For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—
Couldn’t have said it better myself
Exactly! That’s how people usually argue against the Fediverse. People have literally been indoctrinated into believing the internet is centralised.
Our biggest enemy is actually the bootlicker.
Once that guy flips the regime will have hard time maintaining legitimacy
Americans don’t understand the politics of proper opposition and dissent
Voting for the other guy ain’t it… And it is a lot more than “politics” it is a life style.
Deny the parasite profit and engagement
too true, make it a lifes mission to avoid getting shafted. take pride in once ability, for me: that is repairing electronics, using privacy respecting platforms and having as small a finger print as possible.
I got a small dose of this at work. My coworker has a safety incident, almost fucked up her hand. She got made the safety champion the next day, and was concerned about the optics.
My lead told her “don’t worry what they think of you” but brother you are a leader. Public perception is your strongest tool. You absolutely should be worried what we think of you
I lately have a saying:
“If it’s not FOSS, it’s not worth your time”
I don’t think it’s too complicated, but it is noticeably more complicated than joining traditional social media. People often get immediately freaked out by the whole concept of instances. I know everybody keeps trying to use the email comparison, but that just is not working. People cannot connect the dots between email and something like Instagram.
It would help to change the nomenclature. Joining a Facebook “group” makes sense to anybody. Change insider jargon like “instance” to seeker-friendly verbiage like “village.”
I like that, or something like that. “Server” and “instance” definitely sounds too prickly and technical to a lot of people.
I remember joining reddit when it had the old interface and thinking that it is super unintuitive and complicated compared to all other social media. This didn’t stop reddit from growing and i don’t think lemmy will be restricted by this in the long run. People generally are just not aware of the fediverse and how it works yet but they will get used to it.
Reddit’s complexity was always vastly overstated. You can login and be posting in seconds in a way that you simply can’t with the fediverse
The only additional step you have on lemmy is choosing an instance and honestly it does not even matter that much which you choose. I’m not saying it’s trivial but it is nothing that is inherently more difficult.
Reddit was really strange compared to everything else a few years ago. It only appears easy now because we are familiar with the concept of subreddits now.
You and I know this but people at first glance people generally do not. Then you try to explain to them how Federation works and their eyes gloss over.
I can grab anyone of basically any age and drop them on a computer/phone to sign up for Facebook for the first time and they will figure it out in seconds. Contrast that with joining Pixelfed which doesn’t even let people join the biggest instance anymore. I don’t disagree with their decision at all but the first thing people would likely tap just doesn’t let them move forward. Then a lot of the largest instances don’t carry much if any English content. Do you not see how that’s an issue for adoption?
Imagine trying to join Facebook and when you get through the multi step process everything’s in German, a mistake you made because the largest instance won’t let you in and you don’t understand instances in the first place. For most people that’s an issue.
What I’m trying to say is that every social network has it’s quirks that you just need to learn. The willingness to learn also depends on how attractive the platform is. With time i see no reason for lemmy to not grow like reddit did.
If you just google “Lemmy” one of the first results is https://join-lemmy.org/ where you are directed to an instance that suits you. Far from perfect but Lemmy is still young.
People probably don’t even really need to understand federation. They just need sane defaults to get started and work from there.
And what I’m trying to say is that the big dogs don’t have quirks. They are intuitive to the point where 98% of people can figure them out in seconds the moment they look at them. They have spent billions of dollars over decades learning how to create as little friction as possible to get new users onto their platforms.
There isn’t a single fediverse platform that is as easy to onboard new users to as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. There’s just no comparison.
Edit: I also forgot to mention earlier: some instances have defederated from major ones and vice versa. What instance you choose can matter an awful lot. Additionally, people are going to be confused when they see multiple variants of the same communities on different instances (e.g. News)
Depending on the instance, you might have to put a little more work into it. Not that I’m saying that’s a problem - in my eyes that’s a feature.
To be fair it is easy, if it allowed you to comment and didnt delete them lol
No you cant, karma requirements bud, try making a new account and posting/commenting anywhere?
I’m down to have a serious conversation but please don’t be patronizing with that “bud” crap
That also doesn’t make any sense. You can’t get karma without posting or commenting. They put a temporary cap on how frequently you can post. Individual subs sometimes have their own karma threshold rules yes, but they also tell you they do.
“Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit, you can visit https://phtn.app/ to have a look at the content. If you prefer an app, https://vger.app/settings/install has download links.”
Here’s how you get on Instagram or Reddit or whatever:
You’re done. Your voyager link is not the whole process.
https://lemmy.zip/post/33507041
Well said indeed
Personally, I prefer an intellectual barrier to entry. It’s one of the things that made the internet of the early days so much better than today.
Everybody who says this assumes they wouldn’t have been barred from entry were they to try and get in now.
I was speaking more to the early days of the internet. You had to be relatively smart, and determined to get on it.
I’ll never forget when the AOLers started showing up.
yeah, they sure ruined newsgroups…
Eternal September
Yup. I’ll admit, I didn’t foresee AI coming along and finding a way to make the quality of discourse even worse
God I feel so bad for people even just trying to learn stuff online now.
10 to 20 years ago we had a lot less content, but when you did find a hit on your search, you could be much more confident it contained meaningful information. Rather than just the official documentation repackaged across 10 different “articles.”
I would argue it is closer to 60 years.
Refugee here. Think I’d agree. A subconscious bias / misunderstanding we bought into
I jumped over here a couple weeks ago at the request of another redditor and it’s like a breath of fresh air.
I still check out reddit for a couple subs that just don’t have enough interaction over here “yet”.
I’ve mentioned lemmy a couple times over there and got replies like " it’s just too complicated " etc. and now that I think about it they were most likely bots 🤔
Ima go back to the cesspool and investigate