A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
Because all their friends stay. So to get them to switch, you'd need everyone thay know to switch, which would need everyone they know to switch...
... soon, you need to organize a switch between millions of people, which really isn't happening.
So the only people on fedi are those ok with keeping multiple profiles, and even then just the ones that value the technical aspects over quantity of content: mostly tech nerds and people with strong feelings about politics.
Have you invited people to the fediverse?
Yep I literally didn't hear about it till last week
Ease of access and user experience. A single platform beats that, as you donβt have to choose where to signup and everything will be available without effort.
However, Lemmy is getting better with that and hopefully the user base continues growing. It doesnβt need to have a billion users to be an awesome experience.
Plus it's not easy to explain. Instagram is for pictures and reels Facebook is for people you know IRL Twitter* is for short sentences you spit out Lemmy... well it's a collection of lots of different instances and then you've got communities on each one and some are duplicated but you can join them anyway etc etc
Even if people know fediverse, if the content they want doesn't exist here, they won't stay.
There are Japanese Twitter refugee to fedi (especially Misskey) several times. A lot of big creator doesn't stay as they want to get the highest number of engagement to keep their (art) business afloat.
Do you know any regular people? Most people I know have never even heard the word fediverse.
Not to mention "most people" wouldn't fit in here or feel welcome. Remember Donald Trump won the popular vote and even those who didn't vote didn't feel strongly enough about either side to pick one or the other. It's not just the US, far right candidates keep gaining popularity in parts of Europe. And I think a lot of people aren't interested in Star Trek or trans rights. The niche communities have very low levels of activity too. The fediverse just isn't for everyone.
Is this a joke question?
People are giving great answers here. One I didn't notice at a glance is that the Fediverse is feckin small. Most of the world doesn't know it exists yet, and centralized social medias are probably not gonna be super big about pushing that info through their algorithms
Most people don't care about things. This is kind of a recurring problem. Imagine if people just cared a little bit more. All sorts of problems, like littering, would just go away.
But people are lazy and don't care. They don't care that their behavior today will be a problem for them tomorrow.
The big sites are where the content is, and that's what they want. Suffering a little bit of hardship (fewer memes) in order to bolster a stronger future? Ridiculous.
Inertia, convenience of what you're used to, and all of your friends are over there and have never heard of 'the fediverse'.
also: Actively censorinv the mention of lemmy.. at least on reddit as far as I am aware. Maybe even threads.
Centralized social media is where their friends are.
Same reason why people stick with wells Fargo even if they can move to a credit union. It takes effort, changes to habit, and risk just to gain... what you already have.
Because of network effects.
Building a social network is hard. A typical chicken or egg problem. If you don't have a user base, nobody is willing to join, and if nobody joins, you don't have a user base.
It usually requires a bunch of money to build a social network.
The fediverse has a long time to go but I believe it will win sooner or later.
Because most people haven't gone far enough to even understand this question. The choices come prepackaged, that's what in front of their eyes, so they assume that's how it suppose to be, and take the easy ride
I don't think the average user thinks much about the platform they're on, and about who controls it. I think they go to wherever most of their family/friends are.
Also, those platforms are firmly in the mainstream, the alternatives aren't really - you'd have to actively go search for them. People just aren't likely to do that, I don't think.
There are going to be layers to this.
There are lots of people who are just downright too stupid. They wouldn't be on the internet at all if Tim Apple didn't put it in a baby baba for them to suck it out of. They use Facebook because their iPhone came with the Facebook app pre-installed.
There are lots of people for whom popularity is the only thing that exists. Their brain cannot function beyond "Everyone uses Twitter." They'll adopt this platform only after everyone else in the world does.
There are lots of people who have bought the propaganda. The dark web is for drug traffickers and hitmen, torrenting is for pirates, end-to-end encryption is for traitors, and Mastodon is for Linux neckbeards. You shouldn't associate with those people.
There's this weird trend where the commercial platforms are becoming hives for conservatives, so they're probably going to stay put in their echo chambers. I have observed little to no presence of actual conservatives on this platform; beyond the horseshoe effect with the tankie crowd.
The culture of content consumption is not supported by the Fediverse. We don't do algorithmic slop troughs here, and the amount of content on Peertube and Loops rounds down to zero, so it doesn't fulfill the role of mesmerizing colors and sounds for staring at and drooling like Tiktok does or linear television did.
