company knows you have to make your solution simple to use. Making software easy to use is actually surprisingly hard, involving experts in user interfaces, a lot of thought on user onboarding and training.
Lemmy as it currently stands is relatively new-user hostile for non-technical users. Content discovery isn't very clear, people are confused about how to find communities to follow, and the mobile apps are barebones.
That's not to say it can't get there, but until you never need to mention that the system is federated, I think a lot of people will be turned off from the complexity of using Lemmy. The community right now is motivated to use Lemmy and I would imagine a little more on the technical side, but getting your parents to use Lemmy or Mastadon would be a challenge currently.
As a migrant from Digg to Reddit back in the paleolithic era, I would have said the same of Reddit, the UI really wasn't good compared to Digg. People got used to it in time.
I also remember a time when it wasn't clear if people would want to shop online, and a debate about whether email could really replace letters, or if people would find it too complicated.
People will come to the fediverse if we give them a reason to.
I think it's fine. It's a bit like Linux users. We are maybe one percent of total computer users but we are plenty to create a very good community. :)