IrrationalAndroid

I agree that it should be the default option. Thankfully you can change it from your account's settings, which is very nice.

Can I ask you to educate me on why people need to know? I'm struggling to see your point. Surely people will benefit in some way from knowing how the Fediverse works under the hood, but not everyone needs to know, and as you can see this heavy emphasis on the Fediverse's inner workings is, instead, turning people away.

People are just very used to having things magically work, and I think that it's very natural for them to not want to deal with things that they need to make work. Many people never knew how Twitter or Reddit works under the hood, many never cared, but in the Fediverse it's suddenly brought up as a necessary thing. And I just can't see how that's necessary thing to use such a tool. All I'm saying is that UX-wise, many apps in the Fediverse could feel more seamless.

I hear you on the Fediverse being better in many many cases, but I also feel like many of the Fediverse's features are all but marketable to the average person. Add in the fact that people feel like there is a learning curve, and what you get is that people lose interest very fast.

I agree so much. I feel like your typical user does not need to know 1% of all that. Hell, I don't even think that they need to know much about the whole instances shebang. Scroll through a feed, see a bunch of users from various federated instances say things, the end. The fediverse aspect is something that could be relegated to a help section or something along these lines. Complexity scares people away.

I seriously wish that Lemmy and the Fediverse in general would boom in popularity because this kind of "free" social media is what people deserve, but I just can't see it happening with how things are now.

It's not that they would necessarily cripple it, but they would "enhance" their instance of AP (the "extend" in EEE), "accidentally" making it incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse and thus creating an excuse to suddenly drop support for the Fediverse. At this point users in, say, Mastodon will have created some degree of dependency on users in Threads, and at that point people in there would be forced to move to Threads if they want to maintain a similar experience as before.

Can I ask you why do these examples not apply in your opinion? The XMPP one seems particularly fitting and actually maps perfectly to the Fediverse situation (so far), if I'm not missing anything.

Yes. And there are good reasons for that, as this user showed: https://lemmy.world/comment/884169

This might be a very pessimistic take, but I strongly feel like any average Joe will rather pick the Meta/big corp alternative to the FOSS one. The fact that Meta's got a reputation for Facebook and Instagram while Mastodon's got a reputation for being confusing is... very not promising. Basically I feel like this is a lost race already. Hope it's just me.

It's just that email addresses are often linked to the owner's name and I don't feel too comfortable knowing that it's in cleartext and easy to access without knowing it beforehand. Your advice is good though.

Oh whoops, I deleted my comment almost immediately but it seems like you could see it and answer anyway. Yeah makes sense that it's not an all-instances thing, it was very weird UI-wise because it said "optional" but then the address still came back when I left it empty, saved and refreshed. Seems like they might have forgotten to remove the "optional" label (or remove the requirement, either of the two).

Not necessarily agreeing with you, but I noticed something similar. I can't remember why I was logged out of the official Reddit app honestly, but I was, and all day yesterday I've been getting "suggested posts" and all of these were from r/amiugly, which was weird as hell, especially (again) considering that I was not even logged in, so there was not any sort of algorithm magic going on. I don't know the numbers for that sub so idk if it's just popular, but this is something that I noticed too.