Hey everyone, I’m honestly really liking Lemmy so far. Maybe that’s because it feels so much like browsing reddit 10 years ago and I think it’s safe to say many of us have migrated from the blackout. I’d been a Reddit user since 2010 so I’ve witnessed the slow decline over the years but popping here has really driven home how corporate it started to feel–less like a genuine hub of community and more like a manufactured product with low effort content and some genuine discussion/input peppered throughout.
That said, does anyone feel the idea of a federated platform might be confusing to some less network-savvy users? There’s other successful multi-server platforms like Discord but somehow for me the idea of a ‘chatroom’ versus something more like a forum/board seems like it would make more sense to a less informed user. I could see hearing that posts are aggregating from other sites or being cross-visible confusing to individuals who understand web usage as, ‘visit site–post to site–view content on site’.
Does that make sense? lol Anyways, loving the site so far–hope to see it grow!
Yea I think these are all fair points. And I guess when I say mainstream I don’t mean individuals that churn out low effort farming posts, but rather people who contribute legitimate content/discussion but are pretty ignorant when it comes to internet/tech.
The other thing is–with various forums dedicated to the same content, i.e. technology hosted at beehaw/lemmy.ml/lemmy.world+ it seems like that could potentially hinder growth? Or that it seems superfluous to have multiple forums accessible from one platform dedicated to the same thing but with varying content
I think, given time, a lot of duplicate forums will be consolidated over time, as people start picking favourites. In the case of smaller communities, I expect federation will be of great benefit, as a community could pick one instance and just sit there, without worry that it’ll be duplicated somewhere else and split the community.
Just a guess as an informed observer, of course. We’ll have to see whether I’m actually right.