Yes! I as well started my Lemmy journey on kbin first.

Back when the API changes were introduced in Reddit, everyone on Reddit kept about lemmy.

Then, in the comments you read stuff like “Lemmy are a bunch of tankies, kbin is better, yada yada”…

Great, now you’re already torn between two sides, without even knowing about the basic concepts of how they both work.

You then go to one Lemmy server, and see how bad the UI is, then you check out kbin, and it feels nice.

Well, and the rest is history…

Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack,

I fully agree here. Whatever software they have developed, is not rocket science, and mostly based off of existing standards.

Gmail, Outlook, etc… just a bunch of *DAV servers on top of an emailing service, paired with some SSO. Same goes for Reddit/X/FB. A simple DB just storing some info and doing some fancy sorting based on that info.

Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved

Yes!

But, on the other hand it’s a two-fold sword.

Corps are making money off of peoples lack of knowledge, and this has been the way of how “offering a service” is being done probably since human history… and yes, it pisses me off as well, especially when it comes to human health and nutrition, etc…

But…

Say, you hire contract workers, to build a house, bc. you don’t know how to do it yourself. Then you need to hire someone else to approve the quality of the work that’s been done, since again… you lack the knowledge. After you’ve moved in, something breaks, again… you hire someone to fix it.

Now, at what point do you start learning about all the components involved in a built house? electricity, plumbering, walls, etc… and most importantly, do you even care in learning so or not?

And some people, just don’t care. They simply don’t. Even if the concept of a topic is very easy to grasp, they simply lack the interest in knowing about how it works.

I think, you didn’t get my point.

Everything you mentioned, is nice and all, but who cares where the server is located? if they federate with each other, it doesn’t matter. Again, I’m just talking from a novices POV and things thst might confuse them. They surely confused me at the very beginning

Whether these are just lazy excuses or not, but let’s be real for a moment.

Imagine someone, who’s used to go to reddit.com, search for a reddit app in the app store, both of which have the same logo, design, etc… and use their username/password to login and browse the content.

almost every service, that people use for the last decades is based on this specific approach, except for emails. Even the TLD was always .com

Now imagine, how overwhelmed those people might feel, when you tell them “just come over to lemmy”.

Lemmy, where? lemmy.com? Here’s where you then start explaining the different instances, federation, etc…

the next question will be: where’s the Lemmy app? Remember, the unified logo and design? well, good luck explaining that all lemmy apps are de facto third-party-apps.

Now, once they make it throug all of that, the next hurdle that will confuse the hell out of them are the communities scattered all across the instances.

While I really wish for PixelFed to take off, like Mastodon and Lenmy did, the current situation, IMHO, is just confusing to say the least.

So, here are two pixelfed mobile apps, an older one which is just a wrapper of the web version, and a newer polished one.

I’ve the new “polished” one installed for a few months now, and it seemes as if it’s development has stalled. The app just feels unfinished at this point.

Now, I get it, it’s a volunteer project, and there are probably just a handful of people working on it. And this is totally fine, I’m not expecting them to deliver an Instagram clone anytime soon.

However, a few months ago, they announced “Loops”, with pre-signups and some marketing yada yada… All this, while there’s still an unfinished app for their core product. But, I went ahead and signed up, just to find out, it was just crickets for a few months.

Then, recently I logged in again (on the web), and saw an they have an App for Loops which seems to be in the works, and upon testing it, I came to the same conclusion, it’s just an unfinished barebones TikTok.

Again, I’m not ranting about PixelFed, but IMHO, if they want to get serious, they should focus on one thing, until time and resources allow them to explore other things.

I would love to see it succeed as an alternative.