this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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It will absolutely.
The average non-tech savvy person will be extremely confused about how federated services operate. You say "join lemmy', and they say, 'ok, what's the site?" and then you need to explain, well, you need to pick one of about four thousand instances, and then only go there when you want to sign in. Now they're already confused. That can then be explained 'It's like e-mail, lots of different servers to get email, but they all work together." But this doesn't hit as well because a website is not e-mail, and so interconnected websites are not immediately intuitive. And as soon as you start going into any level of technical details, the average person just tunes out and decides "I don't want to deal with this crap."
If they pick an instance (Like Lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works) that allows free signup, they won't have too much of a problem. If they pick one that has questions to answer and then a manual approval process that is COMPLETELY opaque, they will nope the fuck out immediately and not even bother to find other instances. Heck, I was turned off of Lemmy for several days because of this, and I'm very tech savvy, and have been doing this sort of crap forever. I signed up first at Lemmy.one, which eventually got my login active, but took 3 days. When I saw no indication of that signup working, though, I tried Beehaw. That STILL has not been activated and it's been 5 or 6 days, and of course, there's no indication of what's going on during that time...it's just a spinning wheel. Not until I went to an instance that didn't have these ridiculous manual approvals did I begin using Lemmy. The average user is not going to bother with that.
These are going to be the biggest things that hold Lemmy back (there are also some serious usability issues with the main feed, concerning repeat posts showing for DAYS, and the autorefresh everywhere, which pushes content down constantly if you're in the New feed).
Honestly I think people are making it more complicated than it is. Like everyone tries to compare it to email, but guess what I don't know how email works either. And that's fine, I don't need to understand it. I type words, hit send, tech magic happens, and somebody reads more words. I'd say, just stop trying to explain the technical stuff behind lemmy.
I agree the servers with vetted sign-ups are a major hurdle. I tried behaw first, but I only gave it 15 minutes of waiting before trying to find a new server and now I'm here. I'd tell people to just go with specific open servers, create an account, and boom reddit replacement. The only other thing that needs explained is that some communities are on different servers, but that just means you hit "all" instead of "local" to search. Otherwise it's basically reddit.
My opinion is people need to stop trying to explain the fediverse in detail, nobody cares, nobody needs to know, it's just creating confusion. People don't know how any of their services work and don't care. Just tell them how to get setup in as painless a way as possible.
I gave it a couple of weeks, never got an email about whether my account was approved or denied. It was as transparent as mud. I mentioned it on IRC, and someone said "Oh just keep trying different servers." Initially when I looked at the list a lot of them expressed that they were for people of leftist political leaning, for various countries specifically, LGBTQ+, POC. Joining a server was a complicated process of "What do I join? Will I be welcome there? What is their process? Why am I not seeing any answer?"
Then there's finding communities. You can list them, and for all instances, but then it's quite a massive list to sort through. Searching is hit or miss, and depends on knowing that you have to specifically try to search all instances. Community names aren't super easy to discern so you have to try various forms of your search terms. And trying to do the "reddit like" syntax of /c/ only works on your present server, so unless you know the exact name of the instance you want to try that community on to use the @<lemmy.instance> syntax, it won't work.