I don’t know why people look for feature parity between Lemmy/kbin and Reddit. With a bigger audience, its bound to happen that Lemmy/kbin will catch on features. People waited years and years for reddit to become what it “was”. The fediverse isn’t a stop gap. It’s the next potential platform once foss devs see the potential and have an audience to satisfy.

These articles always feel like the push us towards looking for a commercial option when we already have the right option under our nose. Just give it a few dev cycles.

I keep seeing articles posted on Mastodon about how Mastodon is doomed. Meanwhile, I only follow around 300 people, but my feed is constant.

If it's failing, then someone forgot to tell it. Unless of course, by failing they mean "isn't making money for rich people".

The only way the Fediverse gets ready is by going thru the growing pains that Reddit had to when we all fled from Digg. It also wasn’t ready then but the community stepped up and became mods and built apps and made it awesome. We will do it again… and this time it’ll be distributed and much harder for one person to screw over all of us

I knew this part would ruffle some feathers since whomever is reading it here is probably on board with Lemmy/Kbin.

I do think that for many it's too early but there's now significant interest into making everything a bit more stable and streamlined. I think Mastodon is already there but it is suffering from bad rep from their own waves of migration. I'm a bit worried it'll be the same for Lemmy.

Paid fear mongering. You go to lemmy.world (or any other instance) and sign up. Done. It's not difficult at all. It's rich assholes trying to keep you on reddit.

Well we went from an era where only a small portion of the population congregated online in forums and chats, which basically required you to either be a kid or a techie of some kind, to a world where your grandma was on Facebook because FB made it hella easy to signup and adductive as hell to stay. The Grandma (or even Parent) on Facebook types have never interacted with the internet in the ways we (rightly) romanticize

I'm honestly starting to feel like it might be a net benefit for the barrier to entry to be higher. Since I switched to the Fediverse I have found that post quality is higher here than on Reddit, there's less flaming, fewer low-effort overdone joke comment chains etc. Also it reminds me that there is better shit to do with my life than spend 3 hours a day reading a bunch of hyper-specific subforums that I'm subscribed to.

I think that is disingenuous. People did complain (and pearl clutch) about reddit as it's tree comment structure was vastly different than what people were used to and the upvote / downvote didnt make any sense. But people adapted quickly just like they always do. This move to lemmy is exactly like how the digg -> reddit move went.

Feels like a smear campaign at this point. They're making it sound like you have to dig through instances and code your own interface or something

I think the biggest issue is finding the content you are looking for.

Sometimes people aren’t on Mastodon and even if they are it’s not alway easy to find them if they are not on the same instance.

I think there's active misinformation being shared about the difficulty of use for fediverse playforms. Yeah it's 20 clicks instead of 5 but it's not that hard.

It's easy to forget outside of communities like this how low tech literacy actually is.

I think I don't understand probably 95% of how the internet works and I'm fairly sure that I'm above average in my general understanding.

If the Fediverse really wants to break into the mainstream, and I'm neither saying it does or it should, then these things need to become easier and straightforward.

Joining a server isn't hard, but finding content outside of the server you have chosen can be. Lemmy seems to be better than Mastodon here, but still.

People don't care about federation as such. They want their social network and they want it all, regardless of which server it sits on, and they want it easy.

As someone who works in IT, I can tell you that ive witnessed firsthand so many people who get viruses because when someone gives them a URL, they dont just go to that site. They go to www.google.com, search for the URL, and blindly click on the first result, which is almost always an ad, and which sometimes is a link to malware. Fun times.

Something I often need to keep in mind is that when I was growing up the home PC was pretty crude and mysterious. You had to learn what a command line was, you had to learn about data backups and file trees, you had to learn about navigation and discovery of the web.

Sure you might not have done any of this stuff for decades now, depending on how you engage with the infernal devices, but if you see a forum you know what that is, how it works, what you expect to find inside. If you see URLs with like foo.com/place@otherfoo you kinda intuitively grasp what that is saying.

But if you're like 20 now probably the first computer you ever touched was a magic box where you just clicked things to open stuff and they managed their own little things. Clicked a thing to install other clicky things. You don't know what a config file is, why would you? you don't really use URLs much, you just click the internet and start typing and then click the right link etc.

To a lot of those people some of this stuff is as arcane as like arch linux is to your average millennial PC user. Despite fedi (and arch! I use arch btw) actually being really simple and obvious there's a barrier of unfamiliarity and a lot of basic skills you need to learn first.

Lemmy taking over as a protocol would not be a bad thing, because by design it promotes the creation of multiple federated instances. At least the UI woukd be standardized, lowering the user friction in case he needs to migrate.

The Verge peeps are rather enthusiastic about Activity Pub based platforms, I wouldn't attribute bad intent there.

Linux is used by most of the world but it's either backend where techies take care of things or super streamlined experiences like Android etc.

Federation is a pretty unique concept when learning about it and can be confusing at first. Then after you understand it, you need to choose an instance from god knows how maby and you don't even know how to find what is out there. The first 2-3 days of my migration to lemmy was research. And while it is not hard with just a bit of tech literacy, it's not as easy as finding one site and register - which can be easily done by most people with little tech literacy.

People have just completely lost any semblance of tech literacy.

I think you heavily overestimate the technical literacy of most people. I'd say majority started with 0 and stayed that way, because they only ever use stuff that causes little friction so that even they can use it. It's not that people lost it, it's that the way tech evolved it allowed people with none to go in.

I agree with the general notion that it is a nice filter for the feddiverse and might keep some of the most stupid at bay - at least for a while.

Every time I visit lemmy.world I find myself coming straight back to beehaw because insufferable people make lemmy.world feel just like reddit did and I just get pissed off after 5 minutes of scrolling. Beehaw is perfect for me specifically because there are less people.

They must be used to all the major social medias having absolutely butchered their mobile sites