For the general user, I don't really think so. Not unless a couple big companies run their own instances and search engines bring up specific instances to join. The barrier to entry is relatively complex compared to something that just "works"
Fediverse
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;
- What is the fediverse?
- Fediverse Platforms
- How to run your own community
No. Fediverse is great by design, but is too complicated at the moment (maybe it's just how platforms are set up at the moment).
The design is not too intuitive in looking at other posts from different instances/servers. For example going to this post
The issue is that without marketing or any big scale advertising, the fediverse is never going to take off. Because it is not backed by a big corporation with enough capital like Reddit, it won't ever reach the masses, even with all the advertising the recent Reddit API changes have brought to lemmy and the fediverse, even if Fedi were to be 10x better than anything else.
@retreat3926 @Bicyclejohn If that really is the case, then there needs to be a happy medium between intrusive ads that uglify a UI and spammy nonsense that plagues corporate social media. But even then, a lot of people came here to get away from corpo spam, and will not take kindly or lightly to ads suddenly appearing on their feeds (and some instances have and will outright ban it)
Any instance starting to use ads would likely lose a lot of users. We don't want to look at ads, they are everywhere and they are poison.
I doubt it, not just because current social media sites are insanely popular, but also because there's a learning curve to using the Fediverse, and most people would likely find it complicated.
I don't think so. I think corporations will always want their hand in a pot and will have their things. I think we've seen there's always going to be people who don't want anything to do with that - digg to reddit, twitter to mastedon, reddit to here. And I wouldn't be surprised in a few years if this platform and similar ones face a crisis of identity like that. Small, independent communities are great and can gain value as more people join. But once enough people join other interests can overtake the original goal. What we've learned is that no platform or protocol is forever.
Yes.