This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.
Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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I fully agree here. Whatever software they have developed, is not rocket science, and mostly based off of existing standards.
Gmail, Outlook, etc... just a bunch of *DAV servers on top of an emailing service, paired with some SSO. Same goes for Reddit/X/FB. A simple DB just storing some info and doing some fancy sorting based on that info.
Yes!
But, on the other hand it's a two-fold sword.
Corps are making money off of peoples lack of knowledge, and this has been the way of how "offering a service" is being done probably since human history... and yes, it pisses me off as well, especially when it comes to human health and nutrition, etc...
But....
Say, you hire contract workers, to build a house, bc. you don't know how to do it yourself. Then you need to hire someone else to approve the quality of the work that's been done, since again... you lack the knowledge. After you've moved in, something breaks, again... you hire someone to fix it.
Now, at what point do you start learning about all the components involved in a built house? electricity, plumbering, walls, etc... and most importantly, do you even care in learning so or not?
And some people, just don't care. They simply don't. Even if the concept of a topic is very easy to grasp, they simply lack the interest in knowing about how it works.
Say you hire a company to build a house. You don't have the skills or the know-to, but at some point, you'll have to deal with some inevitable aspects of building a house, if only to discuss them with the workers. Say they "force" you to deal with plumbing, for example by including it in the budget. Imagine if you not only don't know how plumbing works, but also what plumbing is. Maybe you've never had to think about it before. What would you do? Would you go to another company that doesn't force you to deal with it, perhaps by not even providing it in the first place?
Say for the sake of argument that this becomes a generalized problem, and companies use it as an excuse to no longer provide plumbing in new houses, as a cost-saving measure. Most people don't seem to care. Over 10 years pass by, and people have gotten used to expect not having running water at home. "It sucks, but that's the way it is I guess".
Now, a community-driven initiative arises to build cheaper houses, complete with running water. Can you imagine most people refusing participating, because building a house with running water implies having to know that plumbing supplies water? That the mere thought of it is already too complicated, and that maybe having fresh water at home is only for people whose special interest is plumbing?
You need some elementary knowledge on things, if only to exist in the world. The Fediverse, and I mean this wholeheartedly, is not that complicated once you grasp the most basic concepts of the internet.
While I won't deny outright that open-source devs most of the time don't think about making their software accessible to the wider public, and that some aspects of decentralized social media still have to be ironed out (duplicated communities on Lemmy are a pet-peeve of mine); these issues are often heavily blown out of proportion. Besides people honestly not understanding some concepts, I think there is also some deliberate anti-intellectualism going on with this topic in particular. People who spend their afternoons troubleshooting Windows just so that their computer games run at 60 FPS suddenly don't know what a website is when Mastodon is mentioned.
I'm pretty certain that this "Fediverse is too complicated" mantra would not have worked at all before 2010.