Or folks could learn how to do this stuff. Centralization due to "ease of use" is what got us into this mess, and keeps getting us into more walled gardens. At some point folks need to take some responsibility and learn how to setup and maintain their own shit.
It's endlessly fascinating to me - I basically assume that everyone here knows how to do computer stuff, at least at the enthusiast/power user level. Nobody at that level should have an issue with a system that requires a bit of extra configuration or a really, really tiny learning curve.
And yet, every single one of these fediverse discussions is full of people basically saying "This doesn't spoonfeed me with zero effort, I turned it off after ten seconds!"
I have had my Mastodon account since 2017, I posted once and then never really looked again, and then after Twitter imploded and people started using it, I came back. I was an active Twitter user at the time as well, and I just stuck with it for a while, but eventually I just quit using it because there was just no quality interaction on it at all, with people I agree with or otherwise.
I also had kind of a boring Masto feed at first, until I figured out to subscribe to hashtags, and now I have several quality conversations a day about things I'm interested in, with congenial strangers who are also just there to talk about cool stuff. You have to change your habits a bit, it's fine and it's better.
I have also identified a strong tendency in this forum to do very well-outlined explanations of what is difficult or inefficient about federation, but invariably, the problem they're describing exists in a much worse form on the silo'd alternative they are implying we should stick with.
I think you're making the mistake that just because people on the forum have the skills, knowledge, and general capacity to learn a new tool that they are convinced to put in the effort to learn the new tool. Social media specifically has thrived on a culture of extreme low effort to learn how to start having fun with it (think TikTok showing you cool videos, then an easy prompt to sign up, then an immediate "for you" page before you ever need to engage with the TikTok community like commenting, liking, following, etc).
The fediverse (and decentralized social media in general) breaks the mold of extreme ease of use and therefore subverts the cultural expectations, thereby violating one of the ways a user would establish if the application is "good", and thereby it looks "bad".
It's like, technically X algorithm is a superior algo to use. But I can import Algo Joe's library that's 50 years old and already integrated into every language I know, so I'll do Joe.Sort().
Perhaps low-effort users are part of the problems we're experiencing? I think maybe it's time to dial back the user-friendliness just a weeeny bit.
Anyways, I see zero evidence that Reddit will come back from this conflagration in any sort of good shape, and I see even less evidence that the VC business model is going to do any better with anything else.
Edit: Just sitting here thinking about this. Who exactly gets any benefit from low-effort users of a system?
The members of the community? Absolutely not.
The mods? F%@k no.
The site operator who makes money from attention. Get this guy out of the equation and we can have nice things again.
You seem to be assuming that everyone who doesn't want to jump through hoops at signup is a low-quality user. This seems like a very flawed (or pretentious?) view. "Low-quality users" are a subset of "users who don't want to jump through hoops at signup", but the subset is small in comparison to the superset.
Well, this one got a lot of response heat, I'm picking you to respond to.
Twitter is also the current textbook example of the problem with low-effort platforms that are controlled by capital. Like, do I even need to explain this to anyone? Are there still any Musk fanboys in the room who think he's playing 4d chess?
But while Twitter circles the drain and the world scrambles to figure out what to use instead, and Mastodon steps up as a competitor which cannot be seized and ruined by capital, ever, Reddit stands firm as the one true platform that got it right! Everyone gazes in awe at the one last hope for the capitalist internet, which seems to be doing just fine.
And Reddit looked over at Twitter, and then Reddit looked down like Rorschach, and said... "Hold my Over 8000 beers..."
You can’t just categorize people into being low-effort. Motivation is continuously changing, it is absolutely possible that someone will post an absolutely fascinating comment once they find that great unique context.
Also, reddit’s value is exactly that you have very different demographics on each subreddit, and “hearing the voice” of people is the whole point.
I actually don't disagree with your point. I'm merely explaining why fediverse-style platforms always get the complaint it sucks because it's harder to use than the centralized alternative, even among a community that should be used to such platforms.
Well that's what I'm saying. The backend doesn't need to be centralized. But you can avoid the need for the user to "learn this stuff" (which, like it or not, is undeniably a barrier to adoption), by "centralizing" the client (which can still be open source, with competing implementations that all connect to the same "fediverse"), in the sense that each user can have one app that connects to multiple backends for fetching and posting content.
And instead of relying on servers to federate with each other (which basically just shifts the problem, replacing one centralized walled garden with a patchwork of smaller gardens), why not let the client decide which servers to subscribe to? In an ideal world, the client could even merge comment threads when the same story is posted to multiple servers that the client subscribes to.
Centralization due to ease of use IS social media.
Without the centralization, why bother? Without the monolithic environments it's all private gardens. There's no point going and standing in someone's private garden while they're away.
It's seeking of the public square that is generating this situation, over and over and over again. This mess IS the territory. Either there's a way to have best of both worlds, or some kind of 'both worlds, in a compromised way', or this will always happen and this, too, is the territory: all public squares will be bombed for one reason or another until they're gone.
The whole point of federation is to connect these private gardens to each other. So you avoid the disadvantages of both (1) big centralized walled gardens that are not sustainable as "public squares" due to enshittification, and (2) tiny individual instances. This is very similar to how email and the Web work. It's why we use the internet nowadays instead of just dialing up to Compuserve.
