Well yea, of course, if you grew up with decentralized social technology, then it seems natural to you. If you’re reading this, you’re probably in the top 1% of tech-literate people in the world (if not top 0.1%). Unfortunately, if you are reading this, you’ll probably also have a hard time understanding the struggle of the remaining 99%, because you will have a hard time putting yourself in their shoes.
Reacting with astonishment about how people are not as tech-literate as you would hope is not a good path for understanding those people.
This is essentially the Curse of Knowledge. For good examples, look at some of the tag lines that appear on some fediverse app websites:
- Lemmy: “A link aggregator for the fediverse”
- Misskey: “Interplanetary microblogging platform.
Misskey is an open source, decentralized social media platform that’s free forever!” - Mbin: “A federated content aggregator, voting, discussion and microblogging platform.”
Normal people (the 99%) do not know any of these words:
- Link/content aggregator?
- “Fediverse”?
- Microblogging?
- Open source?
- Decentralized?
- Federated?
(I’m not especially bashing Lemmy, Misskey or Mbin here, it was just some examples I found; no offense meant, this is a hard problem, lots of fediverse apps do this)
It’s no surprise that the fediverse is mostly dominated by technical people, because generally the fediverse platforms do not do an amazing job at introducing and teaching people the concept of the fediverse. You will not get a “normal person” (non-techie person) to sign up on a site that starts out with several technical terms that they don’t understand.
The approach taken by Mastodon’s intro site is much more friendly to newcomers and I wish more apps would do the same. Pixelfed is also close though it still mentions “Open source and decentralized”.