Is this a joke question?
Even if people know fediverse, if the content they want doesn’t exist here, they won’t stay.
There are Japanese Twitter refugee to fedi (especially Misskey) several times. A lot of big creator doesn’t stay as they want to get the highest number of engagement to keep their (art) business afloat.
Do you know any regular people? Most people I know have never even heard the word fediverse.
Not to mention “most people” wouldn’t fit in here or feel welcome. Remember Donald Trump won the popular vote and even those who didn’t vote didn’t feel strongly enough about either side to pick one or the other. It’s not just the US, far right candidates keep gaining popularity in parts of Europe. And I think a lot of people aren’t interested in Star Trek or trans rights. The niche communities have very low levels of activity too. The fediverse just isn’t for everyone.
Most people don’t care about things. This is kind of a recurring problem. Imagine if people just cared a little bit more. All sorts of problems, like littering, would just go away.
But people are lazy and don’t care. They don’t care that their behavior today will be a problem for them tomorrow.
The big sites are where the content is, and that’s what they want. Suffering a little bit of hardship (fewer memes) in order to bolster a stronger future? Ridiculous.
Because most people haven’t gone far enough to even understand this question. The choices come prepackaged, that’s what in front of their eyes, so they assume that’s how it suppose to be, and take the easy ride
Because of network effects.
Building a social network is hard. A typical chicken or egg problem. If you don’t have a user base, nobody is willing to join, and if nobody joins, you don’t have a user base.
It usually requires a bunch of money to build a social network.
The fediverse has a long time to go but I believe it will win sooner or later.
The Fediverse is a confusing concept. I’m a giant nerd and even I don’t really understand how this is supposed to work. Centralized platforms provide a more straightforward user experience. And as others have said, that’s where the content is right now.
It’s no more confusing than using email, and everybody managed to figure that out. You don’t need to know how the nitty gritty of it works. The network effects is a far bigger issue, as you point out, centralized platforms simply have far more content on them.
It’s far more complicated than email, at least I can send an email to any valid address from any other address by default ( mostly ) - Lemmy / Fediverse is like needing multiple email addresses that each one can only email some of the others, and you might not even get the response someone sent you unless the content is literally carried back to you.
I have multiple accounts on multiple instances, and sometimes I come across posts I read with one account, but my comments or the responses to those comments just aren’t there, so you only get a portion of what is out there.
It’s kinda a terrible experience in that way.
Qualifying your analogy with (mostly) kinda makes it fall apart for me. Because the fediverse also works like how you described email (mostly). There might be a few extra exceptions due to relative immaturity of the protocol is all.
The whole point of ActivityPub is that you don’t need multiple accounts on different servers. You can use your Lemmy account to talk to people on Mastodon, browse PixelFed, watch PeerTube. Yes, there is sometimes lag in content propagating, and so on, but it’s clearly not a show stopper. My experience using Lemmy and Mastodon is the opposite of terrible.
Because I have no clue what the Fediverse is.
Yeah and I wasn’t sure what it mean on account creation to commit to a server fully. I ended up getting a lot of supportive comments when I did ask.
There are going to be layers to this.
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There are lots of people who are just downright too stupid. They wouldn’t be on the internet at all if Tim Apple didn’t put it in a baby baba for them to suck it out of. They use Facebook because their iPhone came with the Facebook app pre-installed.
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There are lots of people for whom popularity is the only thing that exists. Their brain cannot function beyond “Everyone uses Twitter.” They’ll adopt this platform only after everyone else in the world does.
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There are lots of people who have bought the propaganda. The dark web is for drug traffickers and hitmen, torrenting is for pirates, end-to-end encryption is for traitors, and Mastodon is for Linux neckbeards. You shouldn’t associate with those people.
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There’s this weird trend where the commercial platforms are becoming hives for conservatives, so they’re probably going to stay put in their echo chambers. I have observed little to no presence of actual conservatives on this platform; beyond the horseshoe effect with the tankie crowd.
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The culture of content consumption is not supported by the Fediverse. We don’t do algorithmic slop troughs here, and the amount of content on Peertube and Loops rounds down to zero, so it doesn’t fulfill the role of mesmerizing colors and sounds for staring at and drooling like Tiktok does or linear television did.
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Open source software is usually a bit shit. Be it lack of budget, opinionated developers, redundant projects…we can never have one of something. Why does Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed exist simultaneously? We always end up with software that mostly works, has a lot less graphical polish, a shitty project name, a few missing key features and a couple workarounds you just have to know about. Or an intentionally godawful UI. That’ll put people off.
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A few people who show up are going to be put off by the weirdest decision they’ll be asked to make this month: “Choose an instance, your choice doesn’t matter, just pick one.” If it doesn’t matter, why make me pick? I bet if you watched 100 people try to sign up for a Fediverse platform, at least 30 of them will balk at that stage. I’ve sat and stared at that for awhile myself and I’m one of the ones who made it through.
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They just haven’t heard of us. Ask ten people you know in real life if they’ve heard of Lemmy, or Mastodon, or Pixelfed. I bet they haven’t, or if they have they let it pass in one ear and out the other out of apathy.
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A few people have looked at the Fediverse, didn’t see what they wanted here, and left. If you play Satisfactory, for example, you’ll find an active subreddit where the majority of the player base and the developers of the game interact, on Lemmy you’ll find one community where exactly one person posts “daily screenshots until I get bored.” It’s easy to wander off, especially if you don’t like left wing politics, Linux and the Fediverse itself.
#6 is the weakest. Software diversity drives innovation.
No, it drives duplicated effort on the basics, asterisks in compatibility and confusion among new adopters. We’re not innovating here; we’re talking about three parallel Reddit clones.
There’s a #10 for you: A lot of the commercial sites were new and exciting because they let you interact in ways you couldn’t before. Facebook facilitated interactions with people you knew in person, Twitter let you briefly shout at everyone in the world, Youtube became your own personal television show, Tiktok destroyed attention spans…every single Fediverse platform is a clone of one of those (plus Pixelfed is Instagram, whatever Instagram is for). To my knowledge there is no ActivityPub-based project that has a unique or innovative concept behind it, just store brand copies of pre-existing ones.
Gotta say, the biggest reason I’m not on Pixedfed is because I was told that I could migrate my instagram content, but the two instances I signed up for had that option disabled. I can’t seem to find an instance that tells you upfront if it’s allowed or not, and I’ve already wasted enough time on it.
I’ve picked on Pixelfed’s join page in detail before at length. I think you’d be on board with my suggestions.
Speaking of complaints we have about the fediverse…
You linked to a post on sh.itjust.works, but I’m on slrpnk.net, so if I want to interact with it, I have hoops to jump through first.
Or I would have had hoops to jump through to get the lemmy.world link where that comment is (nominally) hosted. There’s a chainlink icon and a technicolor pentagram icon, neither of those do it. I either have to manually go to lemmy.world’s website, find the comment there, copy the link from there, come back to my account at sh.itjust.works and post it, or I post a sh.itjust.works link and send everyone on an indirect path. It’s…not good.
“Choose an instance, your choice doesn’t matter, just pick one.” If it doesn’t matter, why make me pick?
Email requires you to pick a provider, but it doesn’t matter.
I feel like this issue will solve itself with scale. You’ll end up signing up with the one hosting the community you came over for first and moving if you don’t like it
“To use your new iPhone, create an iCloud account.”
Gmail advertised superior features before also becoming required for using an Android device.
sure, any service gets you sneding and receiving email, but most people these days end up with an email address as a consequence of some other decision they’ve made.
I think when people falk about #7, it needs to be revised to “your choice of instance doesn’t matter when you’re a noob. By the time it does matter, you’ll understand what you want from an instance and can simply make another account”
Agree on all other points though. I hope Lemmy keeps growing and getting more active. A lot of the communities I’ve joined only have a few posts in the past year.
I keep saying that the choice should be meaningful; like I had no trouble picking the Peertube instance I should join because my content would fit their theme.
As always, there’s multiple reasons for things. You did a great job breaking down as much as possible :) the other comments are all right, but you are comprehensive :)
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I don’t think the average user thinks much about the platform they’re on, and about who controls it. I think they go to wherever most of their family/friends are.
Also, those platforms are firmly in the mainstream, the alternatives aren’t really - you’d have to actively go search for them. People just aren’t likely to do that, I don’t think.
Most people are like sheep and just follow the herd.
All but you always get those people that swear they’re different.
- Ease of use
The combination of having to choose an instance and then start with an algorithm free blank slate is a tough ask. It literally takes time to sit down and setup your initial “feed”, which is probably a good thing, but not at all what attracts users whimsical curiosities nor what they’ve experienced over their entire existence with social media.
In my IT program at school, the only people who have heard of the fediverse are the ones I’ve told.
I like to follow a couple reporters directly as opposed to subscribing to the local paper and wading through the fluff pieces, so that means using Bluesky.
Back when I was still an artist for my super niche internet garbage, that meant using Tumblr, then after the Tumblr purge, Twitter. Then after Musk, cohost, then after cohost… I mean, I was done with art but I’d probably be on Bluesky for that too.
I don’t think federation vs centralization is the primary differentiator. I think corporate vs non-profit/ad-free/donation-only/volunteerism is. Our marketing budget is goose egg. It’s all word-of-mouth.
Yeah I keep pushing for join-lemmy.org to buy ads on Google and Bing.
I can also see some people being opposed to them spending the donation money on ads, since they’d be giving money to companies that may be in opposition to what we’re doing here (or ideological reasons around the advertising industry in general).
Maybe if there was a separate pool of donations specifically for advertising, then people who want to support that can donate to it? Those who don’t can still donate to the projects themselves
That’s a smart idea. Instances can buy ads for their specializelation
Ads on the street (like at bus stops) could work well too
You can even do it yourself for the price of wheatpaste and printing
Because they want to feel involved. They want to be with the in-crowd. If they come to the Fediverse, then they’ll think it’s weird and might scare them because it’s a new concept they can’t grasp. When really, I see the Fediverse as just a social media reset. But because it doesn’t have all of the enshittification that centralized social media has, they don’t dare bother.
