Do you believe Lemmy/Mastodon can become mainstream and fully replace their centralized counterparts?
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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When I first started using it I did not think so. In the week or so since I've sort of wrapped my head around some of it, and now I think it's certainly possible.
The biggest hangup in my opinion is the very concept. As a normie I get to the login screen and I see that it's asking for an instance along with a username and password. That's scary and you're curious what that even is, so you Google it. And that doesn't help at all. You're fed a very technical description that feels like a brick wall of information. It's intimidating.
Once you are set up on a large instance and logged into a good app, subscribed to some of your niches... Well in my experience at all clicked together pretty quickly. The only thing that's missing from the Lemmy experience is traffic. I know there are already some pretty big communities and people are starting to say it's too big or something, but there's many interests of mine that are booming on Reddit that have a handful or less posts here. Naturally things take time, and I am genuinely starting to believe we're on the way there with this platform (network of platforms?)
The way I've described it to non tech friends and family is "a bunch of different reddits, all with their own subreddits, but the different reddits can all talk to each other even if you only have an account on one. Then if one reddit has stuff your reddit doesn't want to see, your community (or just the admins) can decide to disconnect from them." It's worked well so far.
Yeah that's a pretty accurate way of putting it ngl. I'm probably stealing this
Yeah, maybe there could be blurb during the sign up section when selecting an instance? That being said, I didn't know what I was doing when I first signed up for Lemmy and chose Lemmy.world without knowing choosing the largest one didn't matter.
Email and Usenet used to have the same barrier to entry, you needed someone to host and provide NNTP, POP3 and SMTP servers for you to access them. This was usually your ISP or IT department.
Modern internet users have become so conditioned by FB, Gmail, etc to think that the only way you can access content is though one of these monolithic providers. There are some users who think that FaceBook is the internet (just like Early AOL, MSN and CompuServe users of the 90’s).
I would like to see small ISPs provide federated instances for their subscribers, just like their email servers and the NNTP servers from days of yore. Since most independent ISP churn is triggered by word-of-mouth, it would be a great marketing platform.