We're RIGHT HERE :(

Was just talking with a friend that downloaded a Mastodon app a while back when Twitter was bought by Elon, encountered the "Choose a server" bit, and bailed after choice paralysis. They're technical and have a doctorate in Computer Science so it's not like they couldn't figure it out, but there's something in the human psyche where most people don't want to make choices like that. They're on Bluesky now and think its great.

IMO sites like https://pixelfed.org/how-to-join and https://join-lemmy.org/ should just have a normal sign up flow, and load balance between all servers that opt in. Looks like that's going to happen for Pixelfed:

https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113830788279211715

It'll make some people unhappy, but that's just how you get "normies" onto the Fediverse.

If there were a good invite system you could have just shared that including a pre-selected instance for your friend. That's way more effective than trying to explain federation to people not really interested in the first place.
- "Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
  https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
  https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
  https://vger.app/ if you want an app
  Feel free if you have any questions"
- you can do that on Mastodon.
I imagine it's difficult to just round robin sign ups like that when ever server has a different audience, and various instances they federate with.
- You could have a short questionnaire that works as whittles things down based on interests or other parameters (eg. How strict you want the moderation to be or whatever). That could also be used to suggest some optional first follows.
for lemmy I had to try 3 times before landing on this one. just toxic shit constantly pumped my way where I was blocking pretty much everything and still getting more. I still have tons of stuff blocked though.
- I had to leave Lemmy altogether for PieFed to finally be able to block an instance of my choosing, without admin support. Tbf I hear that Sync and Connect can let you do that on Lemmy.
  But these Category of Communities yo, they are really worthwhile!:-)
IMO sites like https://pixelfed.org/how-to-join and https://join-lemmy.org/ should just have a normal sign up flow, and load balance between all servers that opt in.
I think the Join Fediverse site should ask a few questions (what service do you want? Where are you? What are your interests?) and spit out a small handful of suggestions. Shouldn't be too difficult to program.
- That's what join-lemmy.org does, is it not?
I got through it but that’s why I’m @lemm.ee instead of something good.
- I went: oh a UK instance, that'll do. And now I help run the place.
- You can always move. I started on Kbin.
  Admittedly, having the service collapse in on itself probably helps with the migration...
- There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with lem.ee I'm thinking that's where I'll set up my backup account for when Aussie.zone is down
- No reason you can't make the switch now to a better instance
.> Mind shuts down when asked to make a choice for himself
.> Is in computer science
Checks out
- Decision fatigue. It's a well known concept and can even be used in marketing as a standard manipulation tactic. If you have a job that has you making strategic decisions all day though, then you'll get decision fatigue. Then the last thing you want to do is mull over a bunch of server details to make the right choice 🤷‍♀️
doctorate in Computer Science
Lmfao
If account migration is easy, that’s probably ideal. If you use something for a while and find yourself drawn to a specific server, and moving is easy once you’ve got a handle on the service, great. That could also help smaller communities who want to vet new members, allowing them to see post/comment history.
this is what the open source community refuses to understand. If you want to go mainstream, you need to give users less choice. There is one windows, there is one macos, but one struggles to describe just what a linux distro even is.
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
https://vger.app/ if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions"
Why isnt there a federated tiktok clone, we have twitter, discord, and reddit, imo a tiktok/vine one has a higher chance of working, prob hella expensive tho
- There is! https://loops.video/
- https://vidzy.codeberg.page/

“This also highlights the fact that people are thirsty for platforms that aren’t controlled by the same few oligarchs,”

So they move (and apparently willingly provide more access to their info than they already need to) to a platform that is controlled by a different few oligarchs, as a treat.. 🙄

Also, you say we're right here, but the number of people already here praising this shit* because they're either tankies simping for faux communists, or simply too indoctrinated to realise that you don't have to choose one, and can oppose both oppressive states (which use almost identical tactics), is pretty fucking gross.

*and before they descend on me with their bullshit and excuses and their throwing of marginalised people under the bus for the sake of maintaining their own black and white view of the world - yes Chinese and American people communicating and breaking down barriers is good. However the idea that this can honestly and freely be done on their oppressive state controlled media, any more than it can on ours, or that one is somehow less oppressive than the other, is a joke, and so are the people ignoring the fact that both states have equally terrible mass surveillance and control over our communications.

