this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Anyone who claims the Fediverse is hard... just ask them if they use email. Is that hard?
I know it's hard for tech literate people to understand but choosing a server is daunting. Most people chose their email because it was linked to a service they were already familiar with like Google and Microsoft. There's no familiarity with the Lemmy or mastodon instances and there are so many of them that people who already have trouble learning new technologies get to deal with decision fatigue on top of that. People like what is familiar and having a service that mostly works the same is still very confusing for them.
That's what bothers me about these sorts of threads. We represent a completely self-selected group of people who have not just managed to create accounts on the Fediverse, but then decided to stick around.
Of course we think it's simple.
We do not represent "typical users" (whatever that means) of mainstream platforms, and yes, Mastodon, Lemmy etc. have a lot of work ahead of them to make themselves appealing to those users.
It doesn't really help to talk about how simple the Fediverse is, or to shame people who find it confusing. The only thing that will actually help take it mainstream is UX work to remove the friction and make it as simple to use as we claim it is.
I agree that UX work is important but the current state that mastodon UX is in is ready for the masses. It is simple. It will just take some time for people to wrap their heads around it, just like it took time for people to adopt email, facebook, twitter, etc. UX friction isn't the reason your grandma isn't using mastodon right now. These things don't happen overnight.
If users need to "take some time [...] to wrap their heads around it", the UX is not ready for mass adoption. It's that simple.
I consider myself relatively savvy in this area, and I still regularly run into walls with random federation-related issues.
It's not that simple. Twitter and email are both just as complicated yet they enjoy mass adoption. You and I run into walls because we're not accustomed to it. When you were new to other tech I'm sure you ran into similar walls.
This meme has to die. Federated services are not some black magic.
I would have replied to this earlier, but my Lemmy instance was unexpectedly down...
Federated services are cool. They're not black magic, but they have their own issues that still need to be handled better for the to be mass adoption. We can't pretend that everything is A-OK as it is today.
Every day, though, these federated platforms are being developed. Different users have different thresholds for what they're willing to put up with, and slowly but surely, more and more people are going to be within the expanding bubble of acceptability.
I am tech literate and even for me the choice of “which instance to register on” delayed my Lemmy sign up for 2 weeks. I eventually just signed up on 3 of them but now I have 3 different accounts each with their own set of subscriptions and favorites.
Aside from that, the Lemmy UI is a usability disaster and needs an overhaul. I’ve been thinking of giving that a try but I already have other projects that are taking up all my free time at the moment.
Oh, and then there’s the bugs.
The "which instance to join" thing is the worst for me. People here are claiming at the same time that "it doesn't matter because fediverse" and "it does matter because you need to find one that you agree with their stance/philosophy/admin-decisions".
I was thinking that for this to work, each instance should had a mandