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).

I mean, it's all about the client. As long as the client makes it seamless, it'll just feel like another sub/community, regardless of the instance it's on. They don't really need to care about or understand federation. Just sign up. Consume content. Ggez

Someone will eventually get smart and stop talking about the fediverse and just build their platform on the fediverse. Then, people will flock to that platform and it will happen to be fediverse connected, allowing people to share content via an open standard.

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

I feel like the focus on explaining federation and the fediverse can be overwhelming and confusing for new mainstream users.

Instead of focusing on the technical details, it might be more helpful to simply direct them to a few major servers (instances) like lemmy.world, beehaw.org, and lemmy.ml and tell them to make an account (or lurk) and explore. The advanced features, namely being able to subscribe to communities in other instances, should be eased into it later.

That is something I think kbin.social has done a better job of. Yes, there are other instances of kbin, but new users are told start with that one and slowly branch out from there.

And for those interested in seeing lemmy's growth, this page is amazing: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

The fragmentation of communities needs to be addressed. The fact is that most people just want to consume content. There needs to be a client-side solution that helps less tech-savvy users to more easily consume content from similar communities.

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.

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 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.

It's the interface more than the technology.

I'm a new user who's not all that familiar with federated social media. But, I think if this instance looked and acted as much like Reddit as possible, most new users would be barely aware of federation.

This might be a hot take but...

Is the interface really that terrible? I feel that if it were as easily accessible aa reddit or even facebook then we would be bombarded with so many brain dead posts by users who don't understand how to get through a computer and therefore the quality of posting and discussion goes way down.

I'm probably wrongly stereotyping and judging here but I had to say 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.

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.

I like to think myself as a power users and federations have been confusing in Lemmy and Mastodon for sure.

But in Mastodon more confusing than in Lemmy, I think it's because the better interface of Lemmy and the ease to interact and follow other instances. I just think is a matter of interface and an well-thought integrated migration process so people could move between instances much easier if needed.

As this instance just got defederated from beehaw.org, I would definitely say so since that's a massive pain, creating multiple accounts for one service just because some other members posted spam is really annoying.

Just joined, absolutely puzzled about how this thing is structured. I can (just about) see how things are structured, after some stops and starts and also understand why that’s a positive thing now but it’s all backwards for me. Why should a user need to get to grips with all of that, and flit around wondering which instance might contain content they want when they just want to start reading stuff that interest them? I’ve joined this instance, who am I missing out on seeing in others? What’s being said in others that I’ll regret missing? Why is it all walled off seemingly necessitating me to register afresh each time I want to check someone where else out?

The content needs to come first, the structure should be presented and needed to be understood secondarily, it’s backwards and it WILL put people off I’m afraid.

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.

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 think it could be, but I explained how it worked to my gf who is not tech-savvy at all and barely got into reddit, and she thought it was a cool idea.

Especially the fact that you can interface with other federated apps (mastadon) inside the same interface.

The biggest hurdle I see is getting good apps (devs are doing great work on this front), and good content (people moving from reddit are going a long way to solving this issue).

It shouldn't be a turn off, but it absolutely is right now. Why does federation have to be so visible to the end user? I really don't get it, things could just be federated mostly behind the scenes. It already goes wrong on the homepage where users are faced with "joining a server" and they get overwhelmed by technical terms like "instances" "fediverse" "lemmyverse". Then you have to pick a server and one of the first things you potentially see is complicated url's no one can ever remember and descriptions containing keywords like "piracy", "NSFW", "furry" and lots of other stuff most people aren't interested in. But this already sets the tone of what content there is, which could be good but could also just scary people away pretty quickly.

Then even if a user does decide to go through and pick a server, they need to remember the URL of it. Lots of people still just go to google and type "lemmy", land on the homepage and see no login button and get completely lost.

And that's just signing up.

There needs to be a focus on UX, more specifically in getting rid of all that technical jazz for non technical users and in guiding users toward the content they want to see. People aren't finding the content or are just stuck on a page that doesn't update for days. All the different server related stuff should be invisible unless you want to see it.

There's just way too much focus on "federation" that few people actually care about. If you want people of all ages and interests, it'll have to become a lot simpler.

Yes, it will absolutely be a barrier to entry to many. Especially people who never used discussion boards. Before reddit, I was an active member on a dozen or so boards, and always wished there was a simpler way for them to interact. So, Lemmy makes sense to me.

I'm going to take a risky stance and say getting onboard isn't actually hard. I didn't learn anything or read anything to get in, I just kind of poked a few buttons and wrote two sentences about why I'm joining.

That said, the gumption to A) try anything new and B) write two cogent sentences might just be enough to deter a few people, and that's no bad thing. The site(s) don't need to become profitable, so it's kind of a non-issue who joins or not.

Two things matter: (1) Content (2) Accessibility to the content.

For (1), we need more active participations and generate more content.

For (2), the mechansim of remote community discovery and subscription are still very tedious and error prone. Not only the remote community is not visible to the instance (Yes I know it's lazy fetching but it still does not work somehow for some remote community subscriptions), but also the lack of integration of community browser are still hard for general users.

In the last few days I have spent countless hours to try community subscriptions on a number of instances.