Why would I tell them about “the fediverse”? Tell them that you use Lemmy or Mastodon or whatever. If they are interested then give them a link to a good instance. That’s it.

That’s the Internet as a whole.

I simply don’t understand what this fediverser thing is supposed to accomplish.

So apparently it is “eventually” supposed to let Reddit and Lemmy users interact with each other. And this will somehow cause people to join Lemmy? If someone is a reddit user, posting in Reddit where 99% of the community is, and they happen to see a comment from Lemmy, why would they even care? Why would they leave their community with 99% of the people to move to a smaller inactive community that only has any action at all due to copying content from the site that they are already on? It doesn’t make any sense!

And if that sad state of affairs is the eventual goal for the project, what is it accomplishing right now, other than annoying people with bot spam? If you want to read Reddit threads, go read Reddit. There is no reason to spam your personal reddit rss feed to the world. And what is even the purpose for it creating user accounts, which is basically impersonating people?

I think it basically boils down to 1 question. Is it currently accomplishing its goal of bringing actual new users to Lemmy, in any measurable way. If that answer is anything other than “yes”, then why is it enabled in the first place? If that answer is “yes”, then there are still a whole host of reasons why that might not be a good thing.

I know Vivaldi (the web browser company) hosts a Mastadon server. That’s what got me to start looking into Mastadon initially.

In the Connect app I know it’s very easy. While looking at a post, you just hit the 3dot menu, and the subscribe/unsubscribe option is right there.

Sure, there can absolutely be reliable sources of reviews. The problem is in verifying what is reliable and what isn’t. Why in the hell would I ever trust some random dude’s WordPress blog as a reliable source of reviews? I would have no way of knowing that companies aren’t paying you or giving you free products.

Outside of something like consumer reports, which has built up a reputation over a long period of time, how does one figure out that a source is reliable? Review the reviewers? Those reviews would just get gamed too.

I think ANY platform for reviews is going to get gamed and flooded with fake reviews. I don’t see how decentralization would solve that.