It's a lot like my feelings on cryptocurrency. The dencentralized idea was interesting but it led to mostly discovering several reasons why it wasn't as good as they thought. Some of the problems were solvable with future iterations, but overall it led to private exchanges that could just take all your money if they wanted, high transaction costs, etc.
With social media, federation addresses one thing: If an instance goes away, the content has already been federated elsewhere. For starters, this has never been a concern for me. I don't treat any social media network as a long term data archive. If there's something I need to refer back to, I will save the conversation myself or I am prepared for it to be deleted when I look away. Even on Lemmy, I don't assume anything I post will stay, because moderator actions are federated, which will delete content from other instances anyway (when that federation is working correctly, at least)
On the other hand, we've already seen some of the negative sides of this:
First, users spam offensive/illegal content, which gets federated to all the other instances, leading to admins scrambling to a) stem the flow of this content and b) remove what is there. Ultimately they had to solve this with temporary defederation and user-created tools to help purge some of the content.
Second, federation is a (relatively) complex process, and there are multiple situations that can cause federation to an instance to fail. I'm pretty sure I've seen cases where if one instance's keys are lost and certificates need to be regenerated, any instance that has seen that instance will be unable to federate with it anymore.
Now like I said before, these aren't unsolvable problems, it's just a case of the software and concept being relatively new, and needs to mature more.
Now when I switched to Lemmy, the complaints I saw about Reddit had absolutely nothing to do with federation and data availability. All I ever saw people complaining about was:
Algorithms pushing content to benefit advertisers rather than the best end user experience
Forcing UIs designed to satisfy advertisers rather than UIs end users want
Admins/moderators making moderation decisions that users disagree with
These are significant issues, and are worth leaving a service over. However, federation doesn't address them at all. Lemmy certainly addresses the first two, but that has nothing to do with federation, that's just it being open source and community-developed software.
So that's what I meant. The one thing federation addresses is questionable, and the added complexity has brought about new problems that need to be solved still. I'm not against it, but it was never what drew me to this platform. It's just a "Huh, that's neat" kind of feature.
WSL has replaced my use of the command prompt in Windows for anything (and I used it more than most, I think).
In my job, I develop Linux applications to support industrial automation, and WSL is capable of building and running most of what I make. It isn't a full Linux machine, and can behave unexpectedly when trying to do things like changing certain network configurations.
So it's great for what it's for, really. But if you want a full VM, this isn't really for that.
Hell, I'm technically-minded and I do understand it, and I still don't consider decentralization a particularly helpful feature of social media (yet).
Federation is technically interesting, but it introduces a lot of new complications that the software is still too new to have solved. The problems it does address, it doesn't really solve very well yet. And I've always been willing to leave a social media network when it doesn't suit me anymore, so centralization has never really bothered me.
What drew me here was the growing community. I would still be here if it was just one centralized service
Consider your specific audience you are reaching out to.
Honestly the biggest barrier for entry into the Lemmy content isn't choosing an instance. You can easily tell someone to sign up for Lemmy.world or kbin.social without going into detail about what that means.
The issue is that most social media users don't want to spend an hour or two searching for communities and blocking bots. They want a feed that is appealing at first, that they can tweak incrementally as they get more familiar with the service and its content.
With that in mind, what people want is to know what makes the experience helpful to them right now. I think that boils down to two primary concepts: Draw people in to specific communities that are more accessible than their Reddit counterparts, or convince them why Reddit is not a good experience for them
The latter is a tough sell to someone who already is happy with the Reddit experience. And the trouble with the former is there's currently not a great deal of communities that are clearly better than on Reddit. The few that I would say count are fairly niche interests.
I think the Lemmy and kbin software needs a set of default subscriptions for guests and new users. Something curated by instance admins to provide the best new user experience, while still allowing them to customize it from there.
For what it's worth, I would expect most social media users not to care about any of the decentralization aspects. Putting too much focus on the "it's like email" thing is likely to fall on deaf ears at first.
Well yeah, what are they gonna do, take the tubes? I'd sooner ask for a site to site...