Fediverse

People don't know what choosing a server entails, because it does matter and a lot of people aren't exactly helpful when they say "just pick any" or "it's like email"

Server choice matters because:

1. Server might federate with a limited number of other servers;
2. Server might be blacklisted by some servers which you might want to interact with;
3. Servers can be running different versions of software, so people might think about security;
4. Servers can go offline
5. Server choice can significantly impact how people perceive you. "Oh look, another tankie from ml"

So, server choice matters and people coming in from corporate shit don't know how much they need to know to make an informed decision, thus giving up.

Boy I don't need the childrape administration to declassify extraterrestrial UFO documents when I can talk to space aliens right here on Lemmy. That's not how email works and if you were a placental mammal you'd know that.

You don't go to email.org, click Join and arrive on a page that says "Thank you for your interest in Email: the open, federated, ethical, cage-free non-instant text messaging standard of the web! To continue, select one of these 44 providers based on a badly rendered logo and three almost identical bullet points. Don't worry, the decision doesn't matter...well it kinda does, for reasons that aren't going to be explained to you up front, so pick one at random, get the lay of the land, then come back and join for real."

No, the majority of people ended up with an email account while signing up for another service, such as gmail accounts for Android users or icloud accounts for iPhone users. You probably have an outlook account if you use Windows (or if you're a certain age, a hotmail account). If you're a dad, you have an email account from your ISP, or you got one from work or school. If you sought out something beyond that, like Protonmail or hosting on your own domain, you started looking for a provider with some shopping criteria in mind.

It is simple: nowadays security awareness is drilled in for most of the online population. If presented with a choice people can't oversee, the default safest option is not to chose. I mean, how many new Mastodon users know any of these servers?

So, as couter-intuitive or even ironic it may seem, the "problem" is choice. People need to learn that social media is no longer a single entity, but more like email or choosing a bank.

Problem is, younger people don't even do that when they make an email address.

They just "create a Gmail".

The internet has become such a sad place.

Well I was used to MMOs with different servers and I thought I’d have to create an account for each if I wanted to be with my friends. I didn’t know Mastodon was NOT a mere Twitter alternative, and I wasn’t familiar with the concept of the fediverse.