The problem is, it's the other way around. Facebook is the option that feels easy/safe/convenient. The fediverse has a long way to go for it to be something the average Internet user would use, both in publicity and in ease of use.

[–] BremboTheFourth@piefed.ca 5 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Ease of use, I disagree. 99% of people already go to the one big instance of whatever service, whether it be Mastodon.social, Piefed.social, Lemmy.world, whatever; you type in your email and a password, maybe click a verification link in your email, and bam, you're set. Compare that to Facebook where you do that plus they'll ask you to set security questions or 2 factor auth, maybe even make you take a selfie or a picture of your driver's license--signing up in the Fediverse really ain't that hard. It's arguably easier! I'm not sure why people still say otherwise. Maybe to ease what little guilt they might feel about supporting monstrous corporations? But the truth is most people don't want to sign up for anything, period. IF, and that is a BIG IF, they go for a new service, they'll want to click the button that says "sign up using my Google account" and be done with it.

The real problem is the same one every gaming service that has ever tried to compete with Steam has: the default is already set. This is the type of problem that Epic hasn't been able to solve by offering tons of free games, nor GOG with its lack of DRM, nor Microsoft with its $1 Gamepass. Those services survive, sure, but the position of "top dog" has never been in doubt.

You might point to Bluesky as a success story, but it only got the audience it did because they ran an effective ad campaign with the original founder of Twitter, right as Twitter itself enshittified to a nigh unbelievable degree. It lost core features like reliable checkmark verification and blocking other users, and the new owner was making Nazi salutes live on national TV. And Bluesky still haven't truly managed to take the throne! Twitter is still the biggest service of its kind! Meanwhile the myth that Mastodon is any harder to join than Bluesky or Twitter is still pervasive, so people don't even give it a chance.

So, publicity, sure, that's a real problem we have, but that's a paradox that's damn near impossible to solve: people don't want to move away from where everyone is already signed up because that's where the most content is, and the most content is there because that's where everyone is already signed up. All we can do in the meantime is continue to exist as we have been.

My cope is that I don't want to interact with people who are so incapable of signing up for new services anyway. Whatever their reasons for their impatience, whether it be their nature, or if they have a stressful, time consuming job, or if they don't know how it works and just use whatever their grandkids signed them up for--whatever the reason, it's going to extend to their ability to disseminate what's happening on the platform, too. Those people are (in general) way more susceptible to misinformation, to spreading it themselves, and to generally being a toxic online presence wherever they go. So fuck 'em, we don't need 'em!

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

This is the type of problem that Epic hasn't been able to solve by offering tons of free games

I largely agree with your comment, but this arguement is ignoring tons of context. EGS was using monopolistic practices like paid exclusoves right out of the game, to the degree where they were paying devs to pull games off of Steam even after people bought copies on there.

Hell, when they did it to Metro: Exodus it was so close to launch the devs had to put stickers on all of the physical copies to say they contained keys for EGS instead of Steam. They even pulled Kickstarter games that were promised to be available on Steam.

On top of the EGS rarely supported their store. It took them over 2 years to add a shopping cart. That's something a competent software developer could do in a couple of days. You'd think a company shelling out millions of dollars for exclusive releases would be willing to spend $1-2k in developer's time to implement something that almost every other online storefront has.

Let's also not forget that Tim Sweeny (Epic's CEO) is a major proponent against using Linux. Instead, he tries to push his store's users to Windows, which is run by another monopoly.

EGS had a chance to compete against Ste with the free games, but they shot themselves in the foot by starting out in a way that pissed a lot of people off and continuing with yet more screw ups.

[–] VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I see your point, but still think that an onboarding site that assigns you an instance from a pool that's seen as reliable might be sensible. After all, we don't want "one big instance", that kinda defeats the point of the fediverse.

Also, I feel the network effect is even worse for Twitter-likes. You're on Facebook for your friends/family, and you might convince some of them to move. You're on a Twitter-like to follow certain people, and whether or not they're on a different service is a crapshoot. And if they are, chances are it's Bluesky.

[–] NathanUp@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago

And also, Friendica is not easy to use for new users, documentation isn't great, the very best theme is meh in terms of appearance and usability, and there are severe performance issues preventing large instances from being functional. This is coming from someone who really likes Friendica and wants it to succeed.

[–] BremboTheFourth@piefed.ca 2 points 1 day ago

I was trying to preempt the argument that picking an instance is confusing and is the big "ease of use" barrier. Which it probably would be, except that most people don't bother with that: they just sign up with the big one. I don't mean to imply that's a good thing, I agree that a stronger system to distribute users among instances would be cool, but I don't think it would make a difference in the number of people joining in the first place. I think that network effect is easily the biggest hurdle, and there's not much we can do about it systematically outside of keeping the network we do have alive and making incremental improvements. I'm not sure there's any killer feature we could invent that would really swing the needle. Bigger, better funded orgs than us have tried.

Otherwise, it's just about us as individuals, doing what we can to push the people in our lives away from corporate social media.

[–] blarghly@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

My cope is that I don’t want to interact with people who are so incapable of signing up for new services anyway. Whatever their reasons for their impatience, whether it be their nature, or if they have a stressful, time consuming job, or if they don’t know how it works and just use whatever their grandkids signed them up for–whatever the reason, it’s going to extend to their ability to disseminate what’s happening on the platform, too. Those people are (in general) way more susceptible to misinformation, to spreading it themselves, and to generally being a toxic online presence wherever they go. So fuck 'em, we don’t need 'em!

The point of facebook is to interact with people you know in real life. Not just privacy nerds on the internet