I'm not sure how we can get the point that a centralized seamless UX experience is core to any platform though the thick skulls of people designing decentralized federated services.
Lemmy's active user number drops every month and as does Mastodon's by a lesser degree, both failing to get proper traction because they segment and wall off tiny gardens where nothing is happening, making sure that people waste time frequenting empty communities instead of merging it all together. Regardless of how the backend is handled, centralized or not, people need the same thing on the frontend. These valiant attempts at remaking popular sites for the people by the people are not only fighting every corporation that wants them gone as a concept but also their own dumb decisions, which will probably prove too much of a hurdle in the long run.
I wanted to like lemmy so bad. I lucked into a lifetime ban from Reddit after using it daily for 12 years, so you’d think it would be easy! But there’s just not enough people to make it interesting, not even close. I subbed to every damn instance I could find, and still no luck.
https://slrpnk.net is an exception in that it’s a cute place for activism and related news, but that’s obviously not the only thing I want to use the internet for, especially when I’m looking to relax.
So far, with an n of 5 days: BlueSky is what I was waiting for. Especially for scientific content - memes or otherwise!
> wall off tiny gardens where nothing is happening
This is actually reason why I like Mastodon. There is barely anything happening. I get content from few niches - but I do not need it to be generating something every minute. I have no time for that.
But for people who prefer old Twitter experience, BlueSky is pretty good.
I would go out on a limb and postulate that most people prefer lots of meaningless content. At least if the popularity of Tiktok is anything to go buy.
Lemmy's active user number drops every month and as does Mastodon's by a lesser degree, both failing to get proper traction because they segment and wall off tiny gardens where nothing is happening, making sure that people waste time frequenting empty communities instead of merging it all together. Regardless of how the backend is handled, centralized or not, people need the same thing on the frontend. These valiant attempts at remaking popular sites for the people by the people are not only fighting every corporation that wants them gone as a concept but also their own dumb decisions, which will probably prove too much of a hurdle in the long run.