Mastodon is REALLY unfriendly from a UX perspective. To many, federation is a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist for them. In their mind, the early model of federation is like email, a problem that was "solved" years ago by having one corporate product that was much better than others (Gmail).
Reiterating, why should people care about the fediverse?
The fediverse is lacking the user numbers, and those that do post don't really interact with others. Spend some time with the newhere tag and you'll see a lot of people that make the occasional post, send a lot of replies, and end up leaving because that engagement ends up with maybe 2 followers. It's rather clique-y.
Some fediverse sites (e.g. Lemmy) have bad reputations, and Mastodon partly suffers from this. Outside of tech, where people argue with each other all the time anyway, there isn't really anything worthwhile being posted.

Generally speaking, how is Mastodon any better than Bluesky? How is Lemmy any better than Reddit? If you can't answer that in a way the average person gives a fuck about, what's the argument for using them?

[–] ngwoo 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

To many, federation is a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist for them. In their mind, the early model of federation is like email, a problem that was "solved" years ago by having one corporate product that was much better than others (Gmail).

To add, on top of that, the fediverse is like if gmail could just randomly decide to stop receiving emails from outlook addresses and there's nothing any user can do about it except make another email for when they want to email outlook users.

I don't think fediverse proponents know just how catastrophically this terminates their entire pitch in the minds of 99% of internet users

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

if gmail could just randomly decide to stop receiving emails from outlook addresses and there’s nothing any user can do about it

This is the case right now.

There's good reasons GMail doesn't do that, but there's absolutely nothing technical preventing from doing that, and I can't think of anything that legally prevents them from doing that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not leagaly but users will be frustated and leave. They will rollback within a day so you will not need to worry too much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

"users will be frustated and leave" exactly the same thing can happen to an instance that adds an instance (or wildcard domain) block. I'd be very surprised if no instance has ever rolled back a block.

Users don't need to worry about instance blocks on ActivityPub, any more than they have to worry about DNS RBLs for email.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

and those that do post don't really interact with others

I’ve found quite the opposite on Mastodon. I get WAY more interaction on there than I ever did on Twitter.

I do a radio show on Monday nights. Despite having more followers on Twitter I never really managed to attract many listeners. Dropped it for a few years and started up again a few months back, publicising solely through Mastodon. Engagement with it is three or four times what it was before.

It’s essentially a request show, and there have been a couple of weeks where I’ve not had to pick any songs to fill the time, all of it has been filled by listener requests.

That said, that’s only my experience, it may be different for others.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

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