You dropped this: ‽

It’s usually just confusion at the idea that things live on other websites. The most common mental model people seem to have for decentralized systems is… centralization. Just, centralized somewhere else.

I remember when the Twitter users flooded Mastodon. Everyone seemed to have this sense that “Mastodon” was a place “over there”, and that the website they were using – if they even recognized that they were using a website, thanks to the appification of everything – was just a dumb terminal. Like, instead of using Twitter, they were using a secondary website that itself ws using Twitter. So, people got really confused about why content was missing, why they couldn’t see the post history of some users, etc. They felt like they were being arbitrarily blocked from seeing parts of “Mastodon”, rather than understanding that they’d just signed up for the equivalent of a magazine subscription and would not be getting the back catalogue for free.

I’ve tried to explain it as being able to request content from Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky from an account on MySpace. Only there’s 500 Facebooks, 2000 Reddits, 10,000 Twitters, 300 Instagrams, and 1500 Blueskies. And also, 1000 other MySpaces. You can request content from those other websites, but because you are not viewing those websites, just requesting that they send some of their content to you you only get the small parts that you specifically asked for. Otherwise, your MySpace would get overwhelmed and burn down around you.

I’m still workshopping this, though. It has not been as effective as I hoped for.

Probably what’ll happen is lemmy.world will become the new reddit and we’ll all have to decide if we want to stay federated with them.

I welcome the schism if it ever occurs. I think it would be really interesting to see how a fully “scaled up” but non-corporate social media handles a challenge like that.

Even if we have almost exactly all the same problems reddit has, but without being a monolithic corporate platform, I think it would be an improvement.

I can’t say it any better, but yeah, pretty much. I compared it to a good replacement that made my life way better. It’s just the best example I have

Oh you will… You will.

Careful, you could get banned saying stuff like that around here!