this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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Huh? I follow your point about people and their inertia. But I don’t follow this part.
What turns people off about Lemmy is the complexity of instances and federation and clients. We’re talking about your uncle Bob and his level of ordinary people. We should not forget that these people scrunched up their faces at Twitter itself for years and said ”but what is it?” Only in the fullness of time did it permeate our entire society.
If by “corporate social media” you mean “free, simple, high quality UX, and high popularity” then I agree with you. But it’s the simplicity and popularity that count, not the corporateness.
Is it really that complex? The API fiasco had me moving here, and I'll tell you right now, I ain't the tech savviest.
You’re probably underselling yourself. Obviously everyone who can read this made it over this barrier so I knew there was a high probability of responses like “It doesn’t seem hard to me.”
I understand. But I’ve actually had lots of opportunities to sit in a usability lab, observing digital product testing with regular people. And let me tell you, most of them struggle with basics. TBH it can be hard at times to keep from bursting out laughing.
This is a very good point. I think the longevity and robustness of the ecosystem matters more than the active user count today. Eventually through pure erosion lemmy and other decentralized platforms could wind up winning in popularity as well if things get worse everywhere else and they're stable enough to continue adding new users.
Reddit was obscure and nerdy for a long time too. Look at it now.
I am hoping the EU and Blue States does a funding program to make open-source and federated projects more user-friendly. There is far too many proprietary ecosystems that will turncoat within years. We need alternatives that are approachable and easy for people to transfer their lives into.
But in the end it's just as with email: providers, spam filters and clients. Some providers have stricter spam filters (~federation), some might prefer another client. Has there been any significant reason to deviate from that terminology?
Meaningful discovery is a major issue in adoption, though. Pro: no search/discovery algorithm that serves some evil plan of world enshittification. Con: no search/discovery algorithm.