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Could federation be a turn-off for more 'mainstream' users? (self.lemmyworld)

submitted 1 year ago by drubbis to c/lemmyworld

139 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hey everyone, I'm honestly really liking Lemmy so far. Maybe that's because it feels so much like browsing reddit 10 years ago and I think it's safe to say many of us have migrated from the blackout. I'd been a Reddit user since 2010 so I've witnessed the slow decline over the years but popping here has really driven home how corporate it started to feel--less like a genuine hub of community and more like a manufactured product with low effort content and some genuine discussion/input peppered throughout.

That said, does anyone feel the idea of a federated platform might be confusing to some less network-savvy users? There's other successful multi-server platforms like Discord but somehow for me the idea of a 'chatroom' versus something more like a forum/board seems like it would make more sense to a less informed user. I could see hearing that posts are aggregating from other sites or being cross-visible confusing to individuals who understand web usage as, 'visit site--post to site--view content on site'.

Does that make sense? lol Anyways, loving the site so far--hope to see it grow!

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[–] damipereira 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If lemmy every becomes mainstream the implementation details will be completely lost to people, and that's ok. You can try explaining someone what a web browser is, but people will still say "I opened google" or even "I opened internet" instead of "I opened chrome". With lemmy there will probably be a few huge instances that people just gravitate to, and if/when something goes wrong, communities will have to migrate, and users will have to try to get into a new instance.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I already can imagine some people talking to their tech savy friend and telling them

fediwhat? I don't want any of that. I will stay and use lemmy.world

[–] damipereira 3 points 1 year ago

It's like old bar names from when people did not know how to read, I don't know what that fediverse and lemmy stuff is, I just go to the white monkey.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's what happened with email. Back in the day it was basically just institutions and very geeky people with basement servers who had an email address (and before that, government). For it to hit mainstream, large, for-profit corporations, had to set up mail servers and make it easy to get in and use it. Nowadays people just use their browser or outlook or Gmail app without even knowing what an SMTP server is. If the fediverse evolved that way, I hope by then there are a lot of communities that have taken root in community-owned instances, otherwise power just gets reconcentrated to a few big players again.

[–] damipereira 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That makes sense. I guess there's no one stopping someone from creating an instance which has ads and tries to do a for-profit version right? The only thing that might happen is all the other instances un-federating it.

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

Pretty much. I feel like people see Lemmy and Mastodon in its current state, and they think oh that's the fediverse, then. But as the fediverse grows, everything on it will have to evolve or die. I mean, Lemmy is in alpha at the moment. The more instances and people start using Lemmy, the more it will have to change to accommodate those people. Infrastructure will have to be created, even new policies on how servers can communicate to avoid abuse. This is all just the beginning.