It’s hard to predict - because despite the bad decisions from platforms like Facebook, Twitch, and Reddit, they are still always going to be immensely more popular than Fediverse / FOSS equivalents due to the network effect.
Despite all the bad moves from YouTube, Twitch, and Reddit, the vast majority of people aren’t interested in another platform, they just want the current platform to not be rubbish, so they don’t lose their current communities and contacts.
While I’d like for all the Fediverse platforms to become relatively “mainstream” that people will sign up for them, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen any time soon, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
Absolutely right. What makes or breaks any social media platform is the ease of forming large communities (which goes hand in hand with the number of total active users) first and the user experience second.
“Fediverse” seems to suffer greatly from a UX point of view, mostly due to decentralization, which creates this isolation effect for newcomers.
Take mastodon vs twitter for example. For someone used to signing up for twitter and instantly gaining access to virtually everything the platform has to offer, mastodon has a big threshold to jump over before you can have a twitter-like experience. At least it feels like it until you get used to the experience. That’s still the biggest barrier in front of large scale adoption of decentralized social media platforms.
Right - I think people are willing to learn things, but only if they have an incentive to do so.
Using bigger platforms such as Twitter or Reddit took some learning, but people and content were already there, this gives people the incentive to figure out how things work.
When you sign up to something like Mastodon, you have to learn how it works, and while it is not particularly complicated at all, why put the effort into figuring out Mastodon when you can just go back to Twitter and have the content and community already there for you?
It’s hard to predict - because despite the bad decisions from platforms like Facebook, Twitch, and Reddit, they are still always going to be immensely more popular than Fediverse / FOSS equivalents due to the network effect.
Despite all the bad moves from YouTube, Twitch, and Reddit, the vast majority of people aren’t interested in another platform, they just want the current platform to not be rubbish, so they don’t lose their current communities and contacts.
While I’d like for all the Fediverse platforms to become relatively “mainstream” that people will sign up for them, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen any time soon, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
Absolutely right. What makes or breaks any social media platform is the ease of forming large communities (which goes hand in hand with the number of total active users) first and the user experience second.
“Fediverse” seems to suffer greatly from a UX point of view, mostly due to decentralization, which creates this isolation effect for newcomers.
Take mastodon vs twitter for example. For someone used to signing up for twitter and instantly gaining access to virtually everything the platform has to offer, mastodon has a big threshold to jump over before you can have a twitter-like experience. At least it feels like it until you get used to the experience. That’s still the biggest barrier in front of large scale adoption of decentralized social media platforms.
Right - I think people are willing to learn things, but only if they have an incentive to do so.
Using bigger platforms such as Twitter or Reddit took some learning, but people and content were already there, this gives people the incentive to figure out how things work.
When you sign up to something like Mastodon, you have to learn how it works, and while it is not particularly complicated at all, why put the effort into figuring out Mastodon when you can just go back to Twitter and have the content and community already there for you?