Technology

I see a lot of comments here saying that the vision of being "Mainstream" is not something Lemmy or other Fediverses try to achieve so they discard the feedback about UX or user comfort and discoverability because "we're not trying to appeal to everyone or grow infinitely".

And while I agree somewhat that "growth" is not the goal, I do feel like a lot of people here miss the point that "Being available to Mainstream users" is also greatly about diversity.

If the user experience and hurdles a user has to pass are great enough to filter only tech savvy or people who the issues with Reddit/Twitter are big enough to take action on, you self select to a very specific population.

You should try to help introduce diversity of people, and any user experience pitfalls and extra requirements reduce that diversity. If the "fediverse" want artists, zookeepers, woodworkers, small business owners, hobbyists, lawyers and many other people with views and interesting content to contribute this is a really bad hurdle.

Part of the reason why so many places of community that downplay user experience trend towards the same population of open source evangelists with the same form of discussion and "hivemind" that already exists in many iterations of this same experiment in the past.

I feel like that's what the author is talking about more than "It needs to beat Twitter" when he's talking about mainstream appeal, and anyone ignoring that is potentially dooming this or any other "let's give people an open alternative to big platforms" to only serve their own specific subset of people and build another same-y echo chamber that could have been achieved using any self hosted forum system.

I know I'm a bit late to the party here with this comment, but I hope it someone helps change someone's mind about downplaying the concerns raised in this post.

Sorry, I couldn’t read this all the way through. All I hear that author saying is various capitalist-mindset “if it won’t serve everyone and won’t ever become a monopoly that crushes competitors, it’s not worth doing” b.s.

It’s perfectly fine that the Fediverse isn’t the best option for everyone! Geeze!

I'm kinda pissy cause the guy never even responded to being made aware of data like this and that
(i feel confident that he saw my comment cause he replied directly at my first one in the thread)

Migrating from Twitter and Facebook is much harder than migrating from Reddit. Twitter and Facebook have you follow mostly individuals, so if those individuals don't all move at the same time to somewhere new, you never get the network effect. Whereas with Reddit, you follow topics. A list of topics can start small and grow with the community.

And you don't need even .1% of the users of Reddit to make a good community. As a Reddit user of 16 years, I would argue that good communities actually only happen when they are smaller like what we have here now.

seems like the author is frustrated that a place where the 1% of people who care about freedom over inconvenience cares more about freedom than the user experience of the 99%

its not like the poor user experience or being against joining large instances are to satisfy some egotistical whim. decentralization is hard, the fediverse still a work-in-progress and upcoming solutions (nomadic identities) would likely not be well received either

It panned out for me. I used to check Twitter everyday, but now I haven't even looked at it in weeks. The Fediverse is the healthier alternative that's better for me, better for the internet, and better for society in general.

Does the fediverse need to consume all of the traffic that's currently directed at other platforms? I think the best thing about the Fediverse is that it provides more options for online social spaces.

If I don't like Twitter I can try something else. If I don't like Reddit I can go elsewhere. It doesn't have to be the exact same thing as those services, as long as it provides me an enjoyable way to consume information in my free time.

I don't feel like the goal is to absorb all of the traffic from every other site though? Or if it is that seems misguided.

I'm very much enjoying my time on Kbin, even if it is janky and new and imperfect. All of that is actually kind of refreshing

Ah yes, another tech person who says the fediverse is dead. And yet we continue to grow

yeah, i agree with the OP. decentralized networks have a hump thats hard to smooth out, and activitypub isnt the best protocol in the furst place.

I've tried to like Mastodon, but each time I end up deleting my account in frustration, vowing never again. Mastodon is horrible to use, and they like it that way.

Mastodon's biggest detriment is it's creator

The Fediverse as a whole has a lot to offer There just is not one unified voice for it and some find the concept hard to understand or follow Maybe if there was a Fediverse Foundation

The great #twittermigration worked out for me because I always thought twitter sucked, with its obviously made up trending hashtags and suggested accounts.

In the Fediverse, I find myself following interesting people and wanting to see what they post out of curiosity, and interacting with them in a genuine way. Kind of like old phpBB forums or the early days of meeting people on campus through Facebook. Maybe that's not what most people are looking for, or maybe that's not the narrative that marketing teams who pay for these articles are trying to push (caveat: I'm an Ars Pro subscriber). It's really difficult to monetize the fediverse, after all.

The Fediverse has me interested in people I've never met. Traditional social media has me wanting to ignore people that I already know.

The barrier to entry is lovely.

I'm honestly torn. Their points about it not having monetization make zero sense - there's a bunch of shit on the internet available for free, the fediverse didn't invent that. I also find it very interesting that they tore into the rough around the edges federating of mastodon without mentioning how smooth it is on lemmy, kbin, etc. Though to be honest I tried mastodon and it did feel kinda dead

I mean it's hard to argue this isn't true. Mastodon (and Lemmy) have a fraction of the userbase of Twitter (and Reddit).

I want to think that Lemmy will be immune to this to some extent compared to Mastodon, since I think personally Twitter-style engagement is worse and less interesting than Reddit-style engagement.

But the author does address this point a little bit:

We are, however, getting something of a repeat of this with Reddit's current brouhaha over API changes, only this time with the mooted alternative being Lemmy and, more specifically, Kbin.social. The latter has already avoided a lot of the above pitfalls and is growing quite nicely, but the worry from my side is that the same purism and proselytization about decentralizing everything will eventually bugger up the #RedditMigration exactly as it did the #TwitterMigration.

In truth, I don't think these things are truly fixable. The decentralized nature of the network introduces inherent issues and trade-offs that ruin the end user experience, and the people who are by and large responsible for anything that might ameliorate those trade-offs are also the people who are least likely to perceive an issue with them. Mainstream adoption as such is not really possible without pissing off a lot of the people who have made Mastodon their home, or at least getting those people to make some compromises they will not want to make. If they don't want to, that's fine, but that will have to come at the same time alongside it remaining an obscure, niche network.

The rebuttal I would offer is that if people create higher-quality content and higher-quality communities in Lemmy, then I think people will continue aggregating into it. There's nothing special about Reddit per se; it started at nowhere too. And there are a ton of subs that required really strict ideological purity so that isn't a fediverse-exclusive problem either.

Still, I think the article is largely correct about Mastodon, and that it's reasonable to be concerned for Lemmy.

Nailed it.

Then there's the absolutely abysmal UX of following someone who exists on another Mastodon instance when you're linked to their profile, which involves the non-obvious steps of manually copying and pasting a URL into a search box on your home instance, waiting for a connection to be made, then following them, at which point you won't see any of their old posts, just their new ones. Compare and contrast with Twitter's handling, which is where you search for a username and can see all their posts and can follow them without having to manually copy and paste a single damn thing.