Do you believe Lemmy/Mastodon can become mainstream and fully replace their centralized counterparts?
What the title says. I think there is still a long way for that to happen but i've been hopeful. What do you think?
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Lemmy, yes. Mastodon, no. I could make no sense of mastodon and found nothing of interest.
I agree, with Lemmy it's alot easier to jump in and begin browsing content. With Mastodon it seems you have to know who to follow before you can have content on your 'home' feed, so it's very dependent on who you follow. Which is hard when none of the folks I follow from twitter are on mastodon, so I just have no clue where to start 😅
That's because Mastodon is a federated Twitter clone. If you never used Twitter to begin with (which is really for professionals/celebrities/famous people to put out public messages to people), then you won't get it. Most people don't need to use Twitter or anything like it.
Mastodon isn’t enough like Twitter imo. It’s too complicated and the separate severs just make things even more difficult. Reddit was always focused on posting under a community, Twitter is community optional. Community optional doesn’t translate well to decentralization at all imo.
I just run off of their big main server and it works fine for me ☺️
How is that functionally different than just having the entire thing be centralized, though? At that point the decentralization is just a footnote that makes the website more confusing. The main instance could be sold off one day and walled off from the other instances and nobody would be able to do anything about it.
I mean, I could run my own node for everything. Just have enough on my plate with work and such.
That's exactly how I felt about twitter years ago, before retro game console modders started posting announcements on it. Couldn't make heads or tails of it, and more importantly, I didn't have any motivation to do so, because there was no content I cared about.
I found with Mastodon I had to force myself to really give it a couple of goes to get how it worked. Initially it seemed like a ghost town, it's definitely way harder to find interesting content at first especially if you've picked a general server. None of that, or really how the whole things works, is really explained to the user, but I've found the experience is getting a bit better.
It started clicking with me when I searched a few very specific hashtags and started following them and the people posting in them. Definitely a lot more work to find stuff on there though. If it's got any chance of taking off, the onboarding process needs to be a lot easier, especially for users coming from Twitter, Instagram and others. The first impression leaves a lot to be desired.