Sim City for GameBoy. If you're thinking, "how the heck would you play Sim City on a GameBoy?" Exactly, don't do it. Young me wanted to like it, but just spare yourself...

What a complete knob. That's like saying you didn't know Michael Jackson was a pop star, or that the Pyramids were tombs for kings, pathetic.

Be careful, your child may start to take extremist actions with their fellow lefties such as:

1. Organizing or joining a union.
2. Voting for increased taxes on the ultra-wealthy.
3. Marching to protest police militarization and restrictions on women's rights.
4. Pushing for better pay, hours, and benefits in their workplace.

Capitalism is a system built on greed as a foundation to function. In a capitalist system, you must always continue to grow, expand, engulf, absorb, and acquire. This is why it is such a toxic and destructive system. Capitalism will always incentivize companies to get the most people possible to spend as much as possible on as little as possible, that's literally the core principle of maximizing profitability.

It's why enshittification keeps happening, the system isn't broken, it's working exactly how it's supposed to.

Capitalism. The incentive for any large, profit-motivated firm will always be to get the most people to pay as much as possible for as little as possible.

Part of the Capitalist mythos for sure, "if you're not growing, you're dying." There's a rejection of the idea that you could reach a healthy equilibrium of size and just remain there.

And because of the way the rest of the market works, it forces everybody to act like that or get beat out completely. Vicious feedback loops.

Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.

The general public isn't interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.

Say what you want about that, I'm not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn't the world we live in right now.

The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.

Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don't know what is the correct approach. All I know is I've heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.

Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.

Sad truth. I'm super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I'm also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.

OP, I like several of your examples though. Lots of the old school tech is really solid. Just needs a clean fast front end in many cases.

Bitwarden. I've used a bunch of password managers, Bitwarden has been by far the best for me.

The mobile, desktop, and web app are all awesome and work great.

Self-hostable, open source, great feature set. Pricing is super reasonable for their cloud hosted features. Ui is simple, clean, makes sense, and so far I've had zero issues with syncing, saving, etc.

IMO, it's a great example of a FOSS application that looks and functions as good or better than the nicest closed source proprietary software.

Not sure, but I hope hundreds of thousands come in. Realistically, I doubt it will be that many, and idk if the instances could handle that kind of load even if it did happen.

But we can hope all the above!

Echoing many things that other users are saying already:

Signing up/choosing a home instance is confusing. I don't think it's very confusing conceptually, but it is confusing from a UX/UI perspective. Subscribing to outside communities was the toughest part, I had to find them through a different instance using a search engine, then manually paste the community-specific URL into my home instance search, wait several seconds, then click into the community home page and finally click "subscribe."

Not something a casual user is going to want or even figure out to do. I trust that many of these growing pains will be fixed in the coming weeks/months. I just hope that it's not all a flash in the pan and then fizzles out totally.

I would love for the federated model to become a gold standard for how successful platforms ought to be run.