Asklemmy

Like Mastodon.social? Afaik it has been around since the beginning and is basically the "default" server unless you're a "hacker" and you're on infosec.pub or whatever, an edgy 4channer and you're on poa.st, a SubGenius on "Bob's" server dobbs.town, or one of the many pervert servers, or one of the asain servers I can't read, but if you're on one of those (for instance dobbs.town) you're joining dobbs.town and mastodon is just there incidentally. Anyone else can just use .social and call it a day until they find out they're really into plants.space or some specific thing.

Hell all the people I've gotten on masto that's how I did it, "Ok make an acct on mastodon.social, great now lemme follow you what's your name? Cool, see there I am! Oh I'm not on mastodon.social, I'm on dobbs.town, but we can still communicate like how I email your gmail from my protonmail, is normal. Now, there's some servers you're gonna want to block..." I don't even tell them about federation until they're already there, unless I KNOW the server they'll want (like when I recommended my Discordian friend hop on discordian.social instead of mastodon.social.)

The real kicker is that none of their precious celebs they follow are on there, as you mention. The weirdos I talk to don't care about that so it works out for me lol.

It's the raison d'etre. Saying "don't federate" is like saying "don't put images and rich hyperlinking on the WWW, just make it like Gopher." If you don't want to federate, don't. But saying that it was a bad move for ActivityPub is just nonsensical.

I don't think there's a lot of evidence that federation is a significant obstacle in practice. Email is a great example of a federated platform that even the least tech literate people are able to use just fine. It could be argued that Mastodon onboarding process could be smoother, but that's not an inherent problem with it being federated.

In my view, the simplest answer is that BlueSky has much better marketing because it has a ton of money behind it and it's been promoted by Dorsey whom people knew from Twitter. So, when people started abandoning Twitter, they naturally went to the next platform he was promoting.

I'd also argue that there is a big advantage to having smaller communities of users that focus on specific topics of interest and can federate with each other. In my experience, this creates more engaging and friendlier environment than having all the users on the same server. Growth for the sake of growth is largely meaningless.

The only reason I actually wound up signing up on Lemmy is that there is one "main" instance by appearance, and it lets you participate in others(?). (Lemmy.world)

You don't need to know any of the more esoteric stuff to get going.

Honestly?

I vastly prefer almost everyone I have interacted with on mastodon over basically every lemmy user. Because lemmy still thinks it is reddit but also is totally over their ex but do you think he is thinking of me and can I send him a picture of your dick to show it is bigger?

Whereas mastodon? People kind of just want to talk. We largely understand that twitter has been a shithole for... most of its existence. So rather than try to reinvent it (bsky and threads) we are learning from it in the same way cohost learned from tumblr (and died even faster...).

And the lunatics who need to scream about what federation is and why it is The Future? They aren't talking about basically anything else. They are keeping to themselves and talking about how amazing the community can be... while the rest of us are actually being a community.