What Is the Fediverse?
For social media to be social it needs people. While I have hope for the future, current fediverse offerings don’t meet people’s basic social media usability needs.<p>People use social media because it’s fun, it fosters connection with people they know, delivers information about news&#x2F;hobbies etc., helps people find communities with shared interests and experiences, and most importantly, does it all in one easy-to-use place. Everybody knows there are better sources for everyday news than Twitter but if they’re already there interacting with people about the game last night…  More importantly, it’s all conceptually easy for users to understand. You’re on Facebook, your friend is on Facebook, you find your friend on Facebook and you can interact on Facebook. If there was a bunch of Facebooks and your friends are in a different Facebook that doesn’t talk to your Facebook and the Recipe Facebook your friend likes is kinda janky and doesn’t always show up when you search for it… your average user would stop using social media altogether if that was their only option.<p>It can be hard for developers to imagine that, but what if it was a different realm of expertise? Imagine you had to have a rudimentary understanding of mail routing to know which post office you needed to use to mail each package and it was only conceptually documented for people who worked in the postal industry and each paragraph required background knowledge you didn’t have? You’d probably just suck it up and use UPS, especially if it was the same price. If someone wants a recipe for French onion soup, they want a recipe — not a culinary school text book chapter on soup. How much documentation or theoretical background knowledge does your average netizen need to use Facebook? <i>Zero. None.</i><p>That doesn’t even get into the whole branding aspect. Like it or not, appeal is a prerequisite and not a bolt-on feature for a social media network. People like feeling competent and hip and hate uncertainty. They don’t want to wonder if their friends on the other mastodon and the other friend on the other other mastodon can smell, er, see their <i>toot.</i><p>We can’t sell non-technical people on technical capability.  While there are technical components to this problem, the solution will not be entirely technical. We need to give them a compelling experience first, and make that work on the tech side. Unless you really only want people in your fediverse who get satisfaction out of wrangling clunky software, that’s just the way it is.