network effects
- Ease of use
The combination of having to choose an instance and then start with an algorithm free blank slate is a tough ask. It literally takes time to sit down and setup your initial “feed”, which is probably a good thing, but not at all what attracts users whimsical curiosities nor what they’ve experienced over their entire existence with social media.
I don’t think the average user thinks much about the platform they’re on, and about who controls it. I think they go to wherever most of their family/friends are.
Also, those platforms are firmly in the mainstream, the alternatives aren’t really - you’d have to actively go search for them. People just aren’t likely to do that, I don’t think.
Most people are like sheep and just follow the herd.
Do you want them here? I don’t. I don’t tell a soul about lemmy, because this is place for me to get away from them. A place for mostly rational discussion, populated by people free thinking enough to seek an alternative. If the masses descended on Lemmy, they’d ruin it like they ruin everything else. They’d draw the attention that would lead to it being litigated, regulated, purchased, corporatized etc. Let them stay on Facebook and Reddit.
This sounds like a very gatekeeper and elitist mentality. Also, Lemmy is FLOSS, they can’t buy it up or destroy it.
In my IT program at school, the only people who have heard of the fediverse are the ones I’ve told.
convenience, marketing
People follow the crowd and centralized media had considerably bigger crowds
Several of these platforms used bots and/or multiple staff accounts to inflate user count/engagement to draw more people in and trigger the network effect.
I don’t think federation vs centralization is the primary differentiator. I think corporate vs non-profit/ad-free/donation-only/volunteerism is. Our marketing budget is goose egg. It’s all word-of-mouth.
Yeah I keep pushing for join-lemmy.org to buy ads on Google and Bing.
The more people using a social media platform, the more content there is to consume and people to interact with. It’s really hard to move to a new platform when there just isn’t as much stuff to consume as the centralized platforms like Reddit. I’m using Lemmy for ideological reasons, but if you just want to vibe and scroll online, Reddit has way more to offer. That said, the user experience of Reddit is continually degrading. Potentially at some point it will create enough refugees that sites like Lemmy hit an inflection point of users.
100%. Lemmy just happens to have the communities I’m interested in.
I remember trying to move to Mastodon years ago. But the main topics in my feed were furries, transgenders and activists.
Not hating on any of those, but it just wasn’t what I was interested in at the time, so I quit the whole microblogging thing altogether and spent more time on Reddit.
Sounds like a question for them.
Because they actually have content and friends there
friends on reddit?
