I love federation but I just don’t see it reaching the masses. People want connectivity and simplicity. I am willing to accept a centralized solution if it’s a non profit who takes care of moderators. Centralization isn’t always terrible, look at Wikipedia.
I agree, all those are super easy to use for an end user. I think maybe we need a website where a user can just check a couple boxes about what there interests are and it will automatically choose their instance for them. Would make it easier for those new to the fediverse to get up and going.
I’m thinking if any fediverse app takes off, we’re going to end up with a few monolithic instances sort of like Gmail and Outlook and those instances are where the masses will go. It takes away the “how do I choose an instance” dilemma. I suspect we’re already seeing that to some extent with kbin.social.
I have a feeling this post is some sort of joke, but as a serious comment, I think decentralization would work better if there were some way to automate assigning new users to instances. This part of onboarding is something that people I know (who have looked at Mastodon then turned down the idea of joining it) have cited as an annoyance. And I know I personally spent some time researching different instances in order to pick my instance, personally.
Contrast Revolt, a relatively recent (in contrast to Matrix) Discord alternative, which a few people people I know jumped right on – despite Discord not having any major/recent “sins” other than messing with the usernames. I mentioned that I’m surprised people so readily picked this up, and someone pointed out that there’s just one centralized place to make a Revolt account.
I love federation but I just don’t see it reaching the masses. People want connectivity and simplicity. I am willing to accept a centralized solution if it’s a non profit who takes care of moderators. Centralization isn’t always terrible, look at Wikipedia.
Phone calls are federated. Email is federated. Text messages are federated.
I’m certain that federated forums can be made easy enough, too. We just need to keep working on improvements. We haven’t yet seen their final form. :)
I agree, all those are super easy to use for an end user. I think maybe we need a website where a user can just check a couple boxes about what there interests are and it will automatically choose their instance for them. Would make it easier for those new to the fediverse to get up and going.
I’m thinking if any fediverse app takes off, we’re going to end up with a few monolithic instances sort of like Gmail and Outlook and those instances are where the masses will go. It takes away the “how do I choose an instance” dilemma. I suspect we’re already seeing that to some extent with kbin.social.
Yeah I think that’s where things are going. I myself use kbin.social far more than I use my lemmy.ml or lemmy.world accounts.
What will be really interesting to see is if we start to get separate instances dedicated to specific topics flourish.
I have a feeling this post is some sort of joke, but as a serious comment, I think decentralization would work better if there were some way to automate assigning new users to instances. This part of onboarding is something that people I know (who have looked at Mastodon then turned down the idea of joining it) have cited as an annoyance. And I know I personally spent some time researching different instances in order to pick my instance, personally.
Contrast Revolt, a relatively recent (in contrast to Matrix) Discord alternative, which a few people people I know jumped right on – despite Discord not having any major/recent “sins” other than messing with the usernames. I mentioned that I’m surprised people so readily picked this up, and someone pointed out that there’s just one centralized place to make a Revolt account.
This is 100% the problem. Makes me wonder if I should write a webpage just for automating signups.