In Catholicism a communion wafer is quite literally the body of Christ – not symbolic. And Christ, as part of the holy trinity, is literally God. So Catholics do actually believe they’re chomping down God every Sunday morning.

This mentality explains a lot of open source.

Another big obstacle is the general UX of these platforms. Major companies have teams of user experience analysis and researchers that, while not always “winning” as compared to product or business driven decisions, absolutely have a (generally positive) impact on the product. Onboarding, retention, etc.

The fediverse has all the standard frictions of most OSS, like talking about itself, it’s technology, etc when the fact is 99% of users dgaf.

I might go so far as to argue the perceived complexity is a bigger barrier than the risk of sabotage from other businesses. I am optimistic the growing list of third party apps will help solve some of these issues, as long as they take things like the sign up process and server selection into their scope.

Why isn’t that a link… Is that a Lemmy thing or an instance thing or an app thing? These tiny UX friction points are important for retention.

Sync for Lemmy in ~6 weeks!