this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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It's a bit of a shock that simply picking an instance and signing up like any regular site is such a hurdle to so many people.
I think in Mastodon's case it was less that you had to pick an instance, rather they were all instances from companies/people that they didn't know. How many email providers does the average person know? The "my Mastodon admin can read all my posts" discussion also fits into this (they were fine with Twitter doing it). Threads will behave just like any other service in the Fediverse at the end, with all that "complexity", but people will say Threads is easier, just because of the recognition factor and that they already have an Instagram account.
That last bit is part of it. One Instagram account means full access, full interaction. If you don’t have one there’s no approval process, either.
Plus it looks more fleshed out. Let’s face it, a clean and at least vaguely clear UI is far more trustworthy for 99% of people than a possibly sketchy one that seems to almost overcommunicate as far as they’re concerned.
Oh, and speaking of UI, the only app I have for Lemmy on iOS is through Testflight. Most people don’t have, want, or even need a desktop so if there’s no phone app then literally nothing else matters and that’s fair.
Technology is hard
That was not the case with lemmy. Most of the instances I tried required manual approval for signups. It took me going through like 4 different instances to find one that didn't.
To be fair, most people reccomend lemmy.world now, and that doesn't need manual approval. But there's another problem, they can't interact with Beehaw.
"Simply" picking an instance is not actually that simple. Most people just want to go to the site and sign up. Even with email, they know what Gmail and Outlook are. But on Lemmy, there's no indication of what you're supposed to pick. Even if you try to go with what seems like the "default" instance, lemmy.ml, you're met with an announcement saying not to do thaf cause it's overloaded.
People don't want to have to make decisions, especially when they don't have any information to go off of.
That’s the key, you have to figure out what instance is best for you. With a million choices you get choice paralysis mixed with FOMO and they just don’t bother.
IMO that’s probably the biggest problem with anything decentralized like this. The average person doesn’t care about the benefits and the above is by far a big barrier to entry.
The biggest advantage of a decentralized system is that none of the people who are unwilling to invest even the briefest amount of time into understanding something will end up using it.
Most of us don't care what the average person has to say on social media, as demonstrated by what they average person has said on social media over the past 15 years.
If you don’t appeal to the masses then lemmy will stay small, and pushes like threads will wipe it out in no time.
IMO that’s also mastodons biggest problem. They’re essentially trying to stay small an unsuccessful.
Lemmy and Mastadon aren't at all private, by any measure. Not sure what exactly you mean now.
They're also not mega corps tracking and selling your every move. It's quite a bit different. What's public here is what I explicitly make public, there's no unwanted encroachment or permissions.
So it's about profiting off the lack of privacy. Not the lack of privacy itself. Now I get it.
Yes, but also how they are doing it. And to who they are selling the data. Etc. Etc.
Best thing Lemmy signups could do is ask "What's your primary interest?" And randomly select an instance that has that category.
That's a bit hyperbolic. You only do that if you join a heavily political instance or subscribe to tons of political communities. Most of the boards aren't like that.
I guess lack of choice makes choosing easy—you only have one option and that's it, take it or leave it. Having to choose between vastly different options is also easy. But if you have a hundred similar, yet slightly different options to choose from, making the decision becomes psychologically hard, even if it doesn't make a difference for your UX which option you choose.