Ask HN: Is federated / de-centralised ever going to make sense?
10 by dmje | 2 comments on Hacker News.
With the obvious backdrop of The Reddit Thing going on, I've been poking properly into lemmy, kbin, mastodon, pixelfed, etc. I then had a quick look at nostr too. What strikes me quite forcibly is that although federation is obviously A Good Thing for content / control, and also A Good Thing for nerds who like the elegance of the protocols - it really, really isn't A Good Thing from a user point of view. Straw poll amongst my (non-nerd) friends reveals absolutely zero understanding of what federated might mean - but more importantly a total confusion when faced with a paradigm which is completely at odds with anything that has come before. Searching Site1 for content that happens to be on SiteN makes no sense to people who spend their time on Insta / Reddit / Twitter. It ultimately won't matter if a user doesn't actually know that their content is federated to/from a number of other platforms - but the UI, the words, the descriptions of what "federated" is are terribly, terribly confusing. Per the words of someone on Reddit: "If you need me to read a 10 page document explaining how to use this new type of Reddit, I'm out". I think there's a blindspot here, and until someone figures out a nicer interface and way of talking about all this stuff, it's going to scupper any possibility of serious migration of users onto these platforms. Thoughts?