Fediverse memes

$0.02: The "appification" of internet appliances and services (e.g. Phones, tablets, and commercial social media) has shifted user expectations to consumer expectations. People are used to a plug-and-play experience with robust and popular services providing experiences "where all your friends are."

Meanwhile, Fediverse tech is built on top of what we had before: disposable services and vendor-neutral clients. The only app you really need is a browser, and you should be prepared to move around to different service URLs over time. As experiences go, it's almost downright agrarian, in that everything has a season and anything could be destroyed by some disaster and replaced just as quickly. So, it takes a little more effort, which is the exact set of detractors that social media companies capitalized on.

Anyway, this difference between user experiences is always going to be a problem for adoption. It's easy to see it as lazyness, but the reality is one of convenience and how people prefer to spend their time.

Lemmy is toxic as fuck. Decentralization is a good thing, but it doesn't magically fix social media.

Honestly if I remembered what I did to have something to poke at before Lemmy I'd probably just do that. It's a mostly unenjoyable compulsion at this point. The whole thing seems to be just childish bickering and depression bait.

I couldn't get my brother over the new user hump, and he's way more technically inclined that I am in many ways. I build PCs (he doesn't), but he runs things like Tor and Linux, dual boots, etc. He's also more politically left than I am, at least through overall experience (he actively canvased for Bernie and such). He's the reason I even got into politics and learned that I'm a leftist. He hates the same things I do about reddit, so I thought for sure that he would click with Lemmy.

But it sounds like he inadvertently joined one of the bad instances and wound up being defederated pretty early on during the post-migration fiasco. I don't think he fully understood what was going on, and wound up leaving due to the negative experience and perceived censorship. Kind of a bummer. I tried to get him to join a new instance but he didn't want to go through the trouble of setting everything up, I guess.

He was very much in the wrong place at the wrong time.

friends are a sign of weakness so i rather not have those

The problem is that the fediverse has genuine usability problems. Even from the perspective of a technical person. I am a sysadmin, and i self host a hilarious amount of things for no reason. Yet even i find the verse frustrating. Discoverability is near non existent, searching is hard, many instances just have duplicate content for popular topics, people don't understand how federation works for the main feed so you get times where stuff like that instance that is only for women pops up on a bunch of different instances Main feed and you have to deal with all the "shutup man this isn't for you!" And then of course there's always the which one do I even make my account on and then even after you do select one there's no guarantee it won't shut down at some random point and you'll be forced to migrate etc.

I've been on lemmy for a while and i still struggle to find content i want sometimes, but things like bluesky? It's easy, i found what i wanted easily and the algorithm picked up on what i liked and what i didn't and brought me more of what i wanted.

And the big problem with open source Alternatives and the fediverse is that instead of acknowledging that these are issues that need addressing and usability could be improved. They will instead tell you that it's your fault and you should give up all of those nice interactions for the sake of being decentralized. It's up to you to put in the effort to search every instance ever and find the content you want and bring it all together, it's up to you to migrate as needed and deal with other things caused by the decentralization. I just want to find some nice art, talk about some interesting Tech stuff and avoid politics to relax. Bluesky and even to some degree reddit let's me do this easily, lemmy makes it difficult.

I will play devil's advocate, it is not necessarily that people have bad excuses, most of the time it just hard to break from habits. It doesn't help either that in the case of digital privacy, most people don't give a fuck. Tech companies know that people prefer convenience.

The only way I see how people will migrate to more ethical services like Fediverse and Signal is if enough people are convinced to go, that it will start a FOMO sentiment on to each person. That is the real boulder we are rolling up the hill.

They trust their corpo bubbles more, pretty sad innit.

If you don't want to do something, any excuse is the same as the next.

People don't want to face change.

These spaces are not welcoming to discourse and different ideas. I don't agree with a lot of what I see here but idgaf about being downvoted or banned. Most of my family and the people I work with would be horrified by Lemmy. I still think we should be exposed to spaces we don't agree with, but don't be surprised when people don't want to be here.

Just send them cool content and funny memes as links to your instance. So if they want to comment/vote, they must sign up. Once they have, if there is a good app, recommend it.

Finally got my friends on signal, we were originally on Whatsapp, and then one of the several Facebook monitoring scandals happened and they agreed to switch to telegram, we went to signal for a long time after the Russia monitoring thing, and then we tried out telegram again and everyone hated it and wanted to go back. I was very happy lmao

There's no way I'd recommend friends and family to the Fediverse, well, at least not Lemmy (can't speak for the wider services).

Why would you try to hurt your friends and family?

Usually, bad excuses are just an indicator that someone doesn't care and just wants you to not bother them about it, rather than a "i'm interested but concerned here are my arguments".

I... don't really want them here, tbh

Don't forget there's one monent every time Sysiphos rolls the rock up and down the hill when his world is perfect. That's when he's on top and for a second everything is in balance.