I think, as well as the issues you mention, another issue might possibly be duplication. Historically, search engines penalise duplicated content, even across different domains and federation kind of bakes that in.

Star Trek memes. I didn’t even know I liked Star Trek until 2 years ago.

I do the same on mobile :) but I think once people do understand federation and why its actually a very good idea they would too - but thats not going to be true of the majority - certainly not before they use a federated service.

I’m not suggesting its impossible to improve the UX but I a) I think thats going to be an incredibly low priority for the developers and b) I’m not sure what changes can be made to address the essential conflict between the whole point of the fediverse - decentralisation - and a sign up process that essentially hides that without taking away an informed choice.

In reality, its not really that much of a difficult concept to grasp and there are loads of resources like fedi.tips etc to help people. If the communities and content was of a sufficient quality (as oppose to quantity) people would make the fairly minimal effort to understand why the fediverse is the way it is.

And if people don’t or won’t thats really their call.

The vast majority of people want an experience where federation is invisible. Sign up and post/comment. To maintain the benefits of decentralisation and choice, that’s never going to be a truly workable thing.

The vast majority of people don’t want to create or even participate in communities, they just want to lurk, scroll and get their new content fix. Every social media based site I’ve ever been on, federated or centralised has a large group of people complaining about the lack of new content but never take it upon themselves to apply the obvious solution themselves.

These are not necessarily UX issues, these are people issues.

Maybe its time to stop continually worrying about this subject and concentrate on creating great communities? Because if we do that then users will participate organically.

Nostr is where everyone who secretly admires Musk/Trump/Zuck goes.

Also means people can safely quote from it on those platforms.

Not much though :) you can add a subdomain via the web control panel, run the server diagnostics, go back to the new domain and apply a Lets Encrypt certificate - done.

If you stick to the apps that are indicated as being well supported it’s good. The main reason I use it is because I’m part of a team that includes people not comfortable with the command line so having a web interface to manage a server means not everything falls on my shoulders.

The people leaving Twitter right now want Twitter minus Elon. That’s Bluesky. They’ve heard a couple of their Twitter follows mention it and they’ve gone to their app store where they find an app called Bluesky, install it and easily join and start using it. Once they do they are finding it pretty straightforward to find people they used to follow on Twitter.

That’s all people want.

And it’ll stay that way until people use, and keep using, this space. So, to use an overused phrase, be the change you want to see :)

I pay Bitwarden the tenner a year as I have no reason to distrust them and they’re definitely providing a more reliable, securer service than I can self-host.

I also do an encrypted export once per week and store that export to an encrypted cloud based service and an encrypted USB stick. Takes 2 minutes.

Bandcamp is still OK for me and I listen to some fairly obscure stuff.

Just to offer a heads up - there’s a new solution/site which is currently in Beta but is backed by good people (musicians). It needs an influx of music diversity (lots of metal at the moment) but if it gets that when it comes out of beta then it could very well be a good Bandcamp replacament - Ampwall

Mate, I was simply extending an analogy you introduced. I neither know (nor care) what the presence of a McDonalds does or doesn’t do so don’t Sagan me. Nor am I claiming mainstream social media is all arseholes. What I’m saying is that mainstream social media most certainly has the ability and propensity to make people into arseholes due to constant enshittification - part of which is the influencer phenomenon in my opinion and the need for growth at all costs.

I most definitely have reached out to lots of good people on the fediverse and had lots of great exchanges that follow both professional and ‘hobby’ based interests I have.

But here’s the thing - you want growth? OK. I also have no issue with growth. But the best sort of growth in my experience comes organically. It happens at its own pace. The minute you start prodding it along with managed algorithms and all the other stuff mainstream social media now has you end up with an extended hate room. I don’t miss Reddit or Xitter at all. I genuinely mean that. No more ‘suggestions’ of people to follow, no more manufactured outrage getting pushed to my feed, no more clickbait. Instead what I have now is a curated feed across multiple different types of experiences that I spent some time getting how I want them and dipping in and out of when I want to.

You’re using words like ‘ambition’ and ‘irrelevant’ like the Fediverse is some sort of corporate entity. It’s not - that’s a point very much in its favour in the opinion of quite a lot of people on it. Contrary to your opinion that no one cares, lots do. What some of us don’t care about is catering to a set of people who are paid to express opinions and who, it seems to me, over a period of time end up becoming Andrew Tate or Russel Brand.

There’s no McDonalds in the town I currently live in, which is 20 minutes away from one of the largest cities in the country. It might come as a massive shock to you but I - and I think the majority of people - can survive just fine without a Mickey D’s. Not having one doesn’t make a place desolate, it makes it healthier. And if someone really wants a Big Mac, they can go and get one from elsewhere.

Do you see what I’m saying? This isn’t the same place as that - it’s quite nice to have a place online that still isn’t. And for those that do want that, they can still spend time there if they chose to.

Strangely comforting for something I’m sure you thought was a snappy comeback,

I genuinely don’t care about influencers. Like, at all.

Maybe they should stop caring about visibility and engagement and concentrate on participating in, building and y’know enjoying a community?

Looks like yunohost with a nicer interface but less apps and less config options.

In my own personal experience, Nextcloud;

• Needs constant attention to prevent falling over
• Administration is a mess
• Takes far too long to get used to its ‘little ways’
• Basics like E2EE don’t work
• Sync works when it feels like it
• Updating feels like russian roulette