Does it still seem difficult to understand, use, etc? did you come across anything positive?
I’m still very sceptical. While I love the idea of the fediverse, I honestly don’t think it will ever be more than a niche platform. It will probably remain active among “enthusiasts” but I can’t see it ever going mainstream.
It’s just not simple enough. If some non-tech person wants to join Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or Instagram, they just go to the site or app, sign up, and that’s it. No decisions need to be made, there is nothing to understand. My 70 year old mother could do it.
Joining lemmy is a commitment. And more importantly, it requires decisions to be made. Which server should I join? What difference will it make? Am I doing it wrong? Why are there different communities with the same name but on different servers? Why is there no ‘lemmy’ app? Etc.
Those of us who are here have made the effort to understand these things, but the general population won’t bother.
To be honest, most of these issues could be solved using abstraction, and lemmy world already does that to some extend. Giving the site the look and feel of a single website, with one simple way to join and participate will be vital. I’m not saying to remove those decisions, but rather have them on another layer so advanced users can still easily access them, while other users who are either new or don’t care too much about it can just use a common preset.
Just signing up and ignoring the FUD.
Honestly, the loss of Reddit is Fun. I’d say that roughly ~95% of the time I spent on reddit was through mobile, I hardly ever used it on the computer anymore (although funnily enough, years ago it was the opposite, I almost exclusively accessed it via computer). Opening up RIF repeatedly on the day it died, just from muscle memory, is what made me finally decide to look up how to join Lemmy. I had been considering it for awhile, but sticking with Reddit was juuuust easy enough to keep me from doing it, even with the drastic quality drop in reddit over the years. But by blocking RIF/etc, they removed that “easy enough” part, which meant nothing was really keeping me from deciding to finally make the jump.
Still can’t say I fully understand the fediverse, I definitely don’t. But I do understand it slightly more than I did before, and certainly enough to at least try to interact and comment!
Gab and Truth Social were always the most mentioned examples until Elon/Twitter/Mastadon. I’m still cautious of communities becoming overrun by Nazis.
Feels unlikely to me, personally. Those places were designed for shitheads, and there just aren’t that many shitheads to overrun regular places.
Our instance is currently voting to delist a an instance that the vast majority consider a nazi instance.
The truth is that we passed the point of no return with Twitter and Reddit where the quality of the product became so poor, and we (the actual project) became treated worse and worse that it was not going to improve. At least, it won’t improve as long as there is money, or someone with a colossal ego involved in the leadership of the company.
