Ask Lemmy

People who value things like open source are more likely to be curious people who enjoy understanding something

often such projects require active engagement and self education they also reward people look deeply into something

Look at things like Facebook everything is designed to lead you to an endpoint you are not ever allowed to understand how the machine works they reward people who shallowly engage often at a base less

It's not mere complacency these platforms are designed for different people the people who enjoy one platform don't typically enjoy the other because it's not one specific thing about the product they enjoy or don't enjoy it's all the systems that form the big machine that they enjoy

Familiarity.

It was a pain in the ass for me to even try to get people I knew to even try Discord, if they weren't already on it. They just love their Facebook too much to even take a moment to poke their head out and see the alternatives.

Because marketing department haven't been open sourced yet

Microsoft, Apple, etc spend billions on marketing, whereas open source spends about 0. It relies wholly on word of mouth advertisements, and just showing people that it's actually better and free

Believe you me, if tomorrow we get world wide advertising for a free operating system that works better than Window crap or apple crap, that won't spy, and is free, a LOT more people will jump in.

I'm guessing that "open source" either is completely u known or still is a bit of a dirty word for people, associated with "alternative software" so it must be worse than the "real" software, right?

Even though in many MANY ways its superior to corporate software. And its free. And its almost always free as well.

I'm guessing that the cloud services has also been a response from tech companies to open source because on the one hand they get to use open source software for free without giving back anything and on the other hand they get to sell subscription services for stuff that should be free anyways.

Again, most SaaS software providers put there float on open source software, yet they'll charge you through the nose for the little layer they built on top of that. There are other such layers available for free in the open source community,but you'll have to set it up yourself. That is the basic difference.

For me, o host everything myself.

(1) Network effects. People want to use social media that everyone else is using. Once a site achieves a critical mass of users it becomes the obvious choice to join. It also becomes difficult to leave because if you have built up a personal network on most sites, you can’t take it with you.

(2) Convenience. Most sites don’t require a lot of effort to use. In the past few years this one has surprised me a bit. The level of effort most people are willing to put in to trying a new site is basically 0. Using something like lemmy requires you to read a few paragraphs and make a decision about a home instance. That is too much effort for a lot of people.

For social media: Aside from the reason that everyone they know is on the popular ones, it's also because of the algorithms. People are too lazy to curate their feed, and algorithms tickle the part of our brains that light up and keep us engaged.

I'm reasonably confident that the reason has a lot to do with social proof. I don't think it has much to do with UX, or amount of content, because both of those reasons would require people to actually try the fediverse to find out. In my experience, people don't cite reasons as to why they won't try a lesser-known platform, they enter a low-key fight-or-flight mode and sort of go blank, shut down, and don't engage with the idea either way. It's kind of spooky once you notice it in person.

To speculate, I think perhaps centralized, corporate services have an immediate advantage, because a brand name and a logo inherently provides a certain amount of social proof, since corporate brands and logos are so central to Western culture.

Was it ever easy?

Change is hard for most people. When much of the world runs on Android/Google and Mac/iPhone its hard to convince people to switch. Hell, it's hard to switch when you actually do want to leave because the infrastructure is so proprietary and locked in. I'm in the process of de-googling my phone but i use Google applications for work, so its been difficult. Not impossible, but very difficult.

Well, often they are just not as good and active. Most people care about content and service more than principles.

A lot of great comments, but another one that's not mentioned: money and advertising

Open source / non profit run websites don't have money to burn on mobile ads, and many wouldn't want to put money into the ad industry even if they did.

It doesn't guarantee users, plenty of startups fail after promotional campaigns, but it definitely helps people learn about the platform

Bringing more people would ruin these platforms just as they ruined the other platforms.

I think that it would be easier for them to give up social media completely than to move somewhere else without people.

The only way would be to have something there that they need or want and then tell them to make an account in a specific place, no choosing instances bullshit, they'll figure it out eventually if they're interested.

I saw a post about Upscrolled and commented that people should stop joining centralised social media because they all end up the same way, and I got a downvote. On Lemmy.

My friends were all excited about bluesky when that launched, and I told them to join the fediverse because bluesky was just Early Twitter. They didn't listen, then bluesky welcomed ICE. Now they're excited about upscrolled, and I told them to join the Fediverse, and they still aren't listening.

All of which is to say, I have no fuckin idea my guy. People are weird.

Social media only matters if there’s people there. How can you convince someone of jumping ship to an empty place?

I was watching a livestream the other day by someone who appears intelligent and knowledgeable enough to know that she should probably give up Windows and use Linux instead. So far as I could tell there isn't really any reason why she shouldn't. It was the kind of stream where she had plenty of time to just talk freely about whatever was on her mind, and usually that's nothing to do with computers or their operating systems. But she was thinking of doing it. She worries about this and that. She wonders if OBS will work as well, she imagines it would be a lot of work, she seems unsure that her tech skills would be good enough, she worries that it might go wrong, that it might not be worth it, that she might pick the wrong distro, that her webcam wouldn't work, that it might be a colossal waste of time for very little benefit.

People unaccustomed to software freedom find it hard to understand how it would benefit them. People are afraid of change.

UX sucks. Accessibility is nonexistent.

People do not care about decentralization and privacy that is the harsh reality. The best way to promote privacy is to not talk about privacy and provide concrete advantages and unique feature.

Most people moved to Cara not pixelfed. Most people moved to upscrolled not loops.

Also the marketing is terrible. The fediverse creators should go to tech podcast, contact tech medias, participating to general tech events etc

Everyone wants to be where everyone else is at.

In addition to the points the other posts have made, I think we've been conditioned to believe that cost = quality, "you get what you pay for."

It's always contents. Being open source or decentralised is never the sole reason that convinces someone to use them. Same reason why people avoid hexbear even though it's open source, or Truth social even though it's based on Mastodon (I know they're not open source anymore nor decentralised but you get the idea).

Marketing budgets

The public LOVES easy options

Too busy being enslaved under this system of wage slavery

Overall, the UX, but also in big part due to marketing.

Corporate/for-profit solutions tend to have enough money to pay not just for the development but the marketing of a product. Let me show you a non-social-media pair: Plex vs Jellyfin.

If you go to the individual websites, the difference is visibly stark. As a basic user with little to no understanding, which website sells the product better?

Open source most of the time can't afford the long user experience studies and full on designer teams that make a product more likely to be chosen by the average person. Hell, open source often can't even afford lawsuits (which is why a lot of projects go dark and disappear after accidentally stepping on the toes of someone revengeful or looking for a quick payout)... in fact most open source software is solely driven by unpaid contributors. And while there's tradition in software engineering to contribute to open source, the same doesn't really apply for designers.

And that brings us to UX, the most coveted topic of software engineering. Why? Because it's not always intuitive what the users will find intuitive. After all we're engineers, we care about the raw information, not its presentation. Sure a tidied up Excel spreadsheet looks nice, but it isn't more functional in an overwhelming majority of the cases, than a no frills, just data spreadsheet.

That's why most open source software feels so barebones. They're full of features but those aren't fancy, they're not a nice experience for the users but simply fulfill a singular purpose.

And that to date differentiates Plex and Jellyfin, as well as any other pairing of paid-for vs open-and-free software.