In some of the music communities I’m in the content creators are already telling their userbase to go follow them on threads. They’re all talking about some kind of beef between Elon and Mark and the possibility of a boxing match… Mark was right to call the people he’s leaching off of fucking idiots.
It’s a bit of a shock that simply picking an instance and signing up like any regular site is such a hurdle to so many people.
That’s the key, you have to figure out what instance is best for you. With a million choices you get choice paralysis mixed with FOMO and they just don’t bother.
IMO that’s probably the biggest problem with anything decentralized like this. The average person doesn’t care about the benefits and the above is by far a big barrier to entry.
The biggest advantage of a decentralized system is that none of the people who are unwilling to invest even the briefest amount of time into understanding something will end up using it.
Most of us don’t care what the average person has to say on social media, as demonstrated by what they average person has said on social media over the past 15 years.
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That was not the case with lemmy. Most of the instances I tried required manual approval for signups. It took me going through like 4 different instances to find one that didn’t.
To be fair, most people reccomend lemmy.world now, and that doesn’t need manual approval. But there’s another problem, they can’t interact with Beehaw.
“Simply” picking an instance is not actually that simple. Most people just want to go to the site and sign up. Even with email, they know what Gmail and Outlook are. But on Lemmy, there’s no indication of what you’re supposed to pick. Even if you try to go with what seems like the “default” instance, lemmy.ml, you’re met with an announcement saying not to do thaf cause it’s overloaded.
People don’t want to have to make decisions, especially when they don’t have any information to go off of.
Best thing Lemmy signups could do is ask “What’s your primary interest?” And randomly select an instance that has that category.
What if I don’t want to immediately pigeonhole myself into one specific niche?
As a non-LGTB / non-furry / neurotypical / multiple-interest-having / boring-ass white guy in his forties, there really isn’t a sub-sub-microcommunity for me.
And picking these communities is like throwing a political sign in your front yard, saying, “HEY! I know there are some people out there who hate this stuff! Argue with me! Troll me! Make my experience here as terrible as possible!”
That’s a bit hyperbolic. You only do that if you join a heavily political instance or subscribe to tons of political communities. Most of the boards aren’t like that.