Yes. Joe Blow consumer just wants access to all the amazing free content on Reddit. Unfortunately, the people who create that content (1% of users) are currently getting screwed over by Reddit.
So my appeal to join lemmy is not aimed at Joe Blow, it’s aimed at the actual contributors who make communities possible. If enough of them switch over then lemmy will gain critical mass, and the rest is history. Joe Blow can go wherever he wants. I doubt he’ll stick around at Reddit when the content stream disappears.
> it’s aimed at the actual contributors who make communities possible
Contributors generally create content because they want it to be seen by more than a handful of nerds and don't want it to disappear within weeks because their instance has ran out of money.
Those contributors will either stop contributing for good, go back to Reddit (because it's still a better experience than any of the "fediverse" bullshit) or jump ship the second an actually competent company builds a centralized alternative that just works.
Look at the history of Mastodon. Contributors come in all shapes, but all of them want to be able to create without being harassed, insulted, mocked, trolled. Control over your means of communication is a mandatory step for that. Yes, your audience will be few. But few people listening to you in a wholesome way is miles better than masses barely seeing you, harassing you and overall not being heard. There's always someone who'll compare their audience on the fediverse vs twitter, and the conclusion remains: quality is better than quantity.
Funny, because if the US political discourse is to be believed, people, particularly on the right, really care about governance. I mean, hell, Musk bought Twitter specifically so he could change governance of the platform.
So no, I reject the premise.
People absolutely do care about governance. They care if they're getting spammed by crypto scammers or getting targeted by abusive trolls. They care if their political views are being censored or things they find offensive are being promoted.
The difference is, on a traditional, privately owned platform, the users have limited choice and no say, and they've gotten used to
that as the status quo.
And if you're a user who really doesn't care, cool, just join mastodon.social or lemmy.ml and move on. Problem solved.
As for complaints about onboarding, the official Mastodon app already drives people to mastodon.social (much to the chagrin of some folks in the community), so I have no doubt those issues will smooth out with time.
