What made everybody move from a corporate social media platform to another corporate social media platform instead of the fediverse?

After all, the Fediverse and Activitypub is much more mature than Bluesky and the copycat AT protocol or Threads and … whatever they use.

  • EnderMB@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    2 months ago

    Several reasons:

    • Mastodon is REALLY unfriendly from a UX perspective. To many, federation is a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist for them. In their mind, the early model of federation is like email, a problem that was “solved” years ago by having one corporate product that was much better than others (Gmail).
    • Reiterating, why should people care about the fediverse?
    • The fediverse is lacking the user numbers, and those that do post don’t really interact with others. Spend some time with the newhere tag and you’ll see a lot of people that make the occasional post, send a lot of replies, and end up leaving because that engagement ends up with maybe 2 followers. It’s rather clique-y.
    • Some fediverse sites (e.g. Lemmy) have bad reputations, and Mastodon partly suffers from this. Outside of tech, where people argue with each other all the time anyway, there isn’t really anything worthwhile being posted.

    Generally speaking, how is Mastodon any better than Bluesky? How is Lemmy any better than Reddit? If you can’t answer that in a way the average person gives a fuck about, what’s the argument for using them?

    • ngwoo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      To many, federation is a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist for them. In their mind, the early model of federation is like email, a problem that was “solved” years ago by having one corporate product that was much better than others (Gmail).

      To add, on top of that, the fediverse is like if gmail could just randomly decide to stop receiving emails from outlook addresses and there’s nothing any user can do about it except make another email for when they want to email outlook users.

      I don’t think fediverse proponents know just how catastrophically this terminates their entire pitch in the minds of 99% of internet users