Except, it also kind of does matter.

This is absolutely correct, and is also another reason why Lemmy hasn’t taken off. For people like you and I, it seems like we don’t really mind making alts. But for the average Joe, this could be a tedious thing. And if the average Joe isn’t able to figure out the Fediverse, then this platform will struggle becoming popular.

This could be avoided, though. You could just join an instance that rarely defederates from others. But first, you’d need to figure out which instance has the fewest defederations (how do you even figure this out if you’ve just started to poke your head into the Fediverse??). And when you do figure it out, you join that instance and all will be good. That instance might become the most popular in the entire Fediverse.

That is until the admins go on a power trip and start saying to other instances: “If your instance doesn’t do X, Y, and Z, then we, the LARGEST instance of the Fediverse, will defederate from you!”

Once again, you and I would just say “Fuck it, we’re going to another instance”. And what if we find another instance that rarely defederates, but it has other problems such as frequent connectivity issues? Or maybe the admin’s a dick? We could keep searching, but we might never be able to find one that’s as good as the first one.

But most importantly, would the average Joe also do the same as us and move to another instance? Chances are, they might not and will stay. Just look at Reddit after the API drama. Despite being spat in the face by Reddit, the majority of the people stayed. But I don’t blame them because the Fediverse is confusing and has many unresolved issues.

TLDR: If the average Joe doesn’t get the Fediverse, the Fediverse will not grow.

Because there’s still a handful of basic stuff that still hasn’t gotten sorted out yet for some reason.

Like if I wanted to share your post with my friends, I’ll send them this link: https://piefed.ca/c/nostupidquestions/p/377144/why-isint-lemmy-more-popular. If they’re using a mobile app, then it might be fine. But if they’re on desktop and want to comment or vote here but aren’t already on my instance, they need to go back to their home instance, search up this community, and then search for this post. Why isn’t there some sort of native way where I can just click on a button and have it open up in my home instance? Or even better: integrate something like threadiverse.link into Lemmy/PieFed so it immediately redirects me to my home instance’s version on this post.

And before someone suggests using a different front-end or using a browser script, I appreciate you trying to help but my issue is why this isn’t even natively part of Lemmy. And I’m not even sure if it’s in the pipelines for V1.0.

Another issue is that there are still posts that don’t federate properly. And it’s not because an instance was defederated. What posts I see on this account might never be visible from a separate account. What is even more frustrating is that sometimes, I can’t even force my instance to fetch the post. I’ll give it the direct link and it still can’t find the post on my instance.

As long as these basic issues remain unresolved, Lemmy will not become popular. A site can’t be popular if I can’t even share a post to my friends properly. Or if I can’t even see the post, then I wouldn’t be able to share it with anyone!

Edit: added clarification

That is indeed true. Only issue I can see is the copycat community might not outgrow the older community. And I think people tend to gravitate towards the larger community if there are multiples of them. Especially newer users who won’t know of the power tripping mods and will just assume it’s an ordinary community. But let’s hope new users joining the Fediverse have better critical thinking skills and start asking questions if they see a community with a strong and active copycat community.

This can happen on the Fediverse as well, though. It might not happen at the same scale as on Reddit over here due to the public modlog, but mods can still ban people for no legitimate reason.

There are lots of other reasons why Reddit sucks. But mods power tripping isn’t unique to them. We have our own fair share of power tripping mods and community hoarders that migrated here from Reddit.

There’s a video of Kowloon Walled City from a university student (Suenn Ho) if anyone wants to see how it looks like from the inside. It’s incredible how people even managed to live there.

And by OFF, we mean actually off. The last thing I want is the game to push out a minor update 5 years after its last update, and all of the mods I have are now broken.

Yeah it started working a few hours after I signed up for an account. No idea why it took a while, but it’s all good now.

I agree. I don’t quite understand why this is even a debate. Just pick anything that looks neat and 99% of the time, it’s gonna work fine. That’s the beauty of Linux.

Those scary words make the investors sad. :(

Okay, it works now. I waited a few more hours and now I’m sending this using Boost.

I’m able to login via my desktop. I tried using Interstellar and it doesn’t work. Could it be because my account is too new? I joined 3 hours ago.

It was probably posted on Instagram or TikTok first, and they probably have some dumbass filter which hides your post if you have the word “kill” in it.