To be honest I like the idea of being able to move my account from a server which is offline to a different one. We should have it with ActivityPub too.
My girlfriend noped out of lemmy pretty much immediately after I tried to explain how to set it up and use it. Objectively, it’s a lot more confusing than signing up for something like reddit. She’s also pretty tech savvy, so I can’t imagine normies making the transition in mass.
If these federated alternatives are going to become mainstream, someone will have to step up with an implementation that greatly improves usability and accessibility. Meaning that federation will probably have to be masked to a large degree to reduce confusion. Maybe something more like a distributed network instead of a federated one.
As soon as you start talking techbro nonsense like federation and decentralization, people’s eyes glaze over. People don’t care how things work, they just care that it does what they need it to.
Hate to say it but a lot of us in tech, especially the devs, are really out of touch with end users. They aren’t philosophizing about the internet. I understand why people are excited about the idea of decentralization, and why it matters, but it has to be presented in a way that’s much simpler for people to understand if we actually went people to get on board.
Exactly, I have an annoying tendency to ramble on about whatever cool thing is happening in the tech world and why I’m using X technology now but nobody cares about that
Managed to sell friends and family on Signal by just explaining it as “WhatsApp without the Facebook spying”, think that’s the way to do it
I am brainstorming some features:
- default normie instances that you don’t have to choose from (auto choose all)
- default migration between top normie servers (keep profile history and basically auto log into the next one if one is down)
- community aggregation - if multiple communities are the same topic across different servers, auto aggregate posts and comment that are cross posted.
- don’t worry about it, if it has better content than Google and reddit, people will come.
Nah, I don’t buy it, people have been telling me that they don’t understand Twitter, what it is for and so on for years and most of my normal friends never got a Twitter account, while most of them had a Facebook account. It’s not about federated vs. non federated, they all have a federated email account from their school, university, work, etc. and everyone has a username@domain.tld address and nobody is complaining about that it’s not just @username for email. It’s more that it’s not useful for them to have a Twitter account or a Mastodon account or a Lemmy account. If it were useful they would just deal with the complexity like they do with the complexity of Facebook and Email.
Your Twitter example is spot on. Why would I want to follow specific people? It’s about the content on the platform. Tildes suffers from the same issue, it’s generally not an interesting place to be so people don’t stick around very long.
