/r/buyfromEU "Europe keeps building social apps no one wants", "No "pick your fediverse server,” no confusion. It’s one big centralized thing, and that’s part of why posts can go viral"

Every time someone suggests the EU should make their own social media platform, a little part of me dies. You know it would be slow, have weird Guidelines, have 100k downloads and a 3-star rating before disappearing in six months. It would scream “official and out of touch.” What we actually need is private investors, devs who’ve worked on real stuff before (bonus points if they’ve been at US companies as they'd already have experience), and a sane CEO. That’s it.

Democracies are dying because most people now get their information from social media companies that have every incentive to push misinformation. There's a reason the only profitable social media companies* (Meta, ByteDance, Google) are all evil and it's not because they're not European.

Apparently Pinterest is profitable and I don't know enough about them to call them evil

We need a solid alternative to X or Reddit (first) — not another Instagram clone.
Pics are cute, but people wanna talk first. We need a clean, simple, centralized app that’s actually nice to use, has clear but not overbearing rules, and doesn’t try to shove privacy/eco stuff in your face as a personality trait. And keep the EU out of it. Let actual devs with experience run the show and let the platform evolve like a normal product.

Instagram has 2 billion MAUs, this is purely OP projecting their own preferences. Twitter and platforms like it are actually very niche, they just hold a disproportionate sway over online culture.

I agree with some of the points of the original thread:

• having Twitter clone or Instagram clone but decentralized kinda sucks no matter how you put it and it’s probably not mass sustainable

On the other hand… Lemmy is just a forum that can connect to other forums. You don’t find cool subreddits searching for them, the good ones are the ones recommended by other people, usually not by search. The fediverse actually suffers from having a big user base that wants Reddit/twitter/insta but decentralized instead of having small forums/microblogs connected to each other. Also the reason why you see me often advocating for less “generalized instances” and wanting more vertical focused ones. This is easily possible with lemmy dividing by topic and with mastodon dividing by localization.

If you want the fedi to thrive, build lemmy instances focused on being a stand alone forum first and mastodon ones focused on being local first (same for mobilizon)

Monetarization and politics aside, he got some valid points surrounding usability, ease of use and content.

The majority of the fediverse project's fail at onboarding user with simplicity. Modern third party clients (mastodon, pixelfeld, lemmy aswell) do that better, even par excellence. But if we keep referring people to websites with server lists, we'll lose them at that point already.

Federation and lengthy explanations (wall of texts) and tutorials (sorry @[email protected]) are no selling-point for everybody. It caters the nerd in us, but average joe is not a nerd but a simple user with little interest for these details. You could better refer them to an App that works without account and say: hit the explore button to see communities/contents/hashtags (what ever drives the particular network). In my opinion the old principle KISS (keep it stupid simple) is what needs to be followed, so we cann pull people in.

I spent so much time on that thread. Everyone was so wrong about a lot of stuff.

There was one person who understood the matrix protocol, but thought the fediverse was fragmented.