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So far, Americans using RedNote have said they don't care if China has access to their data. Viral videos on TikTok in recent days have shown Americans jokingly saying they will miss their personal "Chinese spy," while others say they are purposefully giving RedNote access to their data in a show of protest against the wishes of the U.S. government.
"This also highlights the fact that people are thirsty for platforms that aren't controlled by the same few oligarchs," Quintin said. "People will happily jump to another platform even if it presents new, unknown risks."
If you want more people to join the fediverse, you have to improve the user experience. People don’t want to read an article breaking down what the fediverse is, how to join an instance, how to find content, etc.
Streamline the join process so it doesn’t require learning the lore and technical training. Stop promoting the fediverse generally, and instead push people to easy to use frontends and popular instances. Remove the barriers to entry. If they want to dig deeper into different instances and the technical stuff, let them do that later. Stop loading the info dump at the front.
The internet use to be about discovery, not convinience. The reason big companies like TikTok can exploit people so well is because the barrier of entry is so low and people would rather get their content quick than to have any involvement in how it works. When someone creates a federated community or a server, it's not plug and play. Work goes into that, so yeah, if you want simplicity, stay on X and Facebook and Insta. If you want control and more clarity about how these protocols work, welcome.