Technology

I've come to the conclusion that it never will. Be happy with what it is. It'll slowly grow for a few years, and slowly die at the same time.

What eventually will happen is the fediverse will be so niche that less than 1000 people will use it.

Which is sad because IF it had the userbase, it would last basically forever. Because it can scale, and adapt to a changing world. It can scale itself indefinately as long as there is interest. It has the basic foundation for being able to uproot corporate ownership elsewhere.

But the reason it never will is the same reason Linux never will be even in the same conversation as the dominant operating systems. It's because it's formed niche concepts which confuse the average user. I've been here 5 months, with more posts than most I come into contact with. Yet I still feel like I must not be getting something. It feels off.

It's more than just decentralized. It's fragmented. The people who write the code seem to think that the average person gives two shits about decentralized. They don't. At all. If anything it's a hinderence to them, because it makes things harder to understand.

And THATS the problem. If you call the average person "normies", then you're sending a clear line between them and you. As if they don't belong.

The best way to attract "normies" is to make things easy. Painfully easy. Preschool levels of easy.

My niece has been using an iPad since she was like 2 years old. My sister, who bought the iPad has ZERO clue how to use it.

These are the people who live on this planet.

With both Linux and the fediverse, the same mentality from the creators seems to be in use. "If I had to deal with it being hard, so do you". And that's a deal breaker for the vast majority.

There needs to be a set of standards that ALL fediverse services and instances need to adhere to. It can still be defederated, but it should FEEL unified. That means one set of usernames. It means if you don't like the instance you're on, you can transfer your account. All your settings, all your post history, all your upvotes would come with you. When you're signing up, you get the choice between the default behavior of random home instance. Which would place you on any random instance which accepts public resignation. OR you can choose any instance that will have you.

This would please the idea of no single instance growing too big. While also keeping individual public instances from clumping same minded people, which then introduces different instances all having different personalities. Ideally you want fediverse nuetrality. Just people, all people, on all machines.

But that's why the fediverse won't grow. SOMEONE will come along and say "Well it won't work because...."

To which I say MAKE it work. Otherwise the fediverse won't be attractive to average people. Google looked at linux and said "We'll MAKE it work." And today Android is the most widely used cell phone OS in the world. While traditional linux has less than 5% adoption rate.

Android is something you don't need to explain. It doesn't work like windows. So you can't blame that. It had no preexisting muscle memory, so you can't blame that. They just put it in peoples hands in 2009, and said "This is android. Use it."

And people didn't need to watch tutorial videos. They didn't need to learn new things. They just picked it up, knowing nothing about what a smart phone even was. In those days touch screens were even a novel new concept. And people just got it. They understood right from the start how it worked.

That's what the fediverse needs. Simplicity that doesn't need explaining, and cross adoption. So if you get a Lemmy account, it makes sense to get a pixelfed account instead of an Instgram.

But thats not what the developers of these systems are doing. That's not whats being worked on. It never will. Don't look for it. What we have is what we got. We might get a slight increase in users, but not anything significant. Because there is no unity in the decentralization.