"Well I still use forums!" Well the HN demographic hasn't accurately represented the average net user for decades, and there are a whole lot more people on the

"Well I still use forums!" Well the HN demographic hasn't accurately represented the average net user for decades, and there are a whole lot more people on the net now. It's likely that more people in the US today know morse code than 100 years ago but that doesn't make it more relevant to your average person. Developers saying "well it looks just fine to me" without deliberately considering if their perspective is representative is the reason FOSS isn't the dominant development model for user-facing software. I think a lot of these folks are correct in pointing out the value of having smaller, community-based places to communicate. However, you can't convince your average person to change something so closely intertwined with their daily lives by haughtily informing them that your superior understanding of online communications indicates that their choice of platforms is inferior. Like it or not, everybody has different use cases, different requirements, different motivations, different tolerances for frustrating interactions or delays, vastly different capacities to understand technical concepts, and none of those things make their perspective less important than yours when you're designing tools for the general population. This attitude will prevent anything currently on the fediverse from getting up enough of a head of steam to even put a ding in current centralized platforms-- forums stand a better chance. While techier folks are busy dismissing miserable user experience issues with "well actually it's pretty straightforward, read the documentation" (which is the non-gaming equivalent of "git gud,") commercial platforms have teams of people that do nothing except figure out how they can make their insanely complex ecosystems intuitive enough for nervous nelly gram gram to get up to speed in hours rather than days.