• earthworm@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    171·
    1 day ago

    Users are trapped by the network effect and a desire for ease of use over anything else.

    The corporate alternatives will always be an easier sell.

    Twitter > Bluesky
    Instagram > Upscrolled
    TikTok > RedNote
    Reddit > no corporate alternative
    YouTube > no corporate alternative
    Discord > no corporate alternative

    To get the average user, you don’t just have to convince them to leave Twitter, you have to convince them to leave corporate social media and all of their friends that still use it.

    You have to convince them to accept additional inconvenience and complexity (@usernames and @instancenames?) in exchange for no direct, tangible benefit. (We know it’s worth it, but the average user doesn’t know and doesn’t care.)

    The people who could handle that are already here. Adoption going forward will be (at best) a slow trickle until we reach some level of critical mass.

    Why people don't leave Reddit

    Reddit has the advantage of years of community-built knowledge, and it’s a “one-stop shop”. Looking for the gaming community? Go to reddit, type in gaming, it’ll be in the top 3, if not the top 10.

    Go to the threadiverse, and you have to run the gauntlet of servers (what’s an instance?), deferated instances (why can’t I see XYZ?), and 20 communities with similar names (which gaming community is the “real” one?). The switching cost is too high for most as long as Reddit still exists.

    Why people don't leave Discord

    Discord is easy to set up, and they’re digging their claws into game dev by making it easy to monetize communities (enshittification, here we come!).

    Revolt Stoat isn’t federated, so each server is segregated from the others. As they grow, users will centralize for the sake of convenience. My bet is they either sell out or remain a niche alternative.

    Element is (still) too complicated and unreliable. Audio sharing is inconsistent (no audio streaming on desktop screenshare, mics won’t work, etc). Video calls aren’t fully implemented.

    Why people won't leave YouTube

    No one can match YouTube’s sheer scale. They have billions of videos and billions of users. Their monetization system means that creators are incentivized to create quality content for the platform.

    By contrast, PeerTube’s best content is often mirrors or backups of content from other platforms. PeerTube is a great backup, but without monetization to incentivize creators, it’s not a real alternative.

    • Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      It’s a marathon not a sprint, hopefully we’ll slowly but surely chip away at it.

      As your post highlights UX is everything, hopefully the Fediverse can get as good UX as the main platforms

    • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      20 communities with similar names (which gaming community is the “real” one?)

      On this one, I agree with them. Network effects do not go well with splittism. And yet it’s hardly surprising we’re here given the ills of contemporary society: narcissism, snowflakery, identitarianism, intolerance for contradiction. For every subject there must be ten separate communities (AKA echo chambers, bubbles) so that nobody has to see anything that they might disagree with.

      I’m caricaturing, of course. But this issue is real. Given the political orientation here, it probably affects the fediverse more than corporate social media. And whatever the wrongs and rights of the subject, it is not helping the cause of attracting newcomers.

      • Agent_Karyo@piefed.worldEnglish
        51·
        2 days ago

        On Piefed you get the most active communities in search (using similar metrics/ranking systems as reddit), it makes a lot more sense than on Lemmy which ranks search by sub numbers as opposed to MAU/WAU (so you get a lot of dead communities as #1 on the Lemmy WebUI).