Why not just use mastodon? Why is this better in any way? Twitter was already going to shit before Elon accelerated it.
At least in my own bubble, many did switch to Mastodon. Those that didn’t are looking at other options, because the whole federation idea and things like home instances didn’t appeal to them or were simply too complicated (they want a service that at least hides its decentralized nature).
Because it doesn’t come with instructions and there’s a lot of “buts”. For example, it took me a while to understand that, for example, I can’t log in “Mastodon.world” with my “Mastodon.social” account, I had to go to “Mastodon.social” to log in and THEN I can access to the content in “Mastodon.social”. Also, there’s the problem of instances blocking other instances. I would be pretty salty if I couldn’t access an account I followed, because the admins of the instance in which the account is hosted, decided to block the instance in which my account is in. That’s why the mayority of users go to the biggest instance (Lemmy.world and Mastodon.social for example), because instances blocking the biggest instance is unlikely to happen (you would block a lot of potencial users and therefore, diminished attractiveness of your instance). But everyone doing that defeats the whole point of federalization. Also, there’s the problem of defederalizing of instances. Also, the problem of safety, privacy and security. For example, a massive security fault was recently discovered in Mastodon and a server was raised by the police and all of it’s data captured by the police. In simple words, the fediverse is not the panacea it was sold like, the kinks are not ironed out.
There are a ton of reasons not to like it and they’re evident on Lemmy pretty notably, let alone other platforms. The entire idea of being able to defederate and federate at will is a big feature of these platforms but they’re also the part that people like the least. If the server you’re on defederates from another server you like, you have no choice but to start all the way from the beginning if you need to choose another instance to join. At the same time, each instance gets its own version of every single community. If you join an instance that federates with lots of other instances, you’re very likely to see the exact same posts multiple times since each community is completely unique and separate (again, a feature for some, a boon for others).
Federation is great for a few reasons and really horrible for others. It’s not the single answer that works for everyone.
Yeah, if you don’t like it just create and account on a generic big one that let’s you access most content and just go with it. Act as if centralized. People like to create problems for no reason. If other people care about choice and the tech behind it and the new possibilities allowed, let them be happy for it.
It’s literally like email. Most people just have a gmail one and that’s most common. Others care about specific services, prices, choice, privacy features, etc, and the trch allows people to make that choice without compromising the primary purpose which is connecting people.
Everyone should have a federated account just like everyone has a email account for most things that require it. More and more places are starting to have proper integration for example commenting on blogs instead of the other stupid common alternative (discourse or wtv is the name I don’t remember).
