Is this a joke question?
Ease of access and user experience. A single platform beats that, as you don’t 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 doesn’t 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
- I refuse to say X cos its wanky
network effects
This. And some people just want to post in front of a crowd. So far I like Lemmy because there’s more conversation going on. And less “Look at me!” posts.
Evolution of human behaviour is slow. Right now we are all enmeshed in the dawning discovery that the current way we run society is falling apart at the seams. Just enter the core of almost any city in North America and you’ll see what I mean (and not just N. America). It’ll take a while to set itself right, or it may all just burn in a raging nuclear fire launched by a pissed off oligarch who does not get his way.
Definitely not forward progress towards a better day.
Part of it is just the network effect. If the people they want to follow are on twitter then they do not really have a choice. Also part of it is the algorithms. For some needing to manually select communities or individuals is an inconvenience. Finally I feel like fedi communities have a very distinct atmosphere simply because very few people use it. This can all change in the future but the majority of the issues stem from just not having enough creators and users as well as the additional effort required to use these platforms.
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.
Is mastodon the app that has it? I’m still pretty new to knowing wtf it even is
Mastodon is a FLOSS X/Twitter
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
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.
Because they want to feel involved. They want to be with the in-crowd. If they come to the Fediverse, then they’ll think it’s weird and might scare them because it’s a new concept they can’t grasp. When really, I see the Fediverse as just a social media reset. But because it doesn’t have all of the enshittification that centralized social media has, they don’t dare bother.
Have you invited people to the fediverse?
Yep I literally didn’t hear about it till last week
Cool
How is it?
The Fediverse is a confusing concept. I’m a giant nerd and even I don’t really understand how this is supposed to work. Centralized platforms provide a more straightforward user experience. And as others have said, that’s where the content is right now.
It’s no more confusing than using email, and everybody managed to figure that out. You don’t need to know how the nitty gritty of it works. The network effects is a far bigger issue, as you point out, centralized platforms simply have far more content on them.
It’s far more complicated than email, at least I can send an email to any valid address from any other address by default ( mostly ) - Lemmy / Fediverse is like needing multiple email addresses that each one can only email some of the others, and you might not even get the response someone sent you unless the content is literally carried back to you.
I have multiple accounts on multiple instances, and sometimes I come across posts I read with one account, but my comments or the responses to those comments just aren’t there, so you only get a portion of what is out there.
It’s kinda a terrible experience in that way.
The whole point of ActivityPub is that you don’t need multiple accounts on different servers. You can use your Lemmy account to talk to people on Mastodon, browse PixelFed, watch PeerTube. Yes, there is sometimes lag in content propagating, and so on, but it’s clearly not a show stopper. My experience using Lemmy and Mastodon is the opposite of terrible.
You don’t get me. My instance isn’t Federated with lemmy.world and other large instances. I just don’t see the majority of comments or content you do on this account.
And I don’t see that as a problem. I don’t think Fediverse needs to be fully connected the way a centralized platform is. The fact that different instances can choose whom they federate with is a feature not a bug. Fediverse favors creating smaller communities that are more personal, instead of just being one giant cesspool. It’s a different way to interact with people.
Qualifying your analogy with (mostly) kinda makes it fall apart for me. Because the fediverse also works like how you described email (mostly). There might be a few extra exceptions due to relative immaturity of the protocol is all.
In my IT program at school, the only people who have heard of the fediverse are the ones I’ve told.
Network effect. Next question.
I like to follow a couple reporters directly as opposed to subscribing to the local paper and wading through the fluff pieces, so that means using Bluesky.
Back when I was still an artist for my super niche internet garbage, that meant using Tumblr, then after the Tumblr purge, Twitter. Then after Musk, cohost, then after cohost… I mean, I was done with art but I’d probably be on Bluesky for that too.
