I agree it needs to be more intuitive, however, I would argue that Linux is far more intuitive than it used to be. Still, people didn’t switch.

Another driving force is that people don’t like change, and people use whatever others use. TikTok bought another company just to get their userbase, it’s that important.

The fediverse is fighting an uphill battle. You’d have to provide a platform that is far more intuitive and engaging than the competition, while relying on volunteer labour.

To be fair, there was a viable and easy to use alternative (Reddit). And the community was largely tech savvy.

Today there are more computer users, so the average tech literacy is higher, but the tech literacy of the average computer user is lower. People want slick, easy to use, centralised solutions.

I’m not too concerned about this though. I think realistically the fediverse could achieve a critical mass to keep it going, but won’t be too large that it becomes just a bunch of noise (like Reddit).

Really? I’ve actually found the opposite.

Email is probably the only federated protocol most people still use. So they can get their heads around that.

You already see a lot of people congregating in the top Mastodon instances.

People might not understand that they can still communicate with the larger instances (or they might feel like it’s a “safer bet” to join the larger ones). Anyway, by the time they understand, they are not gonna create a new account in another instance.

That’s true.

I’m not that invested into Lemmy yet. But if I end up using it as much as reddit, I might do this (sounds like an interesting project anyway).

For now, I’ll keep my account in a smaller / more open instance.

If anything, I think reddit was a good lesson on what happens when you let a small group of people control such a large platform. We might run into the same issues if we let a couple of instances get too large.

And this is why I didn’t sign up for a large instance.

I’d rather joine a smaller one that doesn’t block any instance, neither is it blocked by other instances.

I just want to slowly find new communites and join the ones I think have good discussion, regardless of where they are hosted. I don’t need babysitting.

Didn’t the 3rd party apps predate the official one by several years?

It’s in there if you inspect the source of the page.

Alternatively, feedly is able to detect and parse it, you only have to provide it the URL to the channel.

If you then don’t want to use feedly, you can export your subscriptions as a opml file, and import them in another reader.

A bit of a convoluted solution, if you don’t want to inspect the source.

As a starter reader, I recommend feedly. It’s easy to use, and has a phone app as well.

Some extra tips, with RSS you can subscribe to YouTube channels, and twitter too (the last one you can grab the feeds from nitter).

How come?

I get the top hacker news from an RSS feed (https://hnrss.github.io/), individual blogs, YouTube channels, twitter accounts (getting the RSS feeds from nitter), etc

Most websites will have RSS hidden underneath.

Another vote for feedly. I really would like to switch (since it’s not FOSS), but the phone app is just too damn convenient. I need to clear my reading list on the go.

I like that it’s more similar to old.reddit.com. Already use mastodon, so federation is not a new concept for me (I’m sure a lot of people are still getting their heads around that).

The community is much smaller, but that’s to be expected (and maybe a good thing). I miss the feeling of find super-niche hobby subreddits. But I guess those will come to Lemmy if/when the userbase grows.

PS: also, had no idea what sizz was. Looks cool. Is there a new home for it here?