This comes to us courtesy of @misnina@crystals.rest. As a technical person I sometimes find it difficult to communicate with my friends about the value proposition of Lemmy and other federated platforms.
The reality is 99.9% of people are going to instantly tune out the moment they hear “federation”, “decentralized”, or “self-hosted”. These things all existed before the centralized social media hellscape we have today, but those centralized platforms gained dominance because they were able to package their value into a simple pitch: “Your one-stop shop for social!”
Another good example of this is comparing the current state of the official Lemmy website to the official Mastodon website.
Mastodon spends the first 2 page scrolls offering you a visual explanation of what their platform offers, a cohesive and familiar social experience. It’s not until you get 1/3 into the page that you see the words “open source”, and the word “federation” doesn’t even appear in the main copy, it’s used in a user testimonial towards the bottom of the site.
Lemmy’s site on the other hand has an okay paragraph of copy about it’s value proposition, but then spends the first two image tiles and blurbs showing and talking about its source code and infrastructure, with only the third referencing moderator tools.
The following section talks about self-hosting and the fediverse, with only a brief mention to the core value proposition. I could go on about the remainder of the site but by this point it’s likely that the majority of users who weren’t already seeking this and/or are technically inclined have left.
Communicating the value of these things is difficult and something we’re going to need to focus on improving both as platform providers and as users of that platform. That’s why I’m so enamored with this video from Nina. It is quick and to the point, it only communicates what needs to be said for anyone to understand the value prop, and it does so in a way that doesn’t invoke any of the exclusive terminology.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk rant.
IMO, for the average user, leading with anything about self-hosting is just asking for trouble. The basic pitch should be “Go to Lemmy.world. Sign Up. Search for communities and join them.”
You can replace Lemmy.world with the instance of your choice, of course, but even asking people to choose a server is enough of a deterrent that you’ll lose casuals. Now, maybe that’s a good thing, but that’s a different argument.
If you encourage people to look into self-hosting, or imply that it’s required, they’ll run the other way as soon as they look into the details.
Yep, the simpler the pitch, the better. Lemmy gets caught up in the tech chat because federation is a cool technical detail, but casual people just want a community. Let them learn about the tech after they are set up with an account and place to interact with others.
Agreed, specially on the part about sending them to a specific server, the normal user doesn’t want to read or learn, it’s easier to send them to a sever we think they might like but I think it’s still too early for normal users when we think about discovering new communities or subscribing to ones in a different instance.
Genuine question: what happens if the instance you sign up with goes rogue or offline? Is your account tied to that instance or is it transferrable?
Accounts are per instance. The content that was shared to other federated instances would remain visible, though.