I introduced kbin to someone today who asked what the fediverse was. I answered for them of course, but it made me realize that the concept is still technobabble for most people. The average joe probably doesn’t care or notice that server A is really talking to server B. Just have them find out on their own and if a mass migration does need to happen from A to B, just make a standard announcement.
I agree it’s not important to introduce and/or explain the Fediverse at length, but the concept probably cannot be ignored completely either.
People migrating from Reddit are faced with the choice between Lemmy and kbin, and a bunch of different servers. Telling them that “which one you choose doesn’t matter that much, as they will all talk to each other anyway” is probably of some relevance.
The differences among instances really do matter.
If Stormfront opens an instance tomorrow, would you say it makes no difference because they will all talk to each other anyway? You shouldn’t. The example of Mastodon shows they won’t all talk to each other, often for very good reasons. Like “that instance is literally Stormfront.” You can expect that instance to have Nazi moderation policies, to normalize Nazism and to engage in Nazi brigading.
Imagine an average Redditor lands on one of the main Lemmy instances, where everyone (on penalty of excommunication) holds that Stalin Did Nothing Wrong, that Ukrainian culture and language should be exterminated and submerged in the Russian Empire, and so on. If that Redditor doesn’t really understand that the instances are different in viewpoint and policy, they can reasonably conclude that the Fediverse is dominated by tankies. Meanwhile, despite their faults, Twitter and Reddit still exist and are not so clearly dominated by people who like to promote genocide. What does the average user think?
Absolutely - I’m coming from the assumption that they are given a list of reasonable instances (for example from the kbin front page or from recommendations).
Among a curated list of servers, it’s probably best to join one without assigning too much importance to it, and rather change instance later should you be unhappy. But of course, some instances should not be considered, and some might prefer to join an instance with stricter/more lenient moderation right off the bat.
Which one you choose does matter though, at least for the immediate user experience.
I don’t think decoupling the content distribution system from the immediate interface works in the favor of large scale adoption of the whole system.
We can be honest by saying something like “the particular site you sign up for will look and feel different, and the people you first encounter will have a slightly different culture, but ultimately all of these sites can and do interact with each other’s users and content. It’s like choosing one of twitter or facebook as your main interface but being able to read and post on either one. It’s a lot more complicated to talk about than it is to use it, really. You’ll see when you try it”.
Most importantly, people can start somewhere, and if they don’t like the first site they choose, they can register with another. We should be finding ways to tell people this isn’t the end of the world if they feel the need to go to another site to use the same overall ecosystem.