This comes to us courtesy of @[email protected]. As a technical person I sometimes find it difficult to communicate with my friends about the value proposition of Lemmy and other federated platforms.
The reality is 99.9% of people are going to instantly tune out the moment they hear "federation", "decentralized", or "self-hosted". These things all existed before the centralized social media hellscape we have today, but those centralized platforms gained dominance because they were able to package their value into a simple pitch: "Your one-stop shop for social!"
Another good example of this is comparing the current state of the official Lemmy website to the official Mastodon website.
Mastodon spends the first 2 page scrolls offering you a visual explanation of what their platform offers, a cohesive and familiar social experience. It's not until you get 1/3 into the page that you see the words "open source", and the word "federation" doesn't even appear in the main copy, it's used in a user testimonial towards the bottom of the site.
Lemmy's site on the other hand has an okay paragraph of copy about it's value proposition, but then spends the first two image tiles and blurbs showing and talking about its source code and infrastructure, with only the third referencing moderator tools.
The following section talks about self-hosting and the fediverse, with only a brief mention to the core value proposition. I could go on about the remainder of the site but by this point it's likely that the majority of users who weren't already seeking this and/or are technically inclined have left.
Communicating the value of these things is difficult and something we're going to need to focus on improving both as platform providers and as users of that platform. That's why I'm so enamored with this video from Nina. It is quick and to the point, it only communicates what needs to be said for anyone to understand the value prop, and it does so in a way that doesn't invoke any of the exclusive terminology.
Thank you for coming to my ~~TED Talk~~ rant.
I agree with your point about the difference between the lemmy and mastodon websites; lemmy could do a significantly better job attracting more users if it changed the welcome page to make the more familiar features clearer.
At the end of the day, federation isn't the important part here IMO. Lemmy is still a social media platform, and social media rides or dies on engagement. Without users, there isn't engagement. I know that tiny communities can exist for years just fine online, and that lemmy did so with a very small user base. But, if people on here seriously want a true alternative to other social media, that alternative needs to show that it has enough engagement to keep people coming back.
To me it's much more important to show prospective users that the tools for engaging with the sited platform are familiar and easy to use, than it is to dive into the details of how federation works. The average user simply won't care about federation unless it directly affects them.
And frankly, those old internet forums went out of style for a good reason. It was annoying to have 10 accounts to keep track of on 10 different social media sites. I don't think anyone today would say that signing up or distinct forums that fo us on topics you care about is a true alternative to big social media like reddit. The way lemmy talks about itself right now makes it seem like you're back on the old forum system, when the whole point of federation is exactly the opposite of that! This FIXES the "you need 10 accounts" problem for the most part. At the end of the day, people want to know that a thing is easy to use and understand, and that other people with similar interests are using it.