It would be great if it could become a virtually universal social media eventually, but for its quirks to be understood by everyone, some critical mass of first adopters must understand the fediverse. So I think the fediverse will self-select for technically knowledgeable people at first before eventually becoming accessible to the public, not by any fault of its own but by virtue of having been around long enough and grown enough of a community to attract the average person from traditional social media.

I also think there are different instances and communities for people with different priorities. People interested in the ideas behind the fediverse can congregate on lemmy.ml (because that's where Lemmy's developers are, right?) and in FLOSS communities, etc., while people looking for a social network that won't use them for profit can flock to region-specific instances, etc.

Lemmy, in its current state, reminds me of a university online forum. It has a university-ish population of active users who seem reasonably well-educated, and you run into people with disproportionately varied interests and passions compared to the general population.

I joined last summer when I became annoyed by the reddit shenanigans and have never looked back. For me, at least, lemmy already has the critical mass needed to occupy my attention. After the initial reddit wave, the active user count dropped steadily from around 70k to 40k, but seems to be slowly rebounding now as it has climbed back to 50k or so recently.

I think one thing of note is that when people flood into the fediverse for whatever reason, there is a tendency for them to congregate at whatever is perceived as the most central instances. This can be devastating if the servers in question are not up to the task of a sudden influx. I am guilty of this myself. I initially opened an account at kbin.social which was swamped. As I learned how the fediverse works, I eventually settled on lemmy.ca, which is a middling size instance that seems quite stable.

I guess my worry, then, is if lemmy goes viral at some point, it may not be up to the task of dealing with all the people flooding in? Viral trends have an exponential growth pattern, so it only takes a few doublings before you're looking at a million users and beyond. At the moment, scalability worries me more than social concerns in terms of the future of lemmy. But I suppose that may, to some extent, be because it's much harder to predict how the latter will play out with a much larger network, so I am giving it the benefit of the doubt?

That's the genius part: It doesn't matter whether I think if someone is welcome or not. Everyone can run their own instance, with the software they prefer, and connect it up to whatever other instances they prefer. In that sense it is more democratic than the closed garden platforms.

It'll take time before these things become more accessible to technically inept people.

To be honest I don’t see a difference to Reddit other than it having much less users and content and more geeky at the moment.

IMO one of the cool things about Lemmy is that it could be both. I can imagine some instances keeping a high barrier of entry and strict posting rules, but federate with more open, mass appeal instances that your aunt joins. I would be surprised if it ever catches on in that way though.

The community right now is mostly technical, with tons of posts on Linux or just the latest tech/science news. It's not that people will be unwelcome here if they don't know this stuff, but I think someone that isn't technical like my aunt will have a harder time finding content relevant to them.

Then you have the insane number of political posts and extremists which I'm sure you've seen around. I blocked a fair number of people just so my feed isn't filled with junk. Not a good first impression if someone joins Lemmy and they instantly see those posts/comments.

I've said it before but the threadiverse (lemmy,kbin,etc) isn't mainstream ready yet. It needs better onboarding for people who have no idea how instances work, a more appealing front-end, easier ways to find communities and content, better moderation tools, maybe some other stuff too.

Overall though? Pretty neat place to be in right now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

This is the future of social media and you are a part of it. Currently there are only a few people but later on everyone will catch up and this will have most of the population on it.

But because of the federal nature it will be cluttered overwhelming or difficult to manage like other centralised social media.

The biggest advantage is neither the corporate nor the governments or dictatorships can censor content here. Only the community can decide what's best for them.

The future is federated, decentralised and anonymised and open to everyone.

Eventually people are gonna get tired of the toxicity of mainstream social media.

Eventually all of the internet is going to be decentralised and free from control again as it was meant to be.

For accuracy's sake, Lemmy is an ActivityPub client. Mastodon is an ActivityPub client. kbin and mbin are ActivityPub clients. I'm sure there are others that I'm not aware of.

Same people as email.

That's the cool thing, different instances have different ethea on this and you can pick one that's more open, like dot-world, or one that's more of a walled garden, like beehaw.

Non-commercial townhall of ideas and community wishing to stay that way. Did I mention non-commercial?

I'm enjoying Lemmy as a content feed. As an interactive board though not as much. Finding things and rembering where content is can be confusing. Its definitely not as easy or user friendly as other sites/apps. Getting IRL friends to join feels like an impossible task unless they're pretty interested in tech.

That said you get what you give and if we want to see more content, we should all interact more.

Only Gentoo, Void, Slackware, Alpine, BSDs and other pro-sumers of *nix-like OSes. Everyone else can get kicked.

Arch users are heretics.

/s

Well, it's federated and runs on free (as in freedom) software. So the whole point is it's theoretically for anyone and everyone. Anyone with a computer and internet connection can host their own instance, or join another instance that aligns with their interests and politics, and connect with any other instance that's federated with them/doesn't have them blocked. And similarly if there's people you find insufferable you can block them as individuals, and if they break the rules of your instance they can be banned from your instance. Or an instance can block another entire instance if they find the other community particularly vile.

Not sure about the positioning of "aunts" as people who wouldn't be interested in the fediverse though. Plenty of people are aunts, I'm sure there's plenty of aunts on the fediverse too.

What do you want it to be? Read up on moderation and how that's handled, host your own instance, contribute to the fediverse. Self hosted social media comes with it's own challenges however you can get as much out of this as you put in.

I would point you two places as far as research on self hosting, db0 and eviltoast.org.

Db0 has a great AI moderation tool, eviltoast was recently plagued by a troll bot that kept creating new accounts and spamming threads with some pretty annoying posts.

Why wouldn't an aunt be welcome?

Wanted to just say welcome! I mentioned in another comment, maybe not Lemmy, it's a bit technical right now, but Mastodon/PixelFed are pretty solid and easy to join right now, they may like the Twitter/Insta feel more anyway if they aren't used to Reddit.

Thanks for being here though! and if you're worried about stirring up shit then I think you can set those worries aside, you're fine here :)

federated

Anyone is welcome, that's the entire point of making it decentralized.

Each user, each community and each instance has control over how they conduct themselves and what behaviour they find acceptable.

If you don't like your spot in the fediverse, you can pick another, or roll your own.

If others don't like your behaviour, they can deal with that within their own sphere of influence.

Unlike other social networks, where some CEO can make up random rules as they see fit and enforce them arbitrarily, the fediverse allows for much more granular control.

That said, it's an experiment that is being played out right now, across society. Your aunt can join, or watch what happens, as can anyone else.

There's still plenty of rough edges, so the user experience is going to vary, some good, some less so.

Participate, or not, it's entirely up to you.