Are we
therefederated yet?We get it, no matter how many times people get fucked by venture capital pushing enshittification, most people don’t actually care enough about the issues at hand to deal with even the minor discomfort of learning something new that isn’t highly polished. They’ll take getting fucked by corporations every time.
Edit: lol
I mean…you say this with an air of sarcasm, because you DO care about decentralization. But I’ve been saying since I got here, with no sarcasm, that Lemmy is not a competitor to reddit. Mastodon is not a competitor to twitter. The fediverse is not appealing to the masses on it’s own current merrit. And why?
Because it’s main selling point is that it’s decentralized. And any average woman named Britney, or any average guy named Todd, does not give a shit about that. At all. At all. At all.
They don’t know what it is. They don’t care what it is. They just want to see what Taylor Swift is saying online. They just want to follow Nascar. They just want to follow all the accounts that you view as corporate branding. That’s what they WANT.
I’ve said in other threads various ways to get the concepts of the fediverse to be looked at. But it takes us, the fediverse, to appear to be appealing to the masses instead of scary.
It needs to feel like a walled garden. It can act as a decentralized service on a technical end. You can wizard of oz the shit out of it. Stay behind a curtain and keep all the scary technical stuff hidden. The technical stuff can still work, but you guys are pushing it front and center like it’s a selling point. It’s not. It’s scary to them, and bluesky looks and feels just like twitter, without the fascism. That’s all they want.
Nobody is over on bluesky asking if bluesky is truely decentralized. Nobody there knows what that is. Nobody cares. It would be like me inventing my own currency that only works in an office I work in. Then wondering why the other offices in that building aren’t adopting my currency. They don’t care about my currency. It means nothing to them.
The fediverse had years of a headstart, and learned nothing. I don’t have the technical skills to build. What I do have is the ability to blend in with any crowd and understand what they’re feeling. So I understand them. I understand you. And I understand the difference in mentality between them and you. I also understand that you guys DON’T understand their mentality. And they don’t even know your mentality exists.
The best way to describe it is, they are like a bunch of flies. They just want to fly to the nearest lightbulb. And you guys are putting on one of those blacklights to expose all the filthy stains around you. And the flies literally land in and eat shit happily, so they don’t care about the stains. Yet you’re so tunnel visioned that all you see are the stains, and are certain the flys will care. Then a neighbor turns on a porchlight, and they all fly over there.
Also the previous big light was a bug zapper.
It’s not about “minor discomfort.” The Fediverse has too much UX friction for someone that isn’t in tech/used to a product that isn’t mature in features or content. Even if they are fine with that, they need to spend time to figure out what server(s) to trust, or at least an organization they can sue if things go wrong.
Ranting about “normies” instead of listening and understanding what their needs and concerns are is not conducive to growth, but it’ll certainly help it decay.
Exactly. Most Fediverse fans always go on a rant about “corporations”, “enshittification”, whatever, when they don’t understand that not everyone will take/have time to learn about these things. Not everything is simple as in just click a big “download” button or “create account”. It’s those new extra steps that confuse those people, some who are of old age, or never saw a desktop computer before. It needs actual designers. Same thing with other FOSS projects.
Tech enthusiasts vastly overestimate how much hassle people are willing to put up with in order to do something, and this is a classic example.
