Text for readability:
So far, Americans using RedNote have said they don't care if China has access to their data. Viral videos on TikTok in recent days have shown Americans jokingly saying they will miss their personal "Chinese spy," while others say they are purposefully giving RedNote access to their data in a show of protest against the wishes of the U.S. government.
"This also highlights the fact that people are thirsty for platforms that aren't controlled by the same few oligarchs," Quintin said. "People will happily jump to another platform even if it presents new, unknown risks."
If you want more people to join the fediverse, you have to improve the user experience. People don’t want to read an article breaking down what the fediverse is, how to join an instance, how to find content, etc.
Streamline the join process so it doesn’t require learning the lore and technical training. Stop promoting the fediverse generally, and instead push people to easy to use frontends and popular instances. Remove the barriers to entry. If they want to dig deeper into different instances and the technical stuff, let them do that later. Stop loading the info dump at the front.
Fediverse and decentralism confused me initially but then I learned I can just sign up at lemmy.world and use it normally without having to know the backend.
You get it. Well said.
I agree that promoting the fediverse generally kind of doesn't make sense. People join communities, not web protocols.
I wonder if we shouldn't talk so much about "the fediverse" as we do about individual instances, because that's what people actually join. They get the rest of the fediverse for free, but their home server will always be home. Just like with reddit back in the day, how I may not have identified much with the reddit overculture, I did love some of its communities.
Like look at the difference between the slrpnk communities, and the programming.dev communities. That's something to be celebrated, like, come join this server - look at all the cool things we're doing!