Fediverse memes

"people are thirsty for platforms that aren't controlled by the same few oligarchs" so they're willingly submitting to and supporting CCP tyrannical oppression because they personally have never felt it's raw evil, "Fuck the Chinese" I guess, huh

I'm going to be honest, I do feel a little baffled but maybe that's because I didn't vibe with tik tok.

I think the pros are probably responsiveness and uptime (compared to fediverse things). Even now, hexbear goes down for one reason or another, to say nothing of back when we were the biggest lemmy instance (sorry Des, god that was a while ago), and setting up a new server is something that the vast majority of people don't want to do (especially compared to just signing up for an account). I think this is especially the case if you mostly consume video. While peertube (and others?) does exist, video is still pretty big per second of content, meaning that sort of continuous scroll video is a big ask for a small private server.

Compared to Facebook or Twitter or whatever, its unlikely that a Chinese spy is going to rat your weed ring out to American feds, unlike Facebook or Twitter (which routinely co-operate with American cops, no warrant).

Lastly, network effect, which is the big one. If the big creators you follow (idk what tiktok is like) go somewhere, you're going to follow them (well, not you, fellow lemmy person, but you know who I'm talking about). And your preference is that all your big creators go to the same place rather than to a dozen fediverse instances. Not that it would be insurmountable, but it would be a bigger ask.

Specific oligarchs may still be an effect (Zuck or Musk are not necessarily the most popular people).

Honestly the Fediverse needs to realize that decentralizing has consequences for the user experience. The average user is confused by the idea that there are multiple instances of a single community, for example realizing that there is a /c/AskLemmy on multiple instances can be really confusing, especially for lay people who aren't technically inclined.

Even for those that aren't intimidated or confused, it can still be frustrating to not have a centralized community, and there can be diminished value from not having all the users in one centralized place, e.g. if you ask your question on one instance and it doesn't reach a bunch of users because of defederation and fracture between different instances, the truth is your question isn't really going out to Lemmy but instead some smaller subset of Lemmy users. This dilutes the usefulness of that online community in a lot of cases - there is less content, fewer interactions, etc.

Ultimately people are only going to sacrifice so much, they may be thirsty for a platform that isn't run by oligarchs, but the Fediverse doesn't seem to offer feature parity for most people, as we saw with the failed migration of users to Mastodon after Elon Musk acquired Twitter.

I mean look at it from their perspective: either there is a war with China, in which case you're fucked so many more ways than whatever data tiktok has collected. Or you're one of a billion with compromised data. What are the Chinese going to do? Pick you in your service industry job to blackmail for no reason? Even if they were doing that the chances of it being a you are one in a million. Advertise more directly to you? The fact is no one cares.

The desire for privacy is either necessary to a very small percentage of the population or just an icky feeling with no discernable consequences. (Even if you list me irl consequences for the Chinese taking your data, I can guarantee you it doesn't end up affecting the majority of people's lives in a noticeable way.)

I mean, I'd rather the foreign tyrant get my data than the one that can actually use it. Not that I'm even on anything but Lemmy and youtube anyway.