Why do most people stay in centralized social media platforms when the Fediverse exists?
Why do most people stay in centralized social media platforms when the Fediverse exists?
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There are going to be layers to this.
- There are lots of people who are just downright too stupid. They wouldn't be on the internet at all if Tim Apple didn't put it in a baby baba for them to suck it out of. They use Facebook because their iPhone came with the Facebook app pre-installed.
- There are lots of people for whom popularity is the only thing that exists. Their brain cannot function beyond "Everyone uses Twitter." They'll adopt this platform only after everyone else in the world does.
- There are lots of people who have bought the propaganda. The dark web is for drug traffickers and hitmen, torrenting is for pirates, end-to-end encryption is for traitors, and Mastodon is for Linux neckbeards. You shouldn't associate with those people.
- There's this weird trend where the commercial platforms are becoming hives for conservatives, so they're probably going to stay put in their echo chambers. I have observed little to no presence of actual conservatives on this platform; beyond the horseshoe effect with the tankie crowd.
- The culture of content consumption is not supported by the Fediverse. We don't do algorithmic slop troughs here, and the amount of content on Peertube and Loops rounds down to zero, so it doesn't fulfill the role of mesmerizing colors and sounds for staring at and drooling like Tiktok does or linear television did.
- Open source software is usually a bit shit. Be it lack of budget, opinionated developers, redundant projects...we can never have one of something. Why does Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed exist simultaneously? We always end up with software that mostly works, has a lot less graphical polish, a shitty project name, a few missing key features and a couple workarounds you just have to know about. Or an intentionally godawful UI. That'll put people off.
- A few people who show up are going to be put off by the weirdest decision they'll be asked to make this month: "Choose an instance, your choice doesn't matter, just pick one." If it doesn't matter, why make me pick? I bet if you watched 100 people try to sign up for a Fediverse platform, at least 30 of them will balk at that stage. I've sat and stared at that for awhile myself and I'm one of the ones who made it through.
- They just haven't heard of us. Ask ten people you know in real life if they've heard of Lemmy, or Mastodon, or Pixelfed. I bet they haven't, or if they have they let it pass in one ear and out the other out of apathy.
- A few people have looked at the Fediverse, didn't see what they wanted here, and left. If you play Satisfactory, for example, you'll find an active subreddit where the majority of the player base and the developers of the game interact, on Lemmy you'll find one community where exactly one person posts "daily screenshots until I get bored." It's easy to wander off, especially if you don't like left wing politics, Linux and the Fediverse itself.
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“Choose an instance, your choice doesn’t matter, just pick one.” If it doesn’t matter, why make me pick?
Email requires you to pick a provider, but it doesn't matter.
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"To use your new iPhone, create an iCloud account."
Gmail advertised superior features before also becoming required for using an Android device.
sure, any service gets you sneding and receiving email, but most people these days end up with an email address as a consequence of some other decision they've made.
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I feel like this issue will solve itself with scale. You'll end up signing up with the one hosting the community you came over for first and moving if you don't like it
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#6 is the weakest. Software diversity drives innovation.
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No, it drives duplicated effort on the basics, asterisks in compatibility and confusion among new adopters. We're not innovating here; we're talking about three parallel Reddit clones.
There's a #10 for you: A lot of the commercial sites were new and exciting because they let you interact in ways you couldn't before. Facebook facilitated interactions with people you knew in person, Twitter let you briefly shout at everyone in the world, Youtube became your own personal television show, Tiktok destroyed attention spans...every single Fediverse platform is a clone of one of those (plus Pixelfed is Instagram, whatever Instagram is for). To my knowledge there is no ActivityPub-based project that has a unique or innovative concept behind it, just store brand copies of pre-existing ones.
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I have observed little to no presence of actual conservatives on this platform; beyond the horseshoe effect with the tankie crowd.
Not a real thing. “Tankies” are in no way “conservative.” They want socialism, while fascists want to kill socialists and maintain the capitalist order.
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I think when people falk about #7, it needs to be revised to "your choice of instance doesn't matter when you're a noob. By the time it does matter, you'll understand what you want from an instance and can simply make another account"
Agree on all other points though. I hope Lemmy keeps growing and getting more active. A lot of the communities I've joined only have a few posts in the past year.
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I keep saying that the choice should be meaningful; like I had no trouble picking the Peertube instance I should join because my content would fit their theme.
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Gotta say, the biggest reason I'm not on Pixedfed is because I was told that I could migrate my instagram content, but the two instances I signed up for had that option disabled. I can't seem to find an instance that tells you upfront if it's allowed or not, and I've already wasted enough time on it.
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I've picked on Pixelfed's join page in detail before at length. I think you'd be on board with my suggestions.
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Speaking of complaints we have about the fediverse...
You linked to a post on sh.itjust.works, but I'm on slrpnk.net, so if I want to interact with it, I have hoops to jump through first.
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It’s just the default front end that does that. Using a front end like voyager can automatically redirect links to the instance you are signed in on, more apps and the default front end ought to do that quite frankly
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Or I would have had hoops to jump through to get the lemmy.world link where that comment is (nominally) hosted. There's a chainlink icon and a technicolor pentagram icon, neither of those do it. I either have to manually go to lemmy.world's website, find the comment there, copy the link from there, come back to my account at sh.itjust.works and post it, or I post a sh.itjust.works link and send everyone on an indirect path. It's...not good.
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As always, there's multiple reasons for things. You did a great job breaking down as much as possible :) the other comments are all right, but you are comprehensive :)
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