Can you explain the benefits of the fediverse over a centralized private site to a regular person in 5-second quip that will convince them that the relative complexity of using the fediverse versus BlueSky is worth the effort?
Okay. Now, explain the concept of enshitification. And do it using terms that regular folk won’t find crass.
You know how conservatives live in this bubble where they don’t even see their racism because it’s so normalized? We’re interacting within a bubble where everyone has a very high level of technical competence versus the average person, so we fail to understand just how tech illiterate others are.
Not just tech illiterate but also advertising illiterate. The regular folks I know seem happy to wade through endless platform ads and influencer sales pitches. Enshittification can really be a slowly boiling frog type scenario.
Company focus on profit. even if mean overall experience get not gooder
I dumbed it down to caveman speech for those that still wouldn’t understand. It’s a simple concept all of use that have used the Internet in the past year have experienced.
I never tried it. My only contact with the fediverse was through Lemmy.
When I became aware of lemmy it was first through the piracy subreddit doing the exodus and the head mod db0 mentioning the new piracy community. I wasnt aware of instances at the time and signed up on lemmy.ml because that was the first thing that popped up.
Later I realized I didnt want to be a part of ml and switched to my current instance.
Same goes for matrix. Signed up on element and now I dunno if I wanna stay there or leave. No special reason to do either.
Last time I heard about Mastodon it also doesnt inform about instances.
First google on mastodon leads me to mastodon.social.
A few links later (Info about an animal called mastodon, mastodon.social, google news widget, google info page widget and a “people also ask” section) I get to the joinmastodon.org page and first leads me to mastodon.social and a server selector.
My grandmother would be overwhelmed, my mother would ask me if the site is safe (I warned her to be wary about domains switching) and I assume other more tech iliterate would be just joining mastodon.social totally defeating the use case of deferedation.
Why not Mastodon?
Can you explain the benefits of the fediverse over a centralized private site to a regular person in 5-second quip that will convince them that the relative complexity of using the fediverse versus BlueSky is worth the effort?
Twitter was bluesky before musk bought it, federation ensures that can’t easily happen to mastodon.
That’s it.
Cool. Now give me an argument why my mother would care about this fact.
Centralized and private = enshitification
Self hosted and federated = not prone to enshitification
Idk how simple it has to be for people but clearly I’m over estimating people
Okay. Now, explain the concept of enshitification. And do it using terms that regular folk won’t find crass.
You know how conservatives live in this bubble where they don’t even see their racism because it’s so normalized? We’re interacting within a bubble where everyone has a very high level of technical competence versus the average person, so we fail to understand just how tech illiterate others are.
Not just tech illiterate but also advertising illiterate. The regular folks I know seem happy to wade through endless platform ads and influencer sales pitches. Enshittification can really be a slowly boiling frog type scenario.
Company focus on profit. even if mean overall experience get not gooder
I dumbed it down to caveman speech for those that still wouldn’t understand. It’s a simple concept all of use that have used the Internet in the past year have experienced.
The usual suspects couldnt care less. The more convenient it is the better. No matter how bad the future wil be.
I cannot imagine mastodon getting any more convenient.
I personally never like the style of twitter so I don’t use it
But when I did make an account on the mastodon app it was so simple my special needs clients could do it.
I never tried it. My only contact with the fediverse was through Lemmy.
When I became aware of lemmy it was first through the piracy subreddit doing the exodus and the head mod db0 mentioning the new piracy community. I wasnt aware of instances at the time and signed up on lemmy.ml because that was the first thing that popped up.
Later I realized I didnt want to be a part of ml and switched to my current instance.
Same goes for matrix. Signed up on element and now I dunno if I wanna stay there or leave. No special reason to do either.
Last time I heard about Mastodon it also doesnt inform about instances.
First google on mastodon leads me to mastodon.social.
A few links later (Info about an animal called mastodon, mastodon.social, google news widget, google info page widget and a “people also ask” section) I get to the joinmastodon.org page and first leads me to mastodon.social and a server selector.
My grandmother would be overwhelmed, my mother would ask me if the site is safe (I warned her to be wary about domains switching) and I assume other more tech iliterate would be just joining mastodon.social totally defeating the use case of deferedation.
Because casual mainstream basic folk (non-techie) don’t like the slight legwork you need to do and understand the Fediverse
I saw an article from Yahoo (Source: The Independent) last week about Bluesky’s current success from Xitter refugees and it also listed other similar groups like Mastedon. What didn’t surprise me is that they said Mastedon is predominantly “techie” which includes the majority of it’s user base as “supernerds” with the site having the “steepest learning curve.” This was an op-ed from an outsider.
Until Mastedon can appeal to simple minded mainstream basic folk (which is a pretty good size of netizens) it will always be a niche group.
Until fediverse advocates stop thinking of people as simple minded, they will never understand the steps needed to be relevant.
The main advantage to Bluesky’s architecture is centralized identity and distributed components.
The centralized identity is key. Unless someone figures out a way to do this in activitypub, the fediverse will remain niche.
Accurate username