Bloonface

It's amazing seeing a company try to give itself Galapagos syndrome.

This is just an absolutely fucking dismal idea.

I can't think of a more surefire way to ruin the site than make it so that the mob can tear down anyone who sets a quality bar any higher than they like.

The EU or the UK. The Information Commissioners Office would take an exceptionally dim view of this shit.

There's a lot of people who just resent the idea of mods in general because they feel affronted that they can't just spray their shitposts wherever they feel like and/or object to the idea of the Internet having any kind of quality bar. They're mainly just reacting to it with a "if the mods are for it, I'm against it" mentality.

But yeah, also, the people who didn't leave for the blackout are more likely than not to side with Reddit, or actually like the Reddit app and not care about the fuss.

Also also, there's a vast majority of people who consider this whole brouhaha to be nerd shit and don't care.

Absolutely. In my experience, there's a really strong tendency from people who are already all-in on fedi to treat "this thing doesn't have feature X that my previous site Y did" as simple whining and respond to it with hostility rather than constructive criticism, you can see that with the thin-skinned reaction to some criticisms of Mastodon back in November about e.g. lack of quote posts or poor discovery features.

They don't treat it as constructive criticism or actual feedback from users but instead as an assault on something they identify with personally, which is a recipe for disaster

The sort of sneering at newbies is exactly the sort of shit that in no small part gave Mastodon a reputation of being hostile to outsiders.

If we want this shit to take off as something other than a nerd curio, it needs to be accessible, not delivered with a side helping of judgment for not being 100% on board with the endeavour from the beginning.

I don't really agree with this because the fediverse is not only interconnected by a technology (ActivityPub) but also by some shared values, like inclusivity and kindness to each other.

That's kind of overegging the pudding. There's nothing intrinsically "nice" about fedi, quite a lot that isn't, and this feels like a promise that will be very rapidly seen as hollow lies the moment someone has a negative interaction, as well they might.

people just got extremely lazy when all they have to do is open of the 5 mega-platforms like Twitter and Reddit to access everything.

That's a funny way of saying "to an end user, not having to give a shit about what instance you're on is an objectively easier and thus better experience".

Particularly when most people couldn't tell you what a server even is. It just makes them confused because it's neither something they understand nor something they're going to be motivated to care about.

If using a platform feels like hard work compared to its competitors, that's a failing of the platform, not of users. Users don't owe the platform anything.

I can guarantee there are also plenty of things you, in common with everyone else, simply do not care about and cannot be convinced to care about, and would similarly consider it an imposition to be required to care about them or be judged as "lazy".

It also confused the shit out of newbies who neither know nor care what an instance is and find the idea too outside of their existing comprehension or level of caring to wrap their heads around.

The thing that's interesting to me is this:

That said, what I do think helps here is that Kbin has a much lower barrier to entry. I find it much easier to sign up on here than trying to determine which Mastodon instance to use and I think that helps tremendously.

Kbin is technically federated and Kbin.social is technically just an instance on a federated network, the federation is just broken right now. But the simple fact of that not being a consideration, and everyone signing up on Kbin.social, has led to comments like this where "it's so much easier".

It rather proves my point; putting decentralised whatever front and centre makes things pointlessly complex and offputting to end users. They don't want to think about this shit, they just want to read stuff and post. The less they have to think about this shit, and/or the less this shit has an impact on their experience, the better for them.

To an extent, influencers wouldn't get on with Mastodon anyway.

Looking at it charitably from their point of view, the discovery is so poor that actually building a following there is a huge amount of work they probably won't see a return on. It's a much smaller audience that in no small part resents even the idea of an "influencer" - someone who has that as their line of work is going to struggle and consider it not worth their time.

Looking at it less charitably, Mastodon does not reward activity on its own but instead things only get attention if they're actually worth attention, so carpet-bombing fedi with posts most people don't actually value is a waste of their time, and it's a lot more effort than such people would typically be willing to expend.

Because all of the users they like and want to talk to stayed there too.

Network effects are a powerful driver. They can be overcome, but not easily.