This comes to us courtesy of @misnina@crystals.rest. As a technical person I sometimes find it difficult to communicate with my friends about the value proposition of Lemmy and other federated platforms.
The reality is 99.9% of people are going to instantly tune out the moment they hear “federation”, “decentralized”, or “self-hosted”. These things all existed before the centralized social media hellscape we have today, but those centralized platforms gained dominance because they were able to package their value into a simple pitch: “Your one-stop shop for social!”
Another good example of this is comparing the current state of the official Lemmy website to the official Mastodon website.
Mastodon spends the first 2 page scrolls offering you a visual explanation of what their platform offers, a cohesive and familiar social experience. It’s not until you get 1/3 into the page that you see the words “open source”, and the word “federation” doesn’t even appear in the main copy, it’s used in a user testimonial towards the bottom of the site.
Lemmy’s site on the other hand has an okay paragraph of copy about it’s value proposition, but then spends the first two image tiles and blurbs showing and talking about its source code and infrastructure, with only the third referencing moderator tools.
The following section talks about self-hosting and the fediverse, with only a brief mention to the core value proposition. I could go on about the remainder of the site but by this point it’s likely that the majority of users who weren’t already seeking this and/or are technically inclined have left.
Communicating the value of these things is difficult and something we’re going to need to focus on improving both as platform providers and as users of that platform. That’s why I’m so enamored with this video from Nina. It is quick and to the point, it only communicates what needs to be said for anyone to understand the value prop, and it does so in a way that doesn’t invoke any of the exclusive terminology.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk rant.
You’re assuming that everyone here wants a 1:1 alternative to corporate social media, that works exactly like big social media did. Part of it is that zetaphor phrased his title as a pitch, I don’t blame him, but this video is just how I feel about lemmy and what excites me. I loved old internet forums. I hate that websites are trying to be your one stop shop for everything you could think of instead of focusing on a few things well. I don’t want to have a huge website with multi-layers of mods and administrations, instead of just talking frankly with my favorite site’s owner. I, and many others, went to the fediverse to get away from ‘true’ social media.
Even the concept that lemmy has to do something or it’s “ride or die”, I think is flawed. Lemmy as a whole will never become a “true” social media alternative, because the only way to do that is to make lemmy.ml a central corporate website, and that’s antithetical to what the fediverse was made for. The fediverse existed before musk took over twitter, it existed before reddit shit the bed, and it was about the strength of smaller communities that can talk to each other. If you would like your large instances to become centralized hubs that attract more drama and power struggles, more power to you, but that doesn’t change that the purpose of the fediverse is that I can run my little community on my own terms while still being able to connect with other communities.
My video is about the Fediverse, not New Reddit.