The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:
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~30 years old or older
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tech enthusiasts/workers
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linux users
There’s nothing wrong with that particular demographic or anything, but it doesn’t feel like a win to me if the entire fediverse is just one big monoculture.
I wonder what it is that is keeping more diverse users away? Is picking a server/federation too complicated? Or is it that they don’t see any content that they like?
Thoughts?
Makes sense, how would you resolve it without giving anyone centralized control to make Twitter or Reddit 2.0?
I think the best middle ground might be where there’s a bunch of separate apps that all have their own default server, where they hide most of the fediverse complexity from the user. They’d still all be accessing the same content, but it would just be simpler for ‘normal’ users.
In the long term this will happen tho. If the fediverse becomes more popular, you will definitely have a small handful of powerful instances (either led by foundations or companies) in the center of everything. That’s simply how the internet works.
If you don’t like the mainstream, you can join a defederated instance, that does not want to play with the big dogs.
The only way to keep the fediverse as federated as possible, would be perhaps forcing every community and every user to create their instance. This would probably keep even more people away from the fediverse tho.
I think the point is to have the freedom available. Most people are going to get their email from GMail, but you have the freedom to get it somewhere else if you want to, and you can still send to and receive email from people using GMail. You can even roll your own mail server.