Could federation be a turn-off for more 'mainstream' users?
Hey everyone, I'm honestly really liking Lemmy so far. Maybe that's because it feels so much like browsing reddit 10 years ago and I think it's safe to say many of us have migrated from the blackout. I'd been a Reddit user since 2010 so I've witnessed the slow decline over the years but popping here has really driven home how corporate it started to feel--less like a genuine hub of community and more like a manufactured product with low effort content and some genuine discussion/input peppered throughout.
That said, does anyone feel the idea of a federated platform might be confusing to some less network-savvy users? There's other successful multi-server platforms like Discord but somehow for me the idea of a 'chatroom' versus something more like a forum/board seems like it would make more sense to a less informed user. I could see hearing that posts are aggregating from other sites or being cross-visible confusing to individuals who understand web usage as, 'visit site--post to site--view content on site'.
Does that make sense? lol Anyways, loving the site so far--hope to see it grow!
As this instance just got defederated from beehaw.org, I would definitely say so since that's a massive pain, creating multiple accounts for one service just because some other members posted spam is really annoying.
Why can I still see Beehaw posts though?
You can see their content, but they wont see anything you contribute to it. I just unsubscribed from any beehaw communities so I stop seeing them.
Basically, we now have a local, frozen in time copy of the old beehaw communities on this instance, that will not sync with any other instance anymore since the main instance of that community is no longer talking to this instance. You can still make posts and comments on there, but the only people seeing them will be other lemmy.world users.
Wow, I didn't know defederation was a thing until reading the comments in this post. In that case, I agree with the OP that not leading with federation when promoting Lemmy is probably the best.