this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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You start out by bemoaning the onboarding experience and then move on to portability and then speak up the idea servers should just be relays and browsers should be the new world order.
Yes, onboarding definitely needs to be improved.
Yes, portability can be improved. Lemmy falls short of Mastodon and not even Mastodon is perfect.
But, what mastodon does so is foster does do excellently is foster the idea that social media is a tool and that users shouldn't be overly attached. Also, perhaps if we learn to value servers, so not treat them as mere relays, perhaps we'll be able to teach value and independence.
The problem is, too many people keep trying to think, how can we make the Fediverse relevant in the modern world? And the better question is, how can we redefine the modern world? How can we normalize the idea of cooperative servers? Whether friends, towns, cities, etc. How can we make it so the people running the servers that host our communities are committed and engaged and not running them at a deficit? I would even go as far as to say that there should be government schemes to repurpose old computers into mini servers and that governments should give everyone a domain like NAME.TOWN.CITY and everyone can run a personal server and get used to it and then they can grow from there.
My idea is actually instead of marketing lemmy and mastodon, like "join Lemmy!" Or "Join Mastodon!" Market each individual instance separately.
After speaking with non-technical friends, I began to think how the key to marketing, onboarding, and growth will be to reduce the friction of the fediverse. The technical aspects of the fediverse (such as instances) and even the word "fediverse" itself should be behind a curtain.
Unfortunately, Lemmy's current default frontend does not do a good job at welcoming non-technical users (i.e. needing to find and select instances, fediverse jargon, etc.). Not to mention the lack of common accessibility features
Ultimately, I think the 3rd party devs building accessible and frictionless frontends will be key in this respect.
With that being said, I think a better marketing strategy is to say "join this app" (which connects them to the Lemmy/Mastodon network) because I imagine the bounce rate of the default Lemmy onboarding is not great.
Also instances aren't really helpful in this regard either. "Feddit" just sounds like "fake reddit" and it carries that reddit baggage. "Lemmy.world" and "lemmy.ml" has lemmy in the name so you have to explain lemmy which is off-putting. Stuff like Beehaw, Sopuli, etc, do well. I think Beehaw is actually a good example as well as it has it's own personal identity as well as being a federated forum.
I agree with pretty much everything you've stated except for:
I dont think this is a problem. The fediverse accomplishes exactly what it sought to do, a decentralized social network. This is uncharted territory and has been working out surprisingly well. I thought I would be off this 2 months after reddit killed 3rd party clients, but here I am!!
the minute we start to push growth at any cost is the minute the fediverse quality declines, in my opinion.
If you want to be independent, the only thing that matters is the ability to able to roam around and port our identity and data wherever we want. Where you are doing your computing doesn't really matter.
We don't need any of that. Computing power and storage is so cheap nowadays that even people in middle-income areas can afford to collect piles of used smartphones on their desk drawers. If there was any type of economic demand for what you are saying, we would have seen by now some company trying to make a business out of it.
I think that's a dangerous assumption to make. Not everyone is as well off as ourselves. Some people can't even afford a desk, let alone have a desk drawer full of old phones.
On average, we are rich enough to have plenty of gadgets around.
Those in extreme poverty need access to more important things than access to these gadgets.
We're going down a sidetrack here but this is just false. A smartphone these days is a ticket to many things required to live. Applying for jobs, applying for government services, buying essential items cheaply, cheap/free education.
None of these things are even close to be available to people in extreme poverty.
Think "no access to running water or sewage systems" levels of poverty, not "living in a ghetto area of an European or North American country".
Yes, even for them, the information they can get through a phone is lifesaving. They can learn how to build water supply and sanitation systems and shelter. They can learn how to farm and forage for food. They can find the best way to cross international borders and become a refugee. And so on, they can improve every aspect of their lives. Information is power, and with a smartphone they have access to the entire world, rather than just word of mouth knowledge in their local community.
Obviously, places without any form of electricity are screwed, but satellite internet is rapidly becoming cheaper and more accessible so soon they won't even need cell coverage.
I was using old smartphones as an example of the amount of excess computing power available which goes unused, not what people can do with it.
Your argument is just missing the point and annoying sophistry. Can you please just drop it?
Domain registrars do indeed make money off of this.
Did you read the next post on my series, by any chance? ;)
I did now, and I do agree that registrars could play some role in a more decentralized future, though I'm still unconvinced ActivityPub will end up being the protocol primarily used in that future.
BTW, you might be aware of this, but there is already a DNS-based authentication protocol (DANE, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Named_Entities) which is supported by various mail servers.
Right, one can never be certain about the future, but AP is showing some staying power and (I think) the main reason that it's not evolving faster is because we are not exploring possibilities beyond "let's clone popular closed networks, and slap some AP to pass data around homogeneous servers".