A Slackware user and Gentoo user sitting at the bar both grunt and turn back around

posted from my thinkpad running Arch

ಠ_ಠ

(I use fedora btw)

Challenge level: impossible

except. EXCEPT! i came here to get away from the other places. every other post is about reddit, bluesky, or fucking twitter. holy fuck.

linux is actually dope. i used debian btw

I mean.....you say this with an air of sarcasm, because you DO care about decentralization. But I've been saying since I got here, with no sarcasm, that Lemmy is not a competitor to reddit. Mastodon is not a competitor to twitter. The fediverse is not appealing to the masses on it's own current merrit. And why?

Because it's main selling point is that it's decentralized. And any average woman named Britney, or any average guy named Todd, does not give a shit about that. At all. At all. At all.

They don't know what it is. They don't care what it is. They just want to see what Taylor Swift is saying online. They just want to follow Nascar. They just want to follow all the accounts that you view as corporate branding. That's what they WANT.

I've said in other threads various ways to get the concepts of the fediverse to be looked at. But it takes us, the fediverse, to appear to be appealing to the masses instead of scary.

It needs to feel like a walled garden. It can act as a decentralized service on a technical end. You can wizard of oz the shit out of it. Stay behind a curtain and keep all the scary technical stuff hidden. The technical stuff can still work, but you guys are pushing it front and center like it's a selling point. It's not. It's scary to them, and bluesky looks and feels just like twitter, without the fascism. That's all they want.

Nobody is over on bluesky asking if bluesky is truely decentralized. Nobody there knows what that is. Nobody cares. It would be like me inventing my own currency that only works in an office I work in. Then wondering why the other offices in that building aren't adopting my currency. They don't care about my currency. It means nothing to them.

The fediverse had years of a headstart, and learned nothing. I don't have the technical skills to build. What I do have is the ability to blend in with any crowd and understand what they're feeling. So I understand them. I understand you. And I understand the difference in mentality between them and you. I also understand that you guys DON'T understand their mentality. And they don't even know your mentality exists.

The best way to describe it is, they are like a bunch of flies. They just want to fly to the nearest lightbulb. And you guys are putting on one of those blacklights to expose all the filthy stains around you. And the flies literally land in and eat shit happily, so they don't care about the stains. Yet you're so tunnel visioned that all you see are the stains, and are certain the flys will care. Then a neighbor turns on a porchlight, and they all fly over there.

Also the previous big light was a bug zapper.

It's not about "minor discomfort." The Fediverse has too much UX friction for someone that isn't in tech/used to a product that isn't mature in features or content. Even if they are fine with that, they need to spend time to figure out what server(s) to trust, or at least an organization they can sue if things go wrong.

Ranting about "normies" instead of listening and understanding what their needs and concerns are is not conducive to growth, but it'll certainly help it decay.

Tech enthusiasts vastly overestimate how much hassle people are willing to put up with in order to do something, and this is a classic example.

And no matter how many times FOSS developers are shown that real people don't care about products with shitty UX, they won't put time in making their product accessible.

See how that goes?

Wanna fix federated platforms? Make the backend dumb and the frontend smart. No one that has a life wants to learn about instances and all that bullshit, decentralize the storage and let anyone create a frontend where people can connect and check the content, one credential to access everything, defederation doesn't affect the users, no admins just moderators.

I used to be mad about Linux for the same reason. In more recent times I have a different feeling, but I can't deny how annoying they can be.

Nice one!

Well that's not true at all. I don't think most of us are going on social media to communicate with billions of people. If we can communicate with tens of thousands of people, or perhaps less than that, but those are high quality communications, that's good enough for many or most of us.

Which is to say, quality of other users, quantity of users, and quality of service are all important when trying to evaluate the overall quality of any social media provider.

Of course your goal could be different if all you want is exposure. If you want to advertise, then large numbers of users might be your priority. But most of us are not doing that.

For the most part yes, but not always and also once it gets too big you lose those same creative minds to the sea of trash and mediocrity

I don't get it, could you explain?