Fediverse

No one cares about servers

I'd like to see the source for that.

And even if it is/was true, looking at what came before, you'd just be paving the path to become that which you were against.
If one is to depend on a single element, when it fails, it becomes the failure point for the whole ecosystem. Like with the instance I originally stuck to, Kbin.Social, where, if was the sole instance of the federated forums, when it died, the "fediverse" as a whole would have died overnight.
Also, a centralized platform is far easier to be taken over by either good or bad actors, and at least with fragmentation, when you notice degradation in one of the pieces of the fediverse, you can easily jump to a platform that hasn't been compromised while not having to build the community and groups from scratch.
Sites with specific niches and scopes that still allow for integration, and the culture that ensues, are also an alien concept on a centralized site, and what takes over basically becomes the face of the site's ecosystem as a whole. With the federation/defederation system, however, it's much easier for a site to build its own ecosystem while letting in and out just enough of/to other instances to oxygenate it.
And lastly, like with email and Linux, while some may be rather passionate to defend it, I think that, despite that, it's still a technology, or at least an idea, with great potential, even if slow but constant, as, once more, anyone can make instances in their own vision, or join a platform that better fits what they need while not making a walled garden to force users to stick to it.

Simplify user sign up. No one cares about servers, and I think this is one of the biggest thorns in the side of the fediverse in general.

I cannot stress this enough. This complaint has to die. It's OK for the fediverse to not be ready for everybody yet. But the idea that we need to hide the fundamental building blocks of it, rather than retrain people for a different technology, has to end.

Servers matter. Servers are the core elements of all of this. The fediverse is a local-first, small social media space, dressed up as a big centralized one. We have to accept it for what it is.

Users need to decide which server they'll use, in the exact same way they do when using centralized social media. Only now, they'll be able to talk to people using other services. Whether you use Facebook or Reddit or Twitter matters. You have to choose which server to use between them. THey have different rules, and different cultures between them. This is true here, too.

Masking the server problem behind auto-assignments isn't going to work, because the developer doesn't own those servers. They have no formal relationship to those servers. They cannot vouch for those servers. If the closest fedi server to you is startrek.website and you hate nerd shit, you should not be auto-assigned to it.

If you want to simplify the Friendica signup for your friends and family, launch a Friendica-based website. Give them the URL. Now they don't need to make any decisions. Just like they don't for your Discord, or whatever else you may use that's smaller and personal.

A working mobile app. There is only one app I know of that is not even in beta, and I couldn’t get it work at all. Most people will not use a site if it doesn’t have an app.

Get coding.

Clean up of basic functionalities. Default to the most intuitive and user friendly options (no delete box enabled on posts/comments that aren’t yours, infinite feed on by default, prominent option dropdown to turn on darkmode or different styles, etc). I should not be taken to someone’s page when I click the “follow” button. Following should also be a two way street, and require consent. You cannot see someone’s content on facebook unless they approve your friend request. This is how it should be on friendica. Improve groups. I see they exist, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to browse or search for them. Stop notifying me after I make a post. I know I made the post, I don’t need to be notified. Develop more appealing UI/UX overall that is easy for a layman to understand and use. Allow editing to show updates without needing to refresh the page. Etc, etc, etc.

Most of these are admin settings. Launch your own Friendica-based website and have at it.

Add expected functionalities. Tagging users, live videos, gifs, reaction emojis, marketplace, public events, unshare, reshare with commentary, recommend friends from contacts, etc.

Tagging works. Gifs work. Marketplace isn't going to happen, because it's a whole different product. A bunch of these need someone to support them.

So, start coding.

Friendica is not a social networking site. Lemmy is not a social networking site. Mastodon is not a social networking site. These are web servers that let you run your own social networking sites. Social networking sites that can connect with other small, independent social networking sites, creating an open social web.

But you should not be getting people to sign up to "Friendica". That's not a place on the internet.

It's a technology that drives places.

this feels useless at best and entitled at most: if you want these, get working. this is not reddit or Facebook: there is no profit or product, nobody is making money and no money is being spent on development or making sure your requests are met. all the time you spent writing this or replying could have been spent actually researching the app. not a dev? not entitled to complain

simplify user sign ups

you're basically proposing a centralized service over a decentralized network. who runs that service? how is it guaranteed fair? which servers should be in the pool? what if a server is worse than another spec-wise? what if the assigned server shuts down? the solution to the server issue is you picking a server for your non techie friends, not cooking more centralized complexity on top.

polish/add functionalities

if you really want features developed, make a bounty! pay developers! expecting others to work for your appeasement for free is distastefully entitled. or do it yourself. as you can probably assess, expertise and free time don't grow on trees.

how to attract more users

i think most of this disconnect stems from you wanting this to be just like big centralized services. it's honestly delusional. in another reply you state that "lemmy.world couldn't handle 10M users". maybe, but decentralization is only going to make it worse. every lemmy server needs to broadcast every action to every other server which has users in that community. every post and like needs to be stored in all relevant instance dbs. this generates an insane amount of traffic and data. if the lemmy network suddenly gained 1000 servers, each with 10k users, the new replication traffic may stomp smaller instances to the ground.

the idea of a "global square" is naive and we should move over. it just limits us all because a platform which caters to everyone must be built around the common ground, and the common ground for everyone isn't that much ground. a platform that caters to everyone caters to no-one: see mainstream social media and how it's going. fedi is great because it's a whole different model: small islands which can interconnect. this is why picking a server is so important and you should not hide it from the user: you're not signing up to mastodon, you're signing up to furry.engineer or fosstodon! you can interact with the other instance just fine, but it matters where you register!

this is the core of the disconnect: we should not bend the fediverse to what mainstream social media is, we should either teach others about this or be fine living as a niche. auto enshittifying ourselves hoping to be another facebook or another reddit feels really silly to me