Oligarch doesn't mean a rich person, it means a person who controls the country with their wealth. Even the richest people in china are still at the governments behest, not the other way around like in America.
- Lmmfao, who do you think runs the Chinese government, the workers?
  Anyway, thanks for providing an example of exactly the kind of bullshit and excuses I was referring to.
They are just kids saying fuck you to their parents, same as it ever was since before the dawn of humanity.:-) Hopefully after awhile then move to a more sensible platform. This is our opportunity to help build it and make it welcoming enough to want to join...

Yes, it's an odd one. I was listening to all the breathless coverage and thinking "they must just not like us." It's like school all over again!

That said, I wonder how much of it is because it makes good copy. After all, Pixelfed's usage has taken off like a rocket and it's app was doing better than quite a few of the larger social media platforms:

https://feddit.uk/post/22742725

didn't really rocket but yeah, it had a notable increase

"This also highlights the fact that people are thirsty for platforms that aren't controlled by the same few oligarchs," Quintin said. "People will happily jump to another platform even if it presents new, unknown risks."

Once again...meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

the children yearn for the vines

Fuckin vine man let's resurrect vine and partner it with loops or something

while others say they are purposefully giving RedNote access to their data in a show of protest against the wishes of the U.S. government.

Ah yes, the ole Gavin McInnes method of showing the government who’s boss. Got it.

Honestly the Fediverse needs to realize that decentralizing has consequences for the user experience. The average user is confused by the idea that there are multiple instances of a single community, for example realizing that there is a /c/AskLemmy on multiple instances can be really confusing, especially for lay people who aren't technically inclined.

Even for those that aren't intimidated or confused, it can still be frustrating to not have a centralized community, and there can be diminished value from not having all the users in one centralized place, e.g. if you ask your question on one instance and it doesn't reach a bunch of users because of defederation and fracture between different instances, the truth is your question isn't really going out to Lemmy but instead some smaller subset of Lemmy users. This dilutes the usefulness of that online community in a lot of cases - there is less content, fewer interactions, etc.

Ultimately people are only going to sacrifice so much, they may be thirsty for a platform that isn't run by oligarchs, but the Fediverse doesn't seem to offer feature parity for most people, as we saw with the failed migration of users to Mastodon after Elon Musk acquired Twitter.