Open source software is usually a bit shit. Be it lack of budget, opinionated developers, redundant projects...we can never have one of something. Why does Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed exist simultaneously? We always end up with software that mostly works, has a lot less graphical polish, a shitty project name, a few missing key features and a couple workarounds you just have to know about. Or an intentionally godawful UI. That'll put people off.
A few people who show up are going to be put off by the weirdest decision they'll be asked to make this month: "Choose an instance, your choice doesn't matter, just pick one." If it doesn't matter, why make me pick? I bet if you watched 100 people try to sign up for a Fediverse platform, at least 30 of them will balk at that stage. I've sat and stared at that for awhile myself and I'm one of the ones who made it through.
They just haven't heard of us. Ask ten people you know in real life if they've heard of Lemmy, or Mastodon, or Pixelfed. I bet they haven't, or if they have they let it pass in one ear and out the other out of apathy.
A few people have looked at the Fediverse, didn't see what they wanted here, and left. If you play Satisfactory, for example, you'll find an active subreddit where the majority of the player base and the developers of the game interact, on Lemmy you'll find one community where exactly one person posts "daily screenshots until I get bored." It's easy to wander off, especially if you don't like left wing politics, Linux and the Fediverse itself.
#6 is the weakest. Software diversity drives innovation.
No, it drives duplicated effort on the basics, asterisks in compatibility and confusion among new adopters. We're not innovating here; we're talking about three parallel Reddit clones.
There's a #10 for you: A lot of the commercial sites were new and exciting because they let you interact in ways you couldn't before. Facebook facilitated interactions with people you knew in person, Twitter let you briefly shout at everyone in the world, Youtube became your own personal television show, Tiktok destroyed attention spans...every single Fediverse platform is a clone of one of those (plus Pixelfed is Instagram, whatever Instagram is for). To my knowledge there is no ActivityPub-based project that has a unique or innovative concept behind it, just store brand copies of pre-existing ones.
The Fediverse is a confusing concept. Iβm a giant nerd and even I donβt really understand how this is supposed to work. Centralized platforms provide a more straightforward user experience. And as others have said, thatβs where the content is right now.
Is there a TikTok replacement in the Fediverse? The main reason my wife uses it is because the recommendations are the best. Feel like you have to do more self searching here.
Honestly when switching from Reddit to here that is the thing I missed the most. It was a lot better at serving you things you liked compared to here where you can only really sort by either what's active or popular or what you're subscribed to. I get some people really like that but a lot of people want it to be more personalized to them without having to go search for the things they want. It's also great for discovering new things because sure I can setup my subscriptions to show what I like but then it won't make connections and show me new things I might like. Combine that with there being less content and therefore certain areas of interest not being represented here at all makes mainstream social media better for most people.
The apps absolutely own your phone data and any browser instance the user is logged in to. The issue is not the content, it's the device data permission data...GPS, SMS, WA, FB, real location, browser searches, etc....all go to tiktok, meta, et al.
In my IT program at school, the only people who have heard of the fediverse are the ones I've told.
The combination of having to choose an instance and then start with an algorithm free blank slate is a tough ask. It literally takes time to sit down and setup your initial βfeedβ, which is probably a good thing, but not at all what attracts users whimsical curiosities nor what theyβve experienced over their entire existence with social media.
I donβt think federation vs centralization is the primary differentiator. I think corporate vs non-profit/ad-free/donation-only/volunteerism is. Our marketing budget is goose egg. Itβs all word-of-mouth.
People follow the crowd and centralized media had considerably bigger crowds
Several of these platforms used bots and/or multiple staff accounts to inflate user count/engagement to draw more people in and trigger the network effect.
I asked someone on bluesky i follow what is mastodon lacking that they ultimately chose bluesky, and they said something along the lines "basic ease of use. The way it works is probably perfectly sensible to fediverse people, but I had an awful time there"
They do indeed have (abandoned) mastodon account with posts, so they did try. I don't know what they meant by it lacking basic ease of use, and I didn't feel entitled to ask stranger for more explanation. But it wasn't picking instance, since they already had an account on one of them.
The only thing I personally noticed is off is following people on other instances if you're not looking at them via your instance website Identity not being perfectly transferrable on mastodon. You can post a special "follow me there instead" post, but what if your instance went tyrant and wouldn't let you post it? Or just went offline? I think cryptographic identity would be more robust for that, but it would also mean user having to store private key somewhere, which would be even less user-friendly