Network effect. Next question.
If people hate fruit on pizza, why is tomato sauce okay?
Olives and peppers are also fine. It’s just pineapple that’s as bad as putting a picture of the Pope in your toilet.
Ease of access and user experience. A single platform beats that, as you don’t have to choose where to signup and everything will be available without effort.
However, Lemmy is getting better with that and hopefully the user base continues growing. It doesn’t need to have a billion users to be an awesome experience.
Plus it’s not easy to explain. Instagram is for pictures and reels Facebook is for people you know IRL Twitter* is for short sentences you spit out Lemmy… well it’s a collection of lots of different instances and then you’ve got communities on each one and some are duplicated but you can join them anyway etc etc
- I refuse to say X cos its wanky
Have you invited people to the fediverse?
Yep I literally didn’t hear about it till last week
Cool
How is it?I love it! It’s like reddit was years ago, its positive, friendly and it’s got a nice community feel. Has it changed much in the time you’ve been here?
Even if people know fediverse, if the content they want doesn’t exist here, they won’t stay.
There are Japanese Twitter refugee to fedi (especially Misskey) several times. A lot of big creator doesn’t stay as they want to get the highest number of engagement to keep their (art) business afloat.
Because all their friends stay. So to get them to switch, you’d need everyone thay know to switch, which would need everyone they know to switch…
… soon, you need to organize a switch between millions of people, which really isn’t happening.
So the only people on fedi are those ok with keeping multiple profiles, and even then just the ones that value the technical aspects over quantity of content: mostly tech nerds and people with strong feelings about politics.
People are giving great answers here. One I didn’t notice at a glance is that the Fediverse is feckin small. Most of the world doesn’t know it exists yet, and centralized social medias are probably not gonna be super big about pushing that info through their algorithms
I don’t think the average user thinks much about the platform they’re on, and about who controls it. I think they go to wherever most of their family/friends are.
Also, those platforms are firmly in the mainstream, the alternatives aren’t really - you’d have to actively go search for them. People just aren’t likely to do that, I don’t think.
Most people are like sheep and just follow the herd.
All but you always get those people that swear they’re different.
Most people don’t care about things. This is kind of a recurring problem. Imagine if people just cared a little bit more. All sorts of problems, like littering, would just go away.
But people are lazy and don’t care. They don’t care that their behavior today will be a problem for them tomorrow.
The big sites are where the content is, and that’s what they want. Suffering a little bit of hardship (fewer memes) in order to bolster a stronger future? Ridiculous.
Because of network effects.
Building a social network is hard. A typical chicken or egg problem. If you don’t have a user base, nobody is willing to join, and if nobody joins, you don’t have a user base.
It usually requires a bunch of money to build a social network.
The fediverse has a long time to go but I believe it will win sooner or later.
I’d also chalk it up to convenience.
The Fediverse requires effort.
That too.
In my IT program at school, the only people who have heard of the fediverse are the ones I’ve told.
Centralized social media is where their friends are.
Inertia, convenience of what you’re used to, and all of your friends are over there and have never heard of ‘the fediverse’.
also: Actively censorinv the mention of lemmy… at least on reddit as far as I am aware. Maybe even threads.
The Fediverse is a confusing concept. I’m a giant nerd and even I don’t really understand how this is supposed to work. Centralized platforms provide a more straightforward user experience. And as others have said, that’s where the content is right now.
It’s no more confusing than using email, and everybody managed to figure that out. You don’t need to know how the nitty gritty of it works. The network effects is a far bigger issue, as you point out, centralized platforms simply have far more content on them.
It’s far more complicated than email, at least I can send an email to any valid address from any other address by default ( mostly ) - Lemmy / Fediverse is like needing multiple email addresses that each one can only email some of the others, and you might not even get the response someone sent you unless the content is literally carried back to you.
I have multiple accounts on multiple instances, and sometimes I come across posts I read with one account, but my comments or the responses to those comments just aren’t there, so you only get a portion of what is out there.
It’s kinda a terrible experience in that way.
The whole point of ActivityPub is that you don’t need multiple accounts on different servers. You can use your Lemmy account to talk to people on Mastodon, browse PixelFed, watch PeerTube. Yes, there is sometimes lag in content propagating, and so on, but it’s clearly not a show stopper. My experience using Lemmy and Mastodon is the opposite of terrible.
You don’t get me. My instance isn’t Federated with lemmy.world and other large instances. I just don’t see the majority of comments or content you do on this account.
And I don’t see that as a problem. I don’t think Fediverse needs to be fully connected the way a centralized platform is. The fact that different instances can choose whom they federate with is a feature not a bug. Fediverse favors creating smaller communities that are more personal, instead of just being one giant cesspool. It’s a different way to interact with people.
Qualifying your analogy with (mostly) kinda makes it fall apart for me. Because the fediverse also works like how you described email (mostly). There might be a few extra exceptions due to relative immaturity of the protocol is all.
Because most people haven’t gone far enough to even understand this question. The choices come prepackaged, that’s what in front of their eyes, so they assume that’s how it suppose to be, and take the easy ride
People follow the crowd and centralized media had considerably bigger crowds
Several of these platforms used bots and/or multiple staff accounts to inflate user count/engagement to draw more people in and trigger the network effect.