they may be thirsty for a platform that isn’t run by oligarchs
Except this isn't the case at all, evidently.
I doubt they care at all who runs the platform they use (again, evidently), they just want the addictive dopamine hit these apps are designed to constantly provide (the vast majority of people didn't leave fb or twitter because of zuck or musk, they left because something more addictive and personally tailored thanks to even more intrusive and manipulative algorithms came along). Honestly, the idea that this migration is fuelled by any anti-rich/anti censorship sentiments (neither of which is met by rednote) is completely ridiculous.
Otherwise I agree, the fediverse can be hard for people to pick up, which is a shame, but I think those who genuinely do want to get away from oligarchs, the state, and their censorship, rather than just keep swiping (or whatever you do on tiktok/rednote) for their dopamine, are much more likely to actually make the small effort it requires to figure it out.
- Not everyone has the same situation.
  Sure, some people have every opportunity to research and learn about alternatives, but the number of those people are much fewer than the number of people busy raising kids, holding down jobs, etc. This idea that users are mostly idiots who are addicted to the algorithm is highly reductive, it actually adopts the cynical mindset of the capitalists trying to manipulate people (that users are just marks, idiots to be exploited, deserving of their exploitation). It's honestly surprising to see how much hatred people have for the average user here, considering to my mind Lemmy is meant to be a non-profit, community-driven alternative to corporate apps like Reddit. You would think that mindset would come with some understanding that the users are the victims and that blaming them misses the point. Lemmy is not a perfect alternative to Reddit, as I made my point above, so blaming the users feels a bit delusional to me, and honestly quite convenient to the desires of the oligarchs, which is to ignore social, economic, and otherwise structural inequalities and manipulations and instead focus on the failings of individuals (in this case users) to not exceed their circumstances.
The average user is confused by the idea that there are multiple instances of a single community, for example realizing that there is a /c/AskLemmy on multiple instances can be really confusing, especially for lay people who aren’t technically inclined.
Isn't the same on Reddit? How do people know what is the best community between /r/Games, /r/Gaming, ,/r/VideoGames, /r/TrueGaming?
It is known for instance than /r/Canada isn't as good as /r/OnGuardForThee , but that is something that people have to figure out too.
- Yes, and I think Reddit has struggled to gain the same number of users as other social media platforms - their UI is more challenging for a lot of people, and the experience of trying to find communities can be frustrating and confusing. It's a good point, but I still found it fairly easy to find the main subreddit for a given community based on the activity going on. My point about fractured instances is that you don't have something like two /c/Gaming communities that don't overlap in users at all due to defederation. On Reddit a user is on a single instance with all the communities in one place. On Lemmy you have to find not just the community but also the instance that community is on (or an instance that federates with the instance the community is on). All of these extra steps are even more complicated, and remember Reddit's interface was already confusing for lots of people.
That's also a feature though. If I want to ask "should I risk snuggling myself into another state (in the USA) in order to get an abortion - what if someone finds out?", then I don't want the opinions of the Alt-Right (or the Alt-Left either), bc... I am not insane?
Also, isn't Lemmy far less fractured than Mastodon?
- yes, the bug is a feature in some sense, but it's still also a bug 😅
  Do you know how big Lemmy is compared to Mastodon? I actually know much less about Mastodon, I just never could use anything like Twitter, trying to fit my thoughts into so few characters was futile (and yeah, maybe that's a me problem, but still). Anyway, just completely speculating that if Lemmy is newer and smaller it might not have had the same opportunity to develop the same animosities and fractures, but at this point I'm literally making up fictions.
Maybe there should be a library of all the communities that have matching names and goals, so that an app can present them as one group with all the posts and comments merged as if it was just the one community.
The app would need some smarts so as to de-duplicate posts etc.
- A semi-unified view is sorta what you get when instances are federated with one another, not that communities with the same name get unified but at least both communities' posts show up in one place. But the problem is even if you solve those problems, you still have instances that will defederate over differences in moderation policies and politics, etc. - ultimately a given set of instances will still always be a fractured subset of all the Lemmy instances. Maybe with enough people in a set of instances this wouldn't be a problem, but you have to find a way to get that many people to show up and stick around, and you have to keep those instances playing nice with one another and not falling apart like Mastodon instances did when a huge number of people migrated. People bring drama and overwhelm these smaller communities which are maintained by volunteers running servers and moderating. Ultimately what you see is that people just quit, and there is no stability - and then users leave and don't come back.
  It's just not a model for gaining and retaining users, tbh.
- Maybe there should be a library of all the communities that have matching names and goals, so that an app can present them as one group with all the posts and comments merged as if it was just the one community.
  Not sure people want to see a merge between !politics@lemmy.world and !usa@lemmy.ml
Maybe I'm just old but the concepts are no harder than irc or Usenet. It's been around forever.
- I think my mom would find IRC and usenet very difficult to get into using, for example. Being old doesn't mean it's accessible or understandable to people. Even worse, the young people (like "Gen Z", as much as I hate to use generational thinking) seem to be less tech-literate than Gen Y, so lots of the relevant user base are not going to navigate these things even if they seem simple to a lot of us. Just the curse of expertise I guess (where you forget what it was like before you knew things, how intimidating it all was, etc.).
If someone gets confused about two different places with the same name existing then, frankly, they are not good enough to join lemmy to begin with. They'd just lower the quality of the platform, and i say that as someone who doesn't contribute all that much myself.
- sure, I can understand that concern, but I think there are plenty of users who might need better UI/UX for so many different reasons (thinking of disabilities like dyslexia, etc.) that have nothing to do with the quality of the content they would bring.
  My point is that users bring content and activity, and that is why people ultimately want to join and stick around in an online community. Not every person who finds the Fediverse confusing is "not good enough" - I just hard disagree with you, there are plenty of good people with useful and entertaining things to contribute who would be more likely to if there weren't barriers. Regardless, this attitude is exactly what I think undermines the Fediverse, it's arrogant and alienating. Lemmy shouldn't be just for the technologically privileged, websites in general should be accessible to people of all kinds and perhaps online communities especially. What's the point of a community-built social media alternative if we reject most humans who would make up that community?

