PSA: There is a tool called Shreddit which you can use to delete all your content from Reddit. I have shredded 1000 posts as part of migrating to Lemmy and you should too.
https://shreddit.com/ - I hurt the bastards and you can too.
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It will absolutely.
The average non-tech savvy person will be extremely confused about how federated services operate. You say "join lemmy', and they say, 'ok, what's the site?" and then you need to explain, well, you need to pick one of about four thousand instances, and then only go there when you want to sign in. Now they're already confused. That can then be explained 'It's like e-mail, lots of different servers to get email, but they all work together." But this doesn't hit as well because a website is not e-mail, and so interconnected websites are not immediately intuitive. And as soon as you start going into any level of technical details, the average person just tunes out and decides "I don't want to deal with this crap."
If they pick an instance (Like Lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works) that allows free signup, they won't have too much of a problem. If they pick one that has questions to answer and then a manual approval process that is COMPLETELY opaque, they will nope the fuck out immediately and not even bother to find other instances. Heck, I was turned off of Lemmy for several days because of this, and I'm very tech savvy, and have been doing this sort of crap forever. I signed up first at Lemmy.one, which eventually got my login active, but took 3 days. When I saw no indication of that signup working, though, I tried Beehaw. That STILL has not been activated and it's been 5 or 6 days, and of course, there's no indication of what's going on during that time...it's just a spinning wheel. Not until I went to an instance that didn't have these ridiculous manual approvals did I begin using Lemmy. The average user is not going to bother with that.
These are going to be the biggest things that hold Lemmy back (there are also some serious usability issues with the main feed, concerning repeat posts showing for DAYS, and the autorefresh everywhere, which pushes content down constantly if you're in the New feed).
Listen, I explained Lemmy to my 66 year old boomer Dad and even he understood. You join one of the Lemmy instances and choose it as your home the same way you choose gmail as your email provider. Then you sub whatever community anywhere. It's not a big deal.
The way I see it, just like with many many many other open sourced projects such as Launchbox, or KeePass, or ShareX, or Libre Office, nothing starts out perfect. But you need to recognise there are hard working people trying to make this dream a reality. It's being worked on. What you are looking at is essentially a website in it's infancy still, and it's being built by the sheer will of the community. If people have patience, and understanding, things can work out just fine. This place is a paradise compared to Reddit. The Reddit corporation does not give a fuck. It wants your data, and to squeeze you for cash.
Lemmy isn't perfect, yet, but the best thing we can do is work together and make it the way we want it, and we can, nothing can stop us. It's open source, anyone can contibute. Donate. Post. Help the devs fix the bugs.
I understand that....the average person is not going to. Also, you EXPLAINED it to someone (I also explained it to my wife, who is not a tech person at all, and she understood fine), but again, it takes explaining. For this to take off, it's going to need to be accessible without a lot of explanation. Otherwise people just won't care.
For what it's worth, I'm not a tech person who didn't have anything explained to me beforehand, knew almost nothing except seeing the words 'lemmy instance' (didn't know what that meant, just that it was relevant so googled it and found a sign up page) and 'jerboa app' on reddit and figured out my way here lol. I probably have a bit more free time and patience than the average user and am not afraid to brute force my way through just to see if things work tho lol.
There needs some improvements before it'll be mainstream accessible for sure imo, most of which I've seen pointed out a few times already on different communities. I'd seen mastodon mentioned before in passing by non-tech friends who were just twitter users tho even without ever using Twitter myself, so I suspect if an average user can understand mastodon the same could be true here right?
Agree. I had to do some reading to fully understand the fediverse. If there was a portal that just assigned users to a random instance and then put them directly into a community database for them to sub across multiple instances it would be a much easier on boarding.
Meta is joining fediverse and bluesky will hopefully federate soon. People will "get it" soon enough...