The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:
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~30 years old or older
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tech enthusiasts/workers
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linux users
There’s nothing wrong with that particular demographic or anything, but it doesn’t feel like a win to me if the entire fediverse is just one big monoculture.
I wonder what it is that is keeping more diverse users away? Is picking a server/federation too complicated? Or is it that they don’t see any content that they like?
Thoughts?
Yes.
Absolutely.
Literally the single biggest problem with fediverse adoption, brought up in every discussion about migrating to it. It will never replace centralized sites as long as it remains confusing and complicated.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/14t9t66/im_so_lost_is_there_an_easy_mode_to_the_fediverse/
https://www.reddit.com/r/LemmyMigration/comments/145epgc/looking_for_a_lemmy_website_try_lemmyworld/
As long as you point towards the easiest way to join the fediverse first, while only “selling” federation as a feature for power users and people who are genuinely interested, then it doesn’t really matter how complicated the fediverse really is.
If your mom wants you to make her an email account, you don’t explain her how the entire mail system works, along with its history and while reciting a Richard Stallman manifesto about FOSS philosophy. You also don’t send her a link with 100 different email service providers, that all have their own small advantages or disadvantages, while also explaining her how to create her own mail service.
No, you just make her a Gmail account.
I think the official Mastodon app does a great job at simplifying on how to join mastodon. You have a big blue button that lets you join mastodon.social by default, while a smaller grey button is for users, that want another instance. I’m sure you could simplify this even more, but this is a great beginning.
That’s good. I originally looked at Mastodon years ago and it was just as complicated as Lemmy is now. Good that they figured out how to make it easy to use.
On Mastodon it’s pretty easy. Download the official app and go through the prompts. They should probably have a little note saying “just go with the defaults if you’re not sure” but this shouldn’t be a road block for any normal person. The fact that Mastodon has a standard migration method makes this a low-impact decision.
Lemmy is definitely harder. “Jerboa” doesn’t sound like an official app, and I don’t think you can even create an account in Jerboa. So the first step is finding an instance on the web with no guidance. That’s bad.
I still haven’t joined Matrix because it’s too hard. People say I shouldn’t use matrix.org for various reasons (like bans without warning) but I can’t find an alternative that seems sensible. All the guides I found are basically “you should really host your own, but if you’re too much of a noob, here are some Polish lolicon-themed servers you can join”. If it were possible to sign up without feeling like I’m doing something wrong, I would have many years ago.
Yeah with matrix it’s really bad. I’m aware of a whole 5 matrix servers. matrix.org, the one that’s run at my university, mine, and my 2 friend’s matrix servers
Also all matrix clients are currently shit
IMO things would work a lot more smoothly if the official website had a button that made an inversely weighted random selection from the top 20-50 “general purpose” instances and just sent you straight to their site or signup pages. To those who are unwilling to do extensive research, picking from the list they have is basically just choosing randomly anyway.
I think this is not really inline with the philosophy of the main Lemmy devs. For this to happen, I think someone else would have to do the work of creating the random selection service. If it was popular enough, maybe they’d put a link on join-lemmy.org
Well, they already have a list if popular instances and even curate a few “recommended” instances on top of that. Giving the option to pick one randomly automatically doesn’t seem like a stretch.
There are differences between the servers, though. Instead of picking randomly, it should ask you a few questions about what you value and what you intend to do.
I made this account to look at NSFW stuff, for instance. I had read that lemmy.world was the biggest server and it checked all the boxes of allowing NSFW content, downvotes, community creation, etc.. “OK, should be fine.” Only after trying it out did I realize that all NSFW thumbnails are blurred and you have to manually open each one, and lemmynsfw.com has a patch to fix that. So if you’re making an account for that purpose, it should recommend that server.
Likewise, the admins of different servers have different goals and rules. beehaw is expressly created to oppose rationalism(???), for instance, and disabled downvotes and has heavy moderation of things that don’t fit the admins’ beliefs. The Lemmy sign-up process should give examples of the kinds of things that have been banned/moderated and ask if that’s your thing or not your thing.
It should be kind of like https://chooser-beta.creativecommons.org/
(Also, server administration costs matter? Servers that are hosting lots of images will be more expensive to run. If you’re consuming all that content with an account on another server, is that fair?)
You make some good points. A more complicated chooser could be a good idea. I just went for something simple.
I think that beehaw guy was more against the “DESTROYED by FACTS and LOGIC” culture, that you see among self-proclaimed “rationalists”, that use half-baked and deceptive statistics and half-truths to mask their hate and pride behind a facade of fairness and logic to be more appealing to normal people.
“Rationalism” is weird and misguided way to describe this for sure tho.
The moderation aspect is mostly irrelevant imo. Most recommended instances allow any content. NSFW and politics are the two major faultlines here.
