Fediverse

I remember being curious about the fediverse and when I first looked and saw "instances" I got decision fatigue.

I didn't know if an instance would limit me from interacting with others, could randomly disappear (ie hexbear domain), or if some instances would be a bad fit. I also didn't know of it was unchangeable. Decision fatigue set in and I was less excited, but still registered.

To overcome that, there should be a "randomly choose for me" button with notes next to it that say you can change later, it won't impact things, and you can interact with any instance. For random selection, just make it the top 3 most popular instances. Use a fun icon to indicate random change so the on boarding user has to think less.

Instances seem very confusing to an average user, as does federation. There could be an explanation like "Instead of 1 big company controlling everything, there are many copies of Lemmy that are in different places run by volunteers. These "instances" or copies are all Lemmy and can interact with each other, but having many copies means there isn't ever 1 big company who can set all the rules and suddenly change thing in a bad way. " and then the random selection button which almost everyone would choose.

The average user dosn't want to RTFM and also has an IQ of around 100 which is really low. The average reading ability of someone in the USA is like 6th grade level or something atrocious. You can't overestimate average intelligence in an in boarding process.

Someone advocating for bells and whistles will get eaten alive here. Too many people would rather read their feed on a git terminal. The pushback would be worse than the community drama!

For me, a major issue is federation control. On Mastodon & co, I can mute entire instances, cutting out A LOT of bullshit. On Lemmy, if I want that kind of control, I need to run my own instance. Doable, but kinda overkill.

It's one thing to hide individual subreddits on a centralised platform. It's another thing entirely to have many sites building a big platform, with the same communities duplicated with different rules and followings. That's just a game of wack-a-mole at that point.

And if I don't like the instance's communities, chances are I don't want to interact with its users either, leading to even more wack-a-mole.

Something else to keep in mind is that most Redditors nowadays (like Twitter and Bluesky users) are mobile users. I think a lot of Lemmy mobile apps have a good UI and solve that problem. However, it's hard to point new users at a single website/app/etc to join. Bluesky does that. Obviously, that's bad for decentralization, but Bluesky is also still a beta protocol that's headed toward decentralization at some point. Their single instance was necessary for them at the start.

When a new/small social media platform that acts as an alternative of a bigger platform pops up, one of the common topics on the alternative are people talking about how it's better than the old place and/or just trashing the old place. Eventually, they outgrow that (assuming that platform survives). I feel like that's happened with Bluesky. Browsing it, everyone seems to be talking about their own usual topics now, and I see very few posts calling out Twitter or comparing Bluesky to Twitter nowadays.

Lemmy still feels like it's in that "bash the old place" stage to me. Maybe ~20% or posts I see are talking about Reddit or talking about Lemmy in relation to Reddit. It's annoying.