Going by comments in the post, the required login is coming in waves, so not all people may notice immediately.
Still, as Reddit is strong-arming its way across, maybe worth signaling to people there that the fediverse may be used without an account, so long as there’s even one instance that implements logged-out view as the protocol allows it?
I don’t have access to my account any longer, possibly VPN ban, though I never tried to recover it so I can only guess why mine is lost, else I’d post myself.
People need to change their ideas about what the fedi/threadiverse is in relation to social media. It is an international forum of everything.
The lemmy.ml situation is heavily offset by instances that either limit them or block them enitrely, as well as Piefed acting as a direct foil.
The *iverse cannot be unified entirely. Lemmy/Piefed/Mastodon and Pixelfed should be seen as a platform unto themselves where one may find likeminded people. It is not tailored to anyone’s particular personal taste, and is open to anyone of literally any personal taste.
Lemmy does have a bit of a reputation for being the Fight Club of the fediverse… which is tbh, kinda fair but it kinda comes with the territory - literally. We’re all here and we aren’t all going to agree.
I would disagree with the everything part, but otherwise, that’s precisely the problem - you can’t expect the majority to drastically change their expectations of social media.
I don’t expect the majority to do anything, but I also don’t think Lemmy needs them to validate its existence. We validate it just fine already.
I would much rather more people enjoy it than us just keeping it to ourselves. I believe, if done properly, it has a decent amount to offer for the average user. The fediverse has the major advantage of being decentralized and open source, and I believe that should be accessible to everyone, not just the fanatics (like me, admittedly) who are ready to wade knee deep through technical details and differences in communities, some of them quite toxic.
But OK “we’ll just keep it as is”, we keep the fediverse for us. Yay?
Here’s the problem with that: it then remains a niche. What happens to niches in technology? Well, there are a number of examples that I specifically would like the Fediverse not to follow.
Carrying around a replacement battery was never something most people did. They didn’t generally replace their batteries, either. That was a niche thing. At some point, manufacturers started sealing their phones shut. After all, it was only a niche that needed replaceable batteries, so it didn’t affect many people. So we lost a part of our right to repair.
Rooting your phone was never something a majority of people did. Look what is happening to people who root their phones (read: want admin rights on devices they bought and fucking paid for): they lose their warranties, they lose their ability to use banking apps without complex workarounds that don’t always work, in some cases their hardware doesn’t work properly. Because rooting is seen as a niche thing, “it doesn’t affect that many people, so no need to worry”. So we lost those rights. And we’re about to lose the right to install whatever apps we fucking chose.
What’s on the horizon? Age restrictions. Something major platforms may whine about a bit, but can implement just fine - they already don’t really care about your privacy anyway, and if there are fines, generally they’re small enough to just be a line item. The smaller platforms? The operators of lemmy.world? The operator of kbin.earth, my home instance? I highly doubt that they have anywhere near what’s needed for that. But the fediverse is only a niche thing, so it doesn’t affect that many people. Oh, shit, that’s us now.