Anyone is welcome, that’s the entire point of making it decentralized.

Each user, each community and each instance has control over how they conduct themselves and what behaviour they find acceptable.

If you don’t like your spot in the fediverse, you can pick another, or roll your own.

If others don’t like your behaviour, they can deal with that within their own sphere of influence.

Unlike other social networks, where some CEO can make up random rules as they see fit and enforce them arbitrarily, the fediverse allows for much more granular control.

That said, it’s an experiment that is being played out right now, across society. Your aunt can join, or watch what happens, as can anyone else.

There’s still plenty of rough edges, so the user experience is going to vary, some good, some less so.

Participate, or not, it’s entirely up to you.

It would be great if it could become a virtually universal social media eventually, but for its quirks to be understood by everyone, some critical mass of first adopters must understand the fediverse. So I think the fediverse will self-select for technically knowledgeable people at first before eventually becoming accessible to the public, not by any fault of its own but by virtue of having been around long enough and grown enough of a community to attract the average person from traditional social media.

I also think there are different instances and communities for people with different priorities. People interested in the ideas behind the fediverse can congregate on lemmy.ml (because that’s where Lemmy’s developers are, right?) and in FLOSS communities, etc., while people looking for a social network that won’t use them for profit can flock to region-specific instances, etc.

That’s the genius part: It doesn’t matter whether I think if someone is welcome or not. Everyone can run their own instance, with the software they prefer, and connect it up to whatever other instances they prefer. In that sense it is more democratic than the closed garden platforms.

It’ll take time before these things become more accessible to technically inept people.

IMO one of the cool things about Lemmy is that it could be both. I can imagine some instances keeping a high barrier of entry and strict posting rules, but federate with more open, mass appeal instances that your aunt joins. I would be surprised if it ever catches on in that way though.

Lemmy, in its current state, reminds me of a university online forum. It has a university-ish population of active users who seem reasonably well-educated, and you run into people with disproportionately varied interests and passions compared to the general population.

I joined last summer when I became annoyed by the reddit shenanigans and have never looked back. For me, at least, lemmy already has the critical mass needed to occupy my attention. After the initial reddit wave, the active user count dropped steadily from around 70k to 40k, but seems to be slowly rebounding now as it has climbed back to 50k or so recently.

I think one thing of note is that when people flood into the fediverse for whatever reason, there is a tendency for them to congregate at whatever is perceived as the most central instances. This can be devastating if the servers in question are not up to the task of a sudden influx. I am guilty of this myself. I initially opened an account at kbin.social which was swamped. As I learned how the fediverse works, I eventually settled on lemmy.ca, which is a middling size instance that seems quite stable.

I guess my worry, then, is if lemmy goes viral at some point, it may not be up to the task of dealing with all the people flooding in? Viral trends have an exponential growth pattern, so it only takes a few doublings before you’re looking at a million users and beyond. At the moment, scalability worries me more than social concerns in terms of the future of lemmy. But I suppose that may, to some extent, be because it’s much harder to predict how the latter will play out with a much larger network, so I am giving it the benefit of the doubt?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

This is the future of social media and you are a part of it. Currently there are only a few people but later on everyone will catch up and this will have most of the population on it.

But because of the federal nature it will be cluttered overwhelming or difficult to manage like other centralised social media.

The biggest advantage is neither the corporate nor the governments or dictatorships can censor content here. Only the community can decide what’s best for them.

The future is federated, decentralised and anonymised and open to everyone.

Eventually people are gonna get tired of the toxicity of mainstream social media.

Eventually all of the internet is going to be decentralised and free from control again as it was meant to be.

To be honest I don’t see a difference to Reddit other than it having much less users and content and more geeky at the moment.