I’m still very sceptical. While I love the idea of the fediverse, I honestly don’t think it will ever be more than a niche platform. It will probably remain active among “enthusiasts” but I can’t see it ever going mainstream.
It’s just not simple enough. If some non-tech person wants to join Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or Instagram, they just go to the site or app, sign up, and that’s it. No decisions need to be made, there is nothing to understand. My 70 year old mother could do it.
Joining lemmy is a commitment. And more importantly, it requires decisions to be made. Which server should I join? What difference will it make? Am I doing it wrong? Why are there different communities with the same name but on different servers? Why is there no ‘lemmy’ app? Etc.
Those of us who are here have made the effort to understand these things, but the general population won’t bother.
To be honest, most of these issues could be solved using abstraction, and lemmy world already does that to some extend. Giving the site the look and feel of a single website, with one simple way to join and participate will be vital. I’m not saying to remove those decisions, but rather have them on another layer so advanced users can still easily access them, while other users who are either new or don’t care too much about it can just use a common preset.
I’m still very sceptical. While I love the idea of the fediverse, I honestly don’t think it will ever be more than a niche platform. It will probably remain active among “enthusiasts” but I can’t see it ever going mainstream.
It’s just not simple enough. If some non-tech person wants to join Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or Instagram, they just go to the site or app, sign up, and that’s it. No decisions need to be made, there is nothing to understand. My 70 year old mother could do it.
Joining lemmy is a commitment. And more importantly, it requires decisions to be made. Which server should I join? What difference will it make? Am I doing it wrong? Why are there different communities with the same name but on different servers? Why is there no ‘lemmy’ app? Etc.
Those of us who are here have made the effort to understand these things, but the general population won’t bother.
To be honest, most of these issues could be solved using abstraction, and lemmy world already does that to some extend. Giving the site the look and feel of a single website, with one simple way to join and participate will be vital. I’m not saying to remove those decisions, but rather have them on another layer so advanced users can still easily access them, while other users who are either new or don’t care too much about it can just use a common preset.