"people are thirsty for platforms that aren't controlled by the same few oligarchs" so they're willingly submitting to and supporting CCP tyrannical oppression because they personally have never felt it's raw evil, "Fuck the Chinese" I guess, huh

Nah, fuck the Chinese GOVERNMENT. You don't have to be bigoted towards the people of a country to disapprove of what their authoritarian government does.
Personally, I have nothing against the people of China, Iran, or the US (to name a few obvious examples of peoples under the boot of an unrepresentative government), but that doesn't mean that I approve the oppression and other abuses their governments keep committing towards their own people and others.
- congratulations, everyone else understood what i was saying but you

2 massive issues I have with pixelfed: No support for webp No support for hevc/heic

I don't use an iPhone but I do use heic for 10bit. As heic is default on iPhone, this means that iPhone users go through all the hassle to set up a pixelfed account but then can't upload anything.

That's not good.

Lol. I'm not actually surprised at all that the country that just elected Junior Hitler again is literally begging to be fucked by the CCP. You REALLY cannot fix stupid and stupid is now the vast majority.

Only a small minority of the tiktok users live in the swing states that mattered. Besides, both parties pushed for this ban, and now Trump is actually going to try and stop the shutdown so he can look like a hero.
It's like Democrats are allergic to doing anything that's popular.

Maybe people want a platform that’s more than just a constant Linux and capitalism-bad circlejerk sprinkled with some basic news and askreddit-type threads.

I mean, shut up. Lemmy is great, thanks to it I spend even less time on social media because I get depressed if I overdo Lemmy.
- https://lemmy.world/post/23952547
https://lemmy.world/post/23952547
We have Star Trek too

I mean look at it from their perspective: either there is a war with China, in which case you're fucked so many more ways than whatever data tiktok has collected. Or you're one of a billion with compromised data. What are the Chinese going to do? Pick you in your service industry job to blackmail for no reason? Even if they were doing that the chances of it being a you are one in a million. Advertise more directly to you? The fact is no one cares.

The desire for privacy is either necessary to a very small percentage of the population or just an icky feeling with no discernable consequences. (Even if you list me irl consequences for the Chinese taking your data, I can guarantee you it doesn't end up affecting the majority of people's lives in a noticeable way.)

- Yeah. That's my point.

I mean, I'd rather the foreign tyrant get my data than the one that can actually use it. Not that I'm even on anything but Lemmy and youtube anyway.

It's super funny that so many zoomers have just moved to another (more) Chinese app. So obviously the reporting has been about that, and not the fediverse. But I also don't understand why people have a need for these apps to get big. A small community of people who I kind of know a little bit is a way better experience.

I think it's because TikTok and Instagram create dopamine addiction with their feed algorithms. Fediverse social networks do not.
- Sure they don't. Can't imagine why I spend all the hours here

Yeah sorry but no. Lemmy sucks and the fediverse is an overly complicated mess of in groups, our groups, federated and non federated communities and people will be racist to you and and you can also end up indoctrinated just as much by picking the wrong community starting point.

Wondering why people aren't here doesn't take a big mystery and despite all the people in here with blinders for all kinds of topics I'm not shocked that anyone looking in would be disgusted, compare this place to 4chan with user names and move on.

I'm going to be honest, I do feel a little baffled but maybe that's because I didn't vibe with tik tok.

I think the pros are probably responsiveness and uptime (compared to fediverse things). Even now, hexbear goes down for one reason or another, to say nothing of back when we were the biggest lemmy instance (sorry Des, god that was a while ago), and setting up a new server is something that the vast majority of people don't want to do (especially compared to just signing up for an account). I think this is especially the case if you mostly consume video. While peertube (and others?) does exist, video is still pretty big per second of content, meaning that sort of continuous scroll video is a big ask for a small private server.

Compared to Facebook or Twitter or whatever, its unlikely that a Chinese spy is going to rat your weed ring out to American feds, unlike Facebook or Twitter (which routinely co-operate with American cops, no warrant).

Lastly, network effect, which is the big one. If the big creators you follow (idk what tiktok is like) go somewhere, you're going to follow them (well, not you, fellow lemmy person, but you know who I'm talking about). And your preference is that all your big creators go to the same place rather than to a dozen fediverse instances. Not that it would be insurmountable, but it would be a bigger ask.

Specific oligarchs may still be an effect (Zuck or Musk are not necessarily the most popular people).

We're right here and we suck, mate. FOSS almost always sucks.

Besides, many Lemmy users have been very clear that they do not want the fediverse to have more reach. We don't try to appeal to TikTok users. We don't want to make space for them.