For NSFW, make a second account on lemmynsfw. Most people on reddit also typically don’t use their main account to watch porn, so this is reasonable I think.
For politics, all general purpose instances are mostly fine, so you probably don’t even need a second account for that.
If you have extremely passionate political views tho, then another account specialized towards your brand of politics is probably needed. Normal people don’t want to read posts romanticising or denying genocides, concentration camps or gulags after all.
Redditors making political posts are likely no stranger to getting banned anyways, and are used to creating new accounts constantly, so having one more account is probably not a big deal.
I personally got banned so many times on the r/AskMiddleEast sub for believing that democracy and secularism are good things and that war is bad. Someone even made a poll there and almost every user of that sub had been banned at least once (even the mods ban each other). That sub made me realize that online politics is a waste of time, but that’s a different topic.
So much this. The signups process desperately needs to be streamlined
I’ve been trying to decide what the best, smoothest, option is to make the fediverse “better”.
I think that making a line between a “Fediverse client” and “Fediverse Server” is the answer. A client that can easily browse multitudes of servers, letting you join lemmy subs and follow mastodon accounts might be the answer.
It’s about as complicated as choosing an email provider.
Yeah, you can go with gorillamail, or just go with gmail/outlook like everyone who doesn’t have a specific reason not to.
If you suggest to a new user anything other than choosing a big name instance, you’re part of the problem.
Regular users are going to learn by experience, not theory.
I’ve spent all day trying to figure out the fediverse and I’ve read “it’s just like email” about a hundred times. 😒
Yeah, you probably don’t understand how email providers work either. You just use it and don’t ask questions.
I do understand how email providers work, and Lemmy is not just like them. Stop saying this.
Ok.
You can’t post to Twitter from Facebook or vice versa, but if Facebook and Twitter were part of the Fediverse, then you could. Does that help?
Not to the average person, no. The fact that you have to explain this at all is the problem.
We could sit here and speculate about what makes sense to the average person all day, but at the end of the day it wouldn’t amount to anything without evidence to back it up…user studies or something like that.
What I’m asking is does it make sense to you?
No, your analogy is not accurate. If Facebook and Twitter were part of the Fediverse, you might be able to post to one from the other, or you might not, depending on whether one had defederated from another other or not.
To extend the poor email analogy, it would be as if you had a Gmail account and tried to email a friend on Outlook, but you couldn’t because Outlook refused to accept emails from any Gmail address, but you could get through to them if you sent it from a Yahoo address instead.
I clicked it for you:
Yes, this is why I was never able to figure out getting an email address. Too many servers to choose from.
I like it here, but I feel like the community needs to rebrand already. “Fediverse” just sounds like something that’ll never catch on
How about Metaverse as a new name?
Brilliant!
Yeah, that’s a beacon of shining success :) go for it
The official web ui is ugly and unbearable. I am on liftoff which is decent.
Makes sense, how would you resolve it without giving anyone centralized control to make Twitter or Reddit 2.0?
I think the best middle ground might be where there’s a bunch of separate apps that all have their own default server, where they hide most of the fediverse complexity from the user. They’d still all be accessing the same content, but it would just be simpler for ‘normal’ users.
In the long term this will happen tho. If the fediverse becomes more popular, you will definitely have a small handful of powerful instances (either led by foundations or companies) in the center of everything. That’s simply how the internet works.
If you don’t like the mainstream, you can join a defederated instance, that does not want to play with the big dogs.
The only way to keep the fediverse as federated as possible, would be perhaps forcing every community and every user to create their instance. This would probably keep even more people away from the fediverse tho.
I think the point is to have the freedom available. Most people are going to get their email from GMail, but you have the freedom to get it somewhere else if you want to, and you can still send to and receive email from people using GMail. You can even roll your own mail server.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, defederation should be removed from the protocol. (And replaced with a default ban list that can be overriden by the user).
Each instance should basically just be a set of default settings that are used to access the same shared pool of content.
This removes the new user hurdle, because they can now join any instance and not be worried that they are making some important, permanent decision. If they find that they don’t like something about the instance, they can tweak their settings later.
Also, some of the other solutions to this issue carry significant risks. Pushing users towards a ‘default’ instance increases centralization. Apps that are preconfigured to use a specific instance are even worse (since people wont want to change instance if it means giving up a familiar app). Without some degree of vigilance decentralized services tend to centralize over time. This gives too much power over the entire fediverse to a handful of instance admins. If an instance with 60% of all users starts defederating all smaller instances, most users will just migrate to the larger instance.
This isn’t just some theoretical that I pulled out of my ass, its an easily abusable weakness of federated services. It has been abused in the past, and there is no reason to believe it wont be abused again.
Google used it to kill XMPP. Facebook will almost certainly use it to kill mastodon, once they siphon enough users and content to build a critical mass. Microsoft is so notorious for using this strategy that they has their own internal phrase for it: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish