Hey everyone, I’m honestly really liking Lemmy so far. Maybe that’s because it feels so much like browsing reddit 10 years ago and I think it’s safe to say many of us have migrated from the blackout. I’d been a Reddit user since 2010 so I’ve witnessed the slow decline over the years but popping here has really driven home how corporate it started to feel–less like a genuine hub of community and more like a manufactured product with low effort content and some genuine discussion/input peppered throughout.
That said, does anyone feel the idea of a federated platform might be confusing to some less network-savvy users? There’s other successful multi-server platforms like Discord but somehow for me the idea of a ‘chatroom’ versus something more like a forum/board seems like it would make more sense to a less informed user. I could see hearing that posts are aggregating from other sites or being cross-visible confusing to individuals who understand web usage as, ‘visit site–post to site–view content on site’.
Does that make sense? lol Anyways, loving the site so far–hope to see it grow!
If lemmy every becomes mainstream the implementation details will be completely lost to people, and that’s ok. You can try explaining someone what a web browser is, but people will still say “I opened google” or even “I opened internet” instead of “I opened chrome”. With lemmy there will probably be a few huge instances that people just gravitate to, and if/when something goes wrong, communities will have to migrate, and users will have to try to get into a new instance.
That’s what happened with email. Back in the day it was basically just institutions and very geeky people with basement servers who had an email address (and before that, government). For it to hit mainstream, large, for-profit corporations, had to set up mail servers and make it easy to get in and use it. Nowadays people just use their browser or outlook or Gmail app without even knowing what an SMTP server is. If the fediverse evolved that way, I hope by then there are a lot of communities that have taken root in community-owned instances, otherwise power just gets reconcentrated to a few big players again.
I already can imagine some people talking to their tech savy friend and telling them
It’s like old bar names from when people did not know how to read, I don’t know what that fediverse and lemmy stuff is, I just go to the white monkey.