I feel like the people I interact with irl don’t even know how to boot from a USB. People here probably know how to do some form of coding or at least navigate a directory through the command line. Stg I would bet money on the average person not even being able to create a Lemmy account without assistance.

  • squaresinger@lemmy.world
    7·
    1 month ago

    Tbh, getting into lemmy is quite a bit more complex than e.g. into Instagram or other centralized social media platforms.

    Compare this:

    • Choose which social media platform to use and land on Instagram
    • Download the instagram app from the default store of your phone’s OS
    • Create an account
    • Done

    with:

    • Choose which social media platform to use and land on Lemmy
    • Choose which app to use. There’s like 20 of them, some great some not so, some active, some abandoned. There’s no guide or anything, so you’ll have to google and/or try 5 of them to find one you like.
    • Choose which instance to use. There are literally hundreds of them and you don’t even know where to start. You have no information, but this choice is central to the kind of lemmy experience you will get.
    • Google and find join-lemmy.org. Now you got a one-liner for each instance together with user count. So naively you sort by activity and land on lemmy.ml.
    • Create an account
    • Figure out what .ml stands for.
    • Repeat step 3-5 because account transfers between instances don’t work.
    • Repeat step 3-5 because you landed on the likes of lemmy.ee or feddit.de, and the instance closed down
    • Done, until your instance closes down

    Slight hyperbole here, but choosing an app and instance alone is complicated enough to scare away lots of people.

    • Por_que_pine@startrek.websiteEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      Hyperbole? Not really. You described my lemmy experience perfectly. However, not having big data sift through my digital feces to find the peanut, makes it worth the effort.

      • squaresinger@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 month ago

        Tbh, not even that is guaranteed. Lemmy (or the fediverse in general) are really not that privacy-focussed at all.

        While the people running your instance might not be sifting through your data, nothing would stop anyone from doing so. Everything you post on Lemmy is public, and even if all major instances would somehow block scraping (which they don’t), a scraper would only need to create their own instance and ActivityPub would just deliver all of the data in a nice and easy to process way.

        The big advantage of Lemmy is that it is not controlled by one large corporation (and instead by a bunch of faceless, unknown randos on the internet), not that posting stuff publically visible on the internet is somehow more private.