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.
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.
I was able to move from Reddit to Lemmy with minimal learning curve but I tried Mastodon about a year ago and it felt impenetrable and confusing. The author is absolutely right that people don’t see decentralization as a selling point. Anecdotally, the people I have talked to about federated alternatives have nothing positive to say about their experiences except the small handful of people that use things like Lemmy or Kbin.
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.
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.
Personally, I like to follow specific journalist and news orgs that report on topics I’m interested in. That def helps with the breaking news aspect. Besides of course following talented shitposters like dril ofc.
I am brainstorming some features: