I guess I’m glad I was never a big Twat, so Bluesky wasn’t a place of refuge for me the way Lemmy was when Reddit went off the rails.
I guess I’m glad I was never a big Twat, so Bluesky wasn’t a place of refuge for me the way Lemmy was when Reddit went off the rails.
In general, I’d say the fediverse as a whole has shit branding and is probably a bit too confusing and/or too much initial setup work for the average inertnet user.
But I’m glad it’s like that, to a degree, because it helps lower the amount of people overwhelming places like here with all the people who would gladly allow the place to be overrun by ads and corporate astroturfing.
The barrier to entry acts as a filter. Which is crazy to me, because it’s still so easy to sign up and conceptualize, imo.
I guess it just goes to show how accustomed people have become to uncanny and frankly insane levels of convenience.
I remember the first time I logged in to Gmail without putting my password in — when all of a sudden the entire internet used cookies in lieu of credentials (is that how it works? I’m not qualified).
I can absolutely understand that it’s difficult to conceptualise. For someone who already understands, the concept is dead simple.
But I still remember the confusion trying to join Mastodon all those years ago. You are shown a list of servers, huh? Never being introduced to the concept of federated social media, just being asked makes you feel like you don’t belong because you don’t understand what’s happening.
Ok, so you search around and work out that it’s across many servers. You now have to somehow pick a server with no frame of reference. Pick randomly and hope you don’t pick the lemmdgrad equivalent (which is always high on the list on join-lemmy.com BTW). Then you go to join and you have to apply - oh, but what if they don’t want me? How do they know who I am, why would they approve my application?
Each one of these things is a barrier to entry, they stack like swiss cheese so that very few people make it through.
Then there’s the part where all these people have friends that could help them through it, but the friends never mention the fediverse to them because of the whole don’t talk about thing. I am guilty of this.
Though it’s better now, it used to be that Lemmy and a lot of Lemmy-type alternatives’ documentation were more for people who wanted to host their own server, rather than someone who wanted to join a social network.
But at much the same time, that complication also hurts adoption, so if people ever wanted Lemmy to be a proper social media site to replace the existing ones, the barrier to entry does also need to go down.