My tenuous understanding from an article I read about the AT protocol but barely remember is that it can’t be fully decentralized. I think you have to use bluesky for user authentication. And I think it said the hosting hardware requirements would be significant to the point where it’s not very feisable. I welcome corrections/clarifications.
Point is, assuming that’s reasonably correct, true decentralization isn’t possible. And by it’s nature as a big corporate owned site, enshittification is inevitable.
peregrin5@lemm.ee 1 week ago
We aren’t sure. It’s still a billionaire owned social media. For some reason people are too afraid of the freedom actual decentralized social media gives them and they want a billionaire behind the scenes running everything and coralling them to the correct opinions.
Godort@lemm.ee 1 week ago
It’s not fear of the freedom, it’s choice paralysis. People want to go to one website, sign up for one account and then be part of a network with absolutely zero research beforehand. I like the fediverse, but the barrier to entry is higher than that because it first requires you to understand the technology at a base level.
Internet services getting shitty and then dying is nothing new. Look at MySpace, Digg, or any BBS. people just abandon the old one and join the new popular one. They’ll leave when it gets shitty enough and join the new thing
remington@beehaw.org 1 week ago
Yes. This is the best explanation of why people choose the platforms they use.
peregrin5@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I think it’s also a lack of tech understanding. I know how easy it is to fork a repo so I get how great the fediverse is with all the services beong FOSS and anyone can create an instance. This major benefit makes no sense to someone who doesn’t even know what a git repo is or the difference between free (but you are the product being sold) and FOSS.
Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 1 week ago
Even if you understand the tech, the fediverse has a content discovery problem. The content you want to see may actually exist. However, your instance needs knowledge of the content that best fits you. That’s what bluesky’s model does better.
baggins@beehaw.org 1 week ago
This. The average user doesn’t want to know about the workings and ‘All that technical stuff’, and why should they?
They want to click an icon and have everything and everyone there. They shouldn’t have to swap instances or what have you.
I put Mastodon on a back burner as it’s just too clunky (for me at least) and am currently interacting with people from all over on BlueSky. Half the time on Mastodon (various apps/instances, web, or browser) I couldn’t even log on.
BlueSky will probably go the way of others. Yes, there is a troll problem, and you need to be wary. But I had the same to a lesser extent on Mastodon.
In the end, I’ve had to accept my relatives, work, and old Army colleagues will never be on there, I’ve become resigned to that and keep a WhatsApp account for that reason.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
I just don’t buy that argument. Email is prolific and virtually no one knows how it works.
I legitimately believe that if ActivityPub services had gained traction before the dotcom bubble, they would be the default today, and twitter/bsky/reddit etc would have to go above and beyond to convince people to used their siloed platforms.
Instead, for-profit ventures are motivated by money to come up with new ideas and push them into the mainstream with their marketing budgets. Then later, the fediverse copies those ideas, often with half-baked approximations that are hard to scale (usually due to bandwidth and/or moderation costs).
I’m hoping this is the phenomenon that is the best chance for the fediverse’s future, because every time one of the platforms dies off some small percentage of the userbase switches to a fediverse alternative. And a protocol won’t fail like a private service will. So over time, the more often private services fail, the more users find the fediverse, the larger it gets, and the more people notice that it’s the most dependable way to go. It might take 100 years for a critical mass of people to figure it out, but I think in the long term, the fediverse will eventually be seen as “old reliable”.
letraset@feddit.dk 1 week ago
Strong agree. Email is prolific because it is the proto social network infrastructure, and it has interoperability at its core. You have someones email, you can write them. Theoretically it doesn’t matter what email you send it from, you can send an email to any address in the world. There are limits to this these days, because of things like DMARC, DKIM, and SPF, which have been introduced because of shortcomings in the open protocols, but in its purest form, there are no barriers.
If ActivityPub had been around at the same time as email, it would be considered infrastructure the same way email is today. The online world would look different, but don’t neglect that industries are still finding ways to make money from email. There might not have been platforms like the social media silos we have today, but there might be an industry trying to milk ActivityPub for money.
I too subscribe to this hope. I always end up writing emails to people I haven’t been in touch with for a long time, and aren’t sure about which phone number, social network, or physial address they are currently reachable on. Which reminded me of this post:
my-notes.dragas.net/2023/09/25/25-years-later/
Email just (still) works. Can’t ask for more than that.
remington@beehaw.org 1 week ago
I don’t believe it has anything to do with people’s fear. More money means more marketing power. It’s that simple.
samus12345@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Most aren’t even aware that a decentralized option exists.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 week ago
Even so, if celebrities started using something, their users would follow them - as happened with Bluesky, and to a much smaller extent the Rexodus from Reddit to Lemmy over the 3rd party app debacle.
But there seem to be just too many problems to make it worth most people's efforts. Like lack of content. And speaking of Lemmy, r/RedditAlternatives is full of people that came over here, but then went back - citing lack of content and presence of toxicity as their top reasons.
peregrin5@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I almost left due to the toxicity of the tankie triad but luckily I learned the block features work well.
orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts 1 week ago
“But none of my friends are on there.”
Make new friends then.
baggins@beehaw.org 1 week ago
Right, so we just trade in our relatives for some new ones.
That’s the attitude that puts people off.
orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts 1 week ago
At some point you have to jump ship and follow what fits you and your needs/wants in terms of security, morality (in the context of Meta and its complete lack of ethics), etc. You can try and get folks to try other platforms but most of them will inevitably fall back to what they know and never leave. I’m not going to keep Facebook around on the off chance that one relative needs to reach out. The relatives willing to actually make an effort to reach out can already text or call me and vice versa.
This whole billionaire social media prison is not something I’m willing to keep destroying my mental health on over some “blood is thicker than water” bs.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 week ago
Tech people tend to make horrible salespeople, especially to non-technical normies.
The thing is, some people value different things... and that's okay.