It will absolutely.

1. The average non-tech savvy person will be extremely confused about how federated services operate. You say "join lemmy', and they say, 'ok, what's the site?" and then you need to explain, well, you need to pick one of about four thousand instances, and then only go there when you want to sign in. Now they're already confused. That can then be explained 'It's like e-mail, lots of different servers to get email, but they all work together." But this doesn't hit as well because a website is not e-mail, and so interconnected websites are not immediately intuitive. And as soon as you start going into any level of technical details, the average person just tunes out and decides "I don't want to deal with this crap."

2. If they pick an instance (Like Lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works) that allows free signup, they won't have too much of a problem. If they pick one that has questions to answer and then a manual approval process that is COMPLETELY opaque, they will nope the fuck out immediately and not even bother to find other instances. Heck, I was turned off of Lemmy for several days because of this, and I'm very tech savvy, and have been doing this sort of crap forever. I signed up first at Lemmy.one, which eventually got my login active, but took 3 days. When I saw no indication of that signup working, though, I tried Beehaw. That STILL has not been activated and it's been 5 or 6 days, and of course, there's no indication of what's going on during that time...it's just a spinning wheel. Not until I went to an instance that didn't have these ridiculous manual approvals did I begin using Lemmy. The average user is not going to bother with that.

These are going to be the biggest things that hold Lemmy back (there are also some serious usability issues with the main feed, concerning repeat posts showing for DAYS, and the autorefresh everywhere, which pushes content down constantly if you're in the New feed).

@drubbis Doesn't make sense in my opinion. If you turn off federation it's basically just another Reddit

Inshallah

I wish we could just stop making a big deal out of the federation, other than choosing an initial home and having perceived duplicate groups it has more or less no impact to the front end users.

It's a backend thing and we need to bury it more in the UI so people don't feel it.

For the not so technically inclined the most confusing part of any fediverse service probably is the idea of "signup in some instance" and then you can interact with peope/posts in other intances too. The lazy mainstream people want a single place to signup and stay like reddit, facebook, twitter etc.

Yea I think these are all fair points. And I guess when I say mainstream I don't mean individuals that churn out low effort farming posts, but rather people who contribute legitimate content/discussion but are pretty ignorant when it comes to internet/tech.

The other thing is--with various forums dedicated to the same content, i.e. technology hosted at beehaw/lemmy.ml/lemmy.world+ it seems like that could potentially hinder growth? Or that it seems superfluous to have multiple forums accessible from one platform dedicated to the same thing but with varying content

Not once there's a more feature rich app. Seriously, that's all it will take. My wife is as "mainstream" as it gets, and her only objections to, trying lemmy as a whole is that the ux sucks in browsers and the only two apps that are really available lack features that should be there (like the links on jerboa not going to the right place), and little things like being able to organize subscriptions or do an in-app "multi".

My sister said pretty much the same thing. Out of my main group of friends, none are exactly "into" things like this, and only one said he'd never bother with it at all (and he hated reddit long before anyway). These are fairly casual users of social media of any kind, they aren't power users, they're the average joe. I was able to explain to them exactly how to use lemmy in less than five minutes.

The only other objection that wasn't more of an app thing is the signup delay. That's a bigger barrier to entry than anything else, and it isn't something a friendly user can help with, unlike finding new communities or how to navigate.

It is; I've seen some Reddit users complain about how the fediverse isn't immediately easy to use and is too complicated and confusing

which is understandable, but also it feels like some of those who are complaining about it (I am stressing right now that I don't mean all of them) straight up don't want to have to learn about it; they want their content immediately and they want it as simple as pushing a button

I think it can be initially, because it sounds confusing, but I personally feel fairly confident after poking around consistently after a couple of days, that was the amount of time it took for me with reddit all those years ago as well, I believe. Once you figure out how to get to other federations and look up things there, things just run nicely, as long as you're into the old reddit/old internet forums look. Honestly, I found figuring out cross federations in mastodon is way harder, and they're doing it.

But I don't think it will be on the long run to most people once they acclimatise. I'm using both Jerboa and the browser and when I search for new communities to join or look up what's going on on All neither feels like a confusing alien experience. The only part of it that feels weird about it is that after so many years, I very rarely had a need or a desire to use reddit's all, so feels a bit odd.

Yeah, for sure. I'm not sure I really mind that, though. It's also not super crazy to get a basic handle on, so if it becomes popular enough, more people will be willing to try to figure it out. I also imagine that the developers working on it will try to find more intuitive ways for users to get started.

I don't really care too much about the mainstream coming here, though. Part of the appeal of the Fediverse, I feel, is that it's got that kind of "underground" vibe to it. We are out of the mainstream, but there are still people around, discussion is happening, content is being created. It has a fresh and unique feel to it.

It took me a little bit to wrap my head around the concept, but it's fairly straight forward. Part of the problem is that when you want to "join lemmy" you're presented with several dozen instances and it's unclear what you're supposed to do. I went through all of the "general lemmy" instances until I found this one which seems to be the most popular. I get that you can access other instances that are federated but that's not immediately clear to the user.

Right now it will probably be like original Reddit where the user base is mostly tech savvy people.

Federation should not be an issue for users, I think we could make the front-end hide most of the complexity that it brings. There are only a few things that are harder now:

• discovering communities outside your own instance (this is now mostly done through a website that lists communities)
• logging in when you receive a link to a post on another instance (you have to go to your own instance, login there, and search for the post again)
• creating a community on another instance (this requires an account on the other instance to create the community, after that they can add you as a mod)

One of the things that could be improved is changing the login page to add least add something about Federation, so users won't try to log in on another instance with the credentials of their home instance.

I think in the end the most important things will be a good UI, a clean and inviting look, maybe easy-to-understand guides and of course lots of great content. As soon as all of this exists, then the mainstream will have it easier to use Lemmy. An easy, flawless experience goes a long way and taking away any obstacle to get active here will help on the long run.

I've been thinking about setting up my communities based on what I used to follow on Reddit but honestly, I get about 30 seconds to browse at a time and it's too much of a mental hurdle to be like ok...I need to go to what site was it? And I need to keep going back to my Reddit subreddit list, then search for every subreddit on [whatever that site was] then go to the app and paste some URL in... All of this is a pain in the arse on mobile and if it's not the sort of thing I can do in a minute or two then it's not going to get done.

Maybe someone will write a service that lets you enter your Reddit username and it just auto-searches for the closest matching community for each subreddit you are subscribed to and auto-adds them to your Lemmy account

I don't think the federation in itself is an issue. We just need to figure out how to present it, and integrate everything.

It absolutely will be, at least at first. But as long as Lemmy can keep some forward momentum, the idea will become less and less alien to more mainstream users as more people are exposed to it.

Lemmy doesn’t have to kill Reddit on the spot, it just has to be a viable alternative. And as long as we keep the communities here alive, it will become one. I don’t think the idea of federation will be strange at all in a few years.