Recommendation engines aren’t the biggest issue. People will figure out how to fins what they want, and be generally happy with that, if looking is easy enough.
The big issue is that “join the fediverse” is a really, really shitty and incomplete recommendation. It’s like “join the blogosphere!”
And “join Mastodon” or “join Lemmy” is bad, too. It’s like asking them to “join Joomla”.
You need to point people to the specific website they should join, and that website has to already have what they’re looking for. People aren’t interested in building something.
You know, if this rednote thing really takes off, I don’t think I can believe the whole “fediverse is too complicated” thing anymore. People are moving to an app that isn’t even fully in English. That’s WAY more complicated than picking a random instance out of a list (or more likely, just going to the one big one). I’m getting to where I think the vast majority of people just click on what’s advertised no matter how stupid it is, and without ads (not people spreading things by word of mouth, I mean actual “ooh, shiny” ads) mainstream uptake of the fediverse will never happen. Good luck outspending the big corps on that.
Might be for the best anyway. The type of people who respond to ads probably aren’t particularly fun to engage with.
Recommendation engines aren’t the biggest issue. People will figure out how to fins what they want, and be generally happy with that, if looking is easy enough.
The big issue is that “join the fediverse” is a really, really shitty and incomplete recommendation. It’s like “join the blogosphere!”
And “join Mastodon” or “join Lemmy” is bad, too. It’s like asking them to “join Joomla”.
You need to point people to the specific website they should join, and that website has to already have what they’re looking for. People aren’t interested in building something.
They just want to consume.
You know, if this rednote thing really takes off, I don’t think I can believe the whole “fediverse is too complicated” thing anymore. People are moving to an app that isn’t even fully in English. That’s WAY more complicated than picking a random instance out of a list (or more likely, just going to the one big one). I’m getting to where I think the vast majority of people just click on what’s advertised no matter how stupid it is, and without ads (not people spreading things by word of mouth, I mean actual “ooh, shiny” ads) mainstream uptake of the fediverse will never happen. Good luck outspending the big corps on that.
Might be for the best anyway. The type of people who respond to ads probably aren’t particularly fun to engage with.