I think this is the biggest reason. A huge amount of content on reddit is astroturfing / brand manipulation; both in posts and in the comments. And in addition to that, a there’s a huge amount of ‘karma farming’, where heaps of popular but low-effort content is recycled over and over again to gain points and create a sense of credibility for accounts that will later be used for marketing / manipulation.
It’s not about corporate instances. It’s the bots and fake accounts/posts/comments. That’s one of the issues with Reddit. There are little authentic posts. Most of them are advertisements it just reposts to farm karma to avoid detection. It’s ridiculous.
I don’t understand the “it’s complicated” thing. Figuring out which instance to use was slightly confusing (I went with lemmy.world because it seemed to be the most popular at the time), but after that, it’s no more complicated than Reddit or any other social media site. Am I missing anything?
Yep. Presenting the user with a choice that they don’t fully understand (which instance should I choose? What even is an instance?) is a very big deterrent.
Federation is just complicated enough to keep the dummies out. Also probably defederating the idiot instances and better content moderation.
Not only that, but the community is small enough that large corporations and marketing companies don’t care about it. Yet ;)
I think this is the biggest reason. A huge amount of content on reddit is astroturfing / brand manipulation; both in posts and in the comments. And in addition to that, a there’s a huge amount of ‘karma farming’, where heaps of popular but low-effort content is recycled over and over again to gain points and create a sense of credibility for accounts that will later be used for marketing / manipulation.
And at that point we can defederate from corporate instances. Its so user first.
It’s not about corporate instances. It’s the bots and fake accounts/posts/comments. That’s one of the issues with Reddit. There are little authentic posts. Most of them are advertisements it just reposts to farm karma to avoid detection. It’s ridiculous.
Which subs do you see this in?
It is, hopefully they get modded out
You’re missing all the racism that’s come forth since mod tools were lost
I don’t understand the “it’s complicated” thing. Figuring out which instance to use was slightly confusing (I went with lemmy.world because it seemed to be the most popular at the time), but after that, it’s no more complicated than Reddit or any other social media site. Am I missing anything?
It’s the “slightly confusing” step that 80% of people don’t take.
Yep. Presenting the user with a choice that they don’t fully understand (which instance should I choose? What even is an instance?) is a very big deterrent.
Bigger deterrent is presenting real choice than one they don’t understand
No, you tried something new, the unknown did not dither you. Weirdly, that was the “complicated” barrier.