The fediverse being "endless wars about who is federated" is not really true, is it?
Sure not everyone is federated with everyone else, but legacy social media is federated with nobody at all. Federation is the entire point of the Fediverse, you connect with people you want to connect with and you don't connect with people you don't. It's as simple as that.
Plus, do people really want to be on a single platform with everyone else in the world?
Because that's a big part of what broke the internet in the first place...
99% of users are going to check out when you ask them what server to join.
I'm so sick of this dumb ass argument...
People who complain about "servers" need to tell me what they think "the internet" is. The existence of servers didn't stop online video games, email or discord/slack from catching on with hundreds of millions of people, so why is it suddenly a problem when it comes to the Fediverse?
Onboarding obviously needs to be better, but I'm going to be totally honest honest here: I don't think these are legitimate, actionable or useful critiques.
These are merely excuses from people who are addicted to legacy social media and who don't give a shit that the internet is owned and controlled by a few rich corporations.
The server question was 100% the reason I didn't join Lemmy right away. It's not that I didn't understand what a server is. It's that the signup form was asking me to make a decision I didn't know the answer to, so I gave up.
With a little more hand holding, I'd have joined months before I actually did.
I think the difference between servers and what it means to be on one server vs another is not exactly obvious. On the other hand, if picking a Mastodon or Lemmy server gives a person choice paralysis, I don't know how they can pick anything in life without getting choice paralysis.
Like, how do you know which bread to buy? I guess you just arbitrarily pick one and if you like it then just stick with it, and if you don't then you try something else.
But listen, I'm no stranger to overthinking things, so I guess I do get it, even if it is a bit frustrating as someone who wants people to take the internet back from corporations and oligarchs. Sorry for being a bit overly dismissive. I think it's just that I'm a bit of an old school guy, and so I mostly just hate the idea that the entire internet needs to be centralized around one website/app/platform and that any small degree of choice or distribution is a bad thing.
Well ot kinda was true for the time of the big reddit exodus, there were very active and massively upvoted threads about one instance defederating from another, instances debating on whether they should defederate, beehive publicly wondering whether to ditch lemmy etc