this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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That was part of the reason. I tried explaining Pixelfed to my photographer dad and he completely lost interest when I mentioned instances and equated them to e-mail providers. Non-technical people don't like having to understand a technical aspect, and the nature of federation can't be avoided.
Keep in mind that these are the people who stayed on Twitter after it was infested by the musk. They're leaving because it's turned into a dogshit service, not because of any kind of moral stance. They won't choose one service over another because it's libre or decentralized or community-operated. They'll flock to one that has a low entry barrier and high population.
Speaking of which: Bluesky is where the people are. The merits of a social media provider are worthless if it has a fraction of the population of a direct competitor.
We should just point normal people to the biggest instance and never mention anything until they're settled in.
It is the most viable strategy, but we did that with lemmy.world and now a third of the fediverse is screeching about censorship on the largest instance and directly shitting on LW users.
A third? Are you sure that you aren't in an echo chamber?
Hyperbole. It's obviously not a third of the userbase, or even the recently active ones, but whenever the topic of moderation comes up, there's always a vocal portion of commenters (mostly of the ML persuasion) complaining about the violation of free speech as they (mis)understand it. It's been like this ever since Lemmygrad and Hexbear were defederated and piracy@dbzero was blocked instance-wide.
Lemmy world is good I barely ever see people mad about it.
Top posts on Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
No they aren't, the network effect isn't some magical all powerful force of nature that you cannot resist.
We can choose to join a community that is small and help grow it, frankly if people aren't able to grapple with that I don't think they are ready to come here anyways which isn't to say that the fediverse doesn't need to work on becoming way more accessible and friendly to the average person.
You grossly overestimate the average social media user's willingness to make an effort to create a Thing when that same Thing already exists in a usable state under a different name; and yes, for the purpose of having a Twitter-like microblog, Mastodon and Bluesky are identical.
And they didn't. It continues happening in real time, and the value gap between Mastodon and Bluesky, from the average social media user's perspective, continues to grow. Thinking that a handful of libre-minded people can change that is wishful thinking bordering on delusion.
My point is that it is unreasonable to compare the popularity of a scam being hyped by some of the biggest names in the techbro world with direct access and influence over the mainstream tech press and millions in cash to spend on advertisements, luring in big social media accounts and making a slick UI and onboarding process and most crucially lots of time to hold off on enshittification/monetization...with a community developed fundamentally decentralized constellation of people who are maintaining and developing the fediverse on a budget that is peanuts compared to the literally astronomically larger budget Bluesky has.
The danger with leaving this context out is it leads you into thinking rich people are smarter and have better ideas than you when they are really just richer than you and every single interaction in society is structured to benefit them and defer to their preferred narratives.
Bluesky was always going to grow more explosively than the fediverse, the whole fundamental issue with corporate social media is the immutable need for endless growth that supercedes any moral concern and indeed any concern for the longterm at all.
There is no use lamenting the fact that the fediverse isn't growing at the clip bluesky is, and there is the very real danger of getting caught up in the hype and losing sight of why it is unreasonable to hold the fediverse to the same expectations of nearterm growthrate.