I thought this was slightly funny.
Mark Zuckerberg is known these days for wearing t-shirts with Latin phrases on them, especially ones where he compares himself to Julius Caesar.
Bluesky made a shirt in the same style, but theirs says “a world without Caesars” in Latin.
I actually view it the opposite. Lemmy isn’t necessarily doomed from the start but we will not reach mass adoption because we are too clunky to use for most users because of its distributed nature.
Bluesky has enabled tons of non tech users to immediately reap the rewards without having to worry about instances or who can see their posts, while maintaining decentralization (albeit with a high cost).
The true path forward will probably be a world like Bluesky but instead of running your own relay, you’re contributing compute power to a Kubernetes cluster. Instances and having to worry about federation is far too clunky for most users, it’s the reason mastodon never saw mass adoption while Bluesky almost immediately did.
I think the difficulty to use ActivityPub as a user is a side effect of what makes it resilient. It does not grow quickly amongst the masses, but it also can’t be taken out with one company changing. I think in the long run, more and more people will see it as a legitimate social network and it will grow over time.
I don’t think usability problems in Lemmy are related to the protocol. For me open source alternatives carry the promise that they will only get better, while profit-oriented alternatives will eventually have to get worse.
I don’t think any of what makes Lemmy difficult to use is a necessity based on its distributed nature; its a result of the developers being more geared towards the back-end than towards the front-end. Which is not an inherent weakness - the back-end needs to be good before a nice front-end can make sense. So I’m optimistic. :)
Exactly. If I want to subscribe to a group (sublemmy?) that isn’t on my home instance, then I have to search for it from my home instance and then click the “Subscribe” button. This is a somewhat painstaking process, but there’s no reason that I can see why that couldn’t be streamlined.