For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—
I remember joining reddit when it had the old interface and thinking that it is super unintuitive and complicated compared to all other social media. This didn’t stop reddit from growing and i don’t think lemmy will be restricted by this in the long run. People generally are just not aware of the fediverse and how it works yet but they will get used to it.
Reddit’s complexity was always vastly overstated. You can login and be posting in seconds in a way that you simply can’t with the fediverse
The only additional step you have on lemmy is choosing an instance and honestly it does not even matter that much which you choose. I’m not saying it’s trivial but it is nothing that is inherently more difficult.
Reddit was really strange compared to everything else a few years ago. It only appears easy now because we are familiar with the concept of subreddits now.
You and I know this but people at first glance people generally do not. Then you try to explain to them how Federation works and their eyes gloss over.
I can grab anyone of basically any age and drop them on a computer/phone to sign up for Facebook for the first time and they will figure it out in seconds. Contrast that with joining Pixelfed which doesn’t even let people join the biggest instance anymore. I don’t disagree with their decision at all but the first thing people would likely tap just doesn’t let them move forward. Then a lot of the largest instances don’t carry much if any English content. Do you not see how that’s an issue for adoption?
Imagine trying to join Facebook and when you get through the multi step process everything’s in German, a mistake you made because the largest instance won’t let you in and you don’t understand instances in the first place. For most people that’s an issue.
What I’m trying to say is that every social network has it’s quirks that you just need to learn. The willingness to learn also depends on how attractive the platform is. With time i see no reason for lemmy to not grow like reddit did.
If you just google “Lemmy” one of the first results is https://join-lemmy.org/ where you are directed to an instance that suits you. Far from perfect but Lemmy is still young.
People probably don’t even really need to understand federation. They just need sane defaults to get started and work from there.
And what I’m trying to say is that the big dogs don’t have quirks. They are intuitive to the point where 98% of people can figure them out in seconds the moment they look at them. They have spent billions of dollars over decades learning how to create as little friction as possible to get new users onto their platforms.
There isn’t a single fediverse platform that is as easy to onboard new users to as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. There’s just no comparison.
Edit: I also forgot to mention earlier: some instances have defederated from major ones and vice versa. What instance you choose can matter an awful lot. Additionally, people are going to be confused when they see multiple variants of the same communities on different instances (e.g. News)
PieFed closes most of those gaps. It’s not quite as fully featured as Lemmy, in particular the search function (but then again, Reddit’s search doesn’t work either?:-P), but it’s super easy to get started on the Threadiverse.
For one thing, you don’t even need an account or to download anything at all to start using it immediately to browse content from all across Lemmy. And the Categories of Communities featuring topic areas, which you can customize yourself and/or share with others, provide that multi-Reddit feel that people, especially from Reddit, really crave. See e.g. Arts & Crafts, and note the subheadings beneath, such as Photography. There is simply no comparison between this and e.g. the default setting for Lemmy being to only show Local content (a setting which lemmy.ml still uses today) for those without accounts.
Then if you decide to create an account, a wizard walks you through various settings, asking the user for their preferences and automatically subscribing to multiple communities based on the answers. Multiple types of News, multiple types of Politics, how many posts do you want to see with the keywords “Trump”, or “Musk” (no filtering, just a little, or block them all), etc. Or just don’t bother subscribing to certain types of (high-volume or stressful) communities at all, so that it doesn’t flood your Subscribed feed, yet still be able to access them immediately with the Topic Category at any time.
It’s not perfect, but it’s damn good:-). And for those who do want it, testing is underway for an app (Thunder).
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Depending on the instance, you might have to put a little more work into it. Not that I’m saying that’s a problem - in my eyes that’s a feature.
To be fair it is easy, if it allowed you to comment and didnt delete them lol
No you cant, karma requirements bud, try making a new account and posting/commenting anywhere?
I’m down to have a serious conversation but please don’t be patronizing with that “bud” crap
That also doesn’t make any sense. You can’t get karma without posting or commenting. They put a temporary cap on how frequently you can post. Individual subs sometimes have their own karma threshold rules yes, but they also tell you they do.
I don’t want to have any kind of conversation with you just here to speak my mind and make you reas it
Ok Mr “speak my mind,” again your comment makes no sense. You can’t get karma without commenting and posting, both of which you can do day 1