Comment on The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied.
LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 2 days agoYou and I know this but people at first glance generally do not. Then you try to explain to them how Federation works and their eyes gloss over
eta@feddit.org 2 days ago
What I’m trying to say is that every social network has it’s quirks that you just need to learn. The willingness to learn also depends on how attractive the platform is. With time i see no reason for lemmy to not grow like reddit did.
If you just google “Lemmy” one of the first results is https://join-lemmy.org/ where you are directed to an instance that suits you. Far from perfect but Lemmy is still young.
People probably don’t even really need to understand federation. They just need sane defaults to get started and work from there.
LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
And what I’m trying to say is that the big dogs don’t have quirks. They are intuitive to the point where 98% of people can figure them out in seconds the moment they look at them. They have spent billions of dollars over decades learning how to create as little friction as possible to get new users onto their platforms.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day ago
PieFed closes most of those gaps. It's not quite as fully featured as Lemmy, in particular the search function (but then again, Reddit's search doesn't work either?:-P), but it's super easy to get started on the Threadiverse.
For one thing, you don't even need an account or to download anything at all to start using it immediately to browse content from all across Lemmy. And the Categories of Communities featuring topic areas, which you can customize yourself and/or share with others, provide that multi-Reddit feel that people, especially from Reddit, really crave. See e.g. Arts & Crafts, and note the subheadings beneath, such as Photography. There is simply no comparison between this and e.g. the default setting for Lemmy being to only show Local content (a setting which lemmy.ml still uses today) for those without accounts.
Then if you decide to create an account, a wizard walks you through various settings, asking the user for their preferences and automatically subscribing to multiple communities based on the answers. Multiple types of News, multiple types of Politics, etc. Or just don't bother subscribing at all, so that it doesn't flood your Subscribed feed, yet still be able to access it immediately with the Topic Category at any time.
It's not perfect, but it's damn good:-). And for those who do want it, testing is underway for an app (Thunder).