Comment on Let people just use what they want, okay? It's their choice.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
We get it, no matter how many times people get fucked by venture capital pushing enshittification, most people don’t actually care enough about the issues at hand to deal with even the minor discomfort of learning something new that isn’t highly polished. They’ll take getting fucked by corporations every time.
It’s not about “minor discomfort.” The Fediverse has too much UX friction for someone that isn’t in tech/used to a product that isn’t mature in features or content. Even if they are fine with that, they need to spend time to figure out what server(s) to trust, or at least an organization they can sue if things go wrong.
Ranting about “normies” instead of listening and understanding what their needs and concerns are is not conducive to growth, but it’ll certainly help it decay.
Exactly. Most Fediverse fans always go on a rant about “corporations”, “enshittification”, whatever, when they don’t understand that not everyone will take/have time to learn about these things. Same thing with other FOSS projects.
No, no. It’s definitely about “getting fucked” as SnotFlickerman succinctly put it. It’s just users getting ravaged by corporations so hard they don’t notice care—or something.
Nah, if the masses wish to be damned I say let them.
Make up your mind fellas. Do you guys want more people to join or not?
and when they do figure out the unintuitive UX, they’re met with an avalanche of reply guys and, if they’re Black, a fuckload of overt and covert racism that everyone else will ignore…
there’s a reason why most people on the fedi are white men in tech
only the queer community seems to have managed to carve itself a place on the fedi, and even it has an issue with rampant racism…
Reply guys?
I’ve seen this term on Mastadon. I’m actually confused by it a bit, since I’ve always thought replies are to be expected on the Internet.
I think women have a problem with men following them and replying in an overly familiar manner, or mansplaining, or something like that. I’m old, used to forums, and never used Twitter, so I may be missing some sort of etiquette that developed there. I generally don’t reply at all on Mastadon because of this, and really, I’m not sure what Mastadon or microblogging is for. Seems to be for developing personal brands, and for creators of content to inform followers of what they created. Seems not to be for discussion. I.e. more like RSS than Reddit (that’s my understanding at least).
basically, someone online (usually a man) who replies to another person (usually a woman) in a condescending tone, or giving unsolicited advice, that sorta stuff
Both digital and real world spaces benefit from diversity.
But, but eMAil!!!1!!!
Lemmevangelists really like the email analogy because they think literally anyone knows or cares how email works. 99% of people lose you the moment you say the word “protocol”
The vast majority of email address domains aren’t chosen, they come from your ISP, Cell phone/computer OS manufacturer, or employer/school. That’s the opposite of the fedeverse account creation process.
What UX friction? Lack of Taylor swift on the platform? Delusional.
Understanding what the Fediverse is. This is time people can use for other things.
Finding a server that you can reasonably trust and is relatively troll free. This is time people can use for other things.
The default UI is ugly, and I can’t easily share a Photon UI link with friends from my phone.
Having the same content appear across multiple servers and there’s no way to just have 1 common thread/linkage to it. Some things start to feel spammy and drown out other items.
The link sort system has too many options and some are not intuitively named. Yes, I can look at the wiki, but you’re making me look at a wiki.
NSFW content default on. Not exactly a winning option if you’re trying to get new folks to join.
Understanding what the Fediverse is.
It’s a good thing. Understanding things you use is a good thing. Knowing things is a good thing.
This is time people can use for other things.
They shouldn’t.
Finding a server that you can reasonably trust and is relatively troll free.
Just like finding a social media of choice today? It also doesn’t really matter, Lemmy instances aren’t Discord “servers”.
The default UI is ugly, and I can’t easily share a Photon UI link with friends from my phone.
What’s wrong with it? I think it looks really cool actually. It’s clean, simple, and the colour scheme and it’s use is great. I’ve honestly no idea what “photon UI” is. After I signed up, I only browse Lemmy on my phone via Jerboa.
Having the same content appear across multiple servers and there’s no way to just have 1 common thread/linkage to it. Some things start to feel spammy and drown out other items.
That’s an issue of sorting and subscribing. Unsub to duplicate communities and change filter to something like “Scaled”.
The link sort system has too many options and some are not intuitively named. Yes, I can look at the wiki, but you’re making me look at a wiki.
Huh? Do you mean the sort in the feed? If so it’s all fairly intuitive. I’ve not heard anyone say otherwise until now either so I think this is just a personal issue.
NSFW content default on. Not exactly a winning option if you’re trying to get new folks to join.
I’ve not seen any NSFW comment on Lemmy period. I think if you don’t seek it out it’s not there. On the other hand - I think previously NSFW content was actually a large pull to sites like Twitter and Instagram, and lack thereof caused an exodus of users from sites like Tumblr. I’ve also anecdotally heard from some IRL friends’ (men especially) that they got into Reddit as a porn site, then branched out to become more active users overall, so this may be less of a benefit than it first appears.
Existence of snobs.
And yes, lack of recognizable people on the platform. Why tf should I follow some randos?
Bluesky has Susie Dent😍
“following people”, including whoever “Susie Dent” is, is fundamentally an incompatible concept with a forum structure of Lemmy or the “thousand niche spaces” culture of Mastodon.
I would go one step further and say all celebrity culture is fundamentally incompatible with decentralisation of power as a principle when put into practice architecturally and ideologically
Tech enthusiasts vastly overestimate how much hassle people are willing to put up with in order to do something, and this is a classic example.
Seriously the number of people on here complaining about Windows bloat. I’m not even 100% sure what the hell that’s supposed to mean. I’m a normal and my windows runs fine.
And no matter how many times FOSS developers are shown that real people don’t care about products with shitty UX, they won’t put time in making their product accessible.
See how that goes?
Wanna fix federated platforms? Make the backend dumb and the frontend smart. No one that has a life wants to learn about instances and all that bullshit, decentralize the storage and let anyone create a frontend where people can connect and check the content, one credential to access everything, defederation doesn’t affect the users, no admins just moderators.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I mean…you say this with an air of sarcasm, because you DO care about decentralization. But I’ve been saying since I got here, with no sarcasm, that Lemmy is not a competitor to reddit. Mastodon is not a competitor to twitter. The fediverse is not appealing to the masses on it’s own current merrit. And why?
Because it’s main selling point is that it’s decentralized. And any average woman named Britney, or any average guy named Todd, does not give a shit about that. At all. At all. At all.
They don’t know what it is. They don’t care what it is. They just want to see what Taylor Swift is saying online. They just want to follow Nascar. They just want to follow all the accounts that you view as corporate branding. That’s what they WANT.
I’ve said in other threads various ways to get the concepts of the fediverse to be looked at. But it takes us, the fediverse, to appear to be appealing to the masses instead of scary.
It needs to feel like a walled garden. It can act as a decentralized service on a technical end. You can wizard of oz the shit out of it. Stay behind a curtain and keep all the scary technical stuff hidden. The technical stuff can still work, but you guys are pushing it front and center like it’s a selling point. It’s not. It’s scary to them, and bluesky looks and feels just like twitter, without the fascism. That’s all they want.
Nobody is over on bluesky asking if bluesky is truely decentralized. Nobody there knows what that is. Nobody cares. It would be like me inventing my own currency that only works in an office I work in. Then wondering why the other offices in that building aren’t adopting my currency. They don’t care about my currency. It means nothing to them.
The fediverse had years of a headstart, and learned nothing. I don’t have the technical skills to build. What I do have is the ability to blend in with any crowd and understand what they’re feeling. So I understand them. I understand you. And I understand the difference in mentality between them and you. I also understand that you guys DON’T understand their mentality. And they don’t even know your mentality exists.
The best way to describe it is, they are like a bunch of flies. They just want to fly to the nearest lightbulb. And you guys are putting on one of those blacklights to expose all the filthy stains around you. And the flies literally land in and eat shit happily, so they don’t care about the stains. Yet you’re so tunnel visioned that all you see are the stains, and are certain the flys will care. Then a neighbor turns on a porchlight, and they all fly over there.
Also the previous big light was a bug zapper.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
This is so correct it’s actually unreal. Really well put, solid comment.
hierophant_nihilant@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Extraordinary well put.I wish more people would understand that building communities by attracting users from outside is much-much-much more important than to brag about fediverse in your small nerd circle and defederating another server.
punkaccountant@lemm.ee 1 day ago
While sometimes I think…do we really want it to get super popular? But also even if the popularity comes with the assholes…blocking and curating can help and in the end, it IS still decentralized. So let’s say that convinces the average Lemmy user that yes, let’s grow this shit.
How do we get some of the big names here to promote it? I tell anyone who has a complaint with standard social media about the fediverse but I have minimal influence. I HAVE included it on surveys and contact with podcasts I follow, to promote it more, again limited influence.
I feel like we need like…whatever…a Taylor Swift type to take it up as something they push and then other big names will follow.
As you said, I don’t care about that really but many others do. Lemmy and occasional checkins with Reddit are my only social media. But if it gets more people here, it could be worth it. I personally would just love more communities to be more active because I like Lemmy…but right now I only see the biggest “Reddit copycats” getting the major activity.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I said before, the biggest thing is handles. If Taylor Swift came to the fediverse, I assume her twitter handle is @TaylorSwift
If she came to Lemmy, or Mastodon, her handle would be “@TaylorSwift@Mastodon.social” or “@TaylorSwift@Lemmy.World”
But then I could myself register “@TaylorSwift@Lemm.ee” or “@TaylorSwift@Mastodon.world”
And I could just be Taylor Swift.
What she has to do, and this goes for any public figure, is protect her brand. Her brand is Taylor Swift. Anything at all which creates confusion or infringing on use regarding that name is a problem for her. She needs to keep Taylor Swift exclusively to herself.
Just as Kellogs would want all use of the word Kellogs to belong to them.
So to attract them, they won’t come unless they can be the sole and exclusive @TaylorSwift
That’s the important part. She wants to be @TaylorSwift.
Not @TaylorSwift@Mastodon.social.
So to do this, I shouldn’t be able to create an identical handle, on a different instance.
The fediverse needs to all communicate with each other. I don’t have a peertube account. But since I’m Lost_My_Mind, that exact handle should no longer be in the pool of available peertube account names. And if I were to sign up, with the email from this Lemmy account, I wouldn’t even chose a handle. It would automatically choose Lost_My_Mind. The accounts would be the same.
Because at the end of the day, what celbrities want is one easy place for all people to reach them. Right now with X and Bluesky being two systems that aren’t interconnected, this splits the audience. We already know America is divided. Almost down the middle.
So the LAST thing celebrities, and brands want is bluesky to take off. Because then you’d have X with its right wing views, and bluesky with it’s left wing views. And then brands will have to make two accounts. One on X, one on bluesky. They’d much rather say they have one account with 40 million followers than 2 accounts. One with 22 million followers, and another account with 18 million followers.
And the thing nobody is taking into consideration is the scaling of the fediverse. You can have all of X and all of bluesky on the fediverse. All decentralized. But because 98% won’t notice the decentralized aspect, they won’t care. They’ll just stick to their little corner of the fediverse. And you’ll stick to your corner, and in the middle will be brands.
And both sides can connect to brands from their corner of the fediverse. The only reason brands care to pick a side, is because analytics tells them one side is more likely to financially support them. But they’ll happily take subscribers and money from the other side. Red states? Blue states? Doesn’t matter. All they care about is green states!
And the potential is there. People who want a small fediverse can scale their individual view smaller. People who want it bigger can scale it bigger. It literally has the ability to please both sides wishes. It just has to be implemented properly.
But it may actually be already too late. The bluesky ball has started rolling. Sometimes it’s not about logic. You can have a factually better option, but still lose by having inferior numbers.
Right now, bluesky has an artificial solution to the handles issue. You’re @handle@bsky.app, but EVERYONE is @bsky.app unless you use a custom domain. So realistically you’re just @handle unless specified otherwise.
Same way a website is just website.com, even though it’s really www.website.com
The www. is implied, just like the @bsky.app is going to be implied as time goes on.
constantturtleaction@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Eh, anyone with their own domain can use it even without hosting anything. It just takes a DNS record. So Taylor Swift can have @taylorswift.com or w/e her official website is and that’s pretty much the exact same situation as claiming domain ownership. Someone else could likely register taylorswift.boats but I think most people would realize something is off there.
hierophant_nihilant@reddthat.com 1 day ago
If you want more people to donate, you’ve got to become more popular, and lemmy needs donations afaik
Quik@infosec.pub 1 day ago
Related blog post that puts it similarly well
FrostyTrichs@walledgarden.xyz 1 day ago
Imagine that.