Greetings! I joined the Fediverse near the beginning of this year. Mastodon was the first platform I joined. Since then, I have been enjoying my experience, and recently, I joined Lemmy and found myself using that site almost as much as I did with Reddit (before the mass exodus).
However, there are a few things I’m curious about, and I would like feedback from this community. Greatly appreciate your responses!
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What is the monetary cost associated with an individual hosting an instance? Can these costs be covered sufficiently through donations, or do the individuals have to look for other sources of funding?
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Has anyone thought about how we can bring more people over to the Fediverse? My friends and family are all still on the Big Tech platforms like FB and Insta, and I doubt I will be able to convince them to switch over to a Fediverse platform, especially if they themselves don’t see any of their connections using the platform too. How does the Fediverse community plan on attracting more users over?
I find it’s going to need to get even more convenient for the general public to be interested in it. Federation almost needs to be a ‘background’ process that the end user doesn’t really need to deal with. Otherwise, it’ll be a little too complicated or obscure to comprehend for most. I know it isn’t rocket science but we’re talking about the general public, here.
the biggest hurdle ive seen is the lack of federated sso/id. users expect the remote sites to know who they are, and then lose the process where they need to open that thread in their local instance.
I’m a new user, so hope you don’t mind answering a question - tried looking this up but no joy: I understand the broad concept of federated sso/id, but what do you mean by opening threads in the local instance?
a user gets sent a link to a thread in some remote fediverse site… which the browser dutifully opens. but then the user cant comment, because they are not logged in. user is confused. it is a common user story.
for some people this is obvious, for others its a problem. google/facebook kinda get around this kind of thing with an SSO process (login with google!)
at its root is the problem of finding remote communities for which one would want to subscribe.
what you Really do, is take the community/magazine/thread and subscribe to it over in your own instance, which will then allow you to comment in your local instance.
Ok thanks - wasn’t aware it was possible to read anything without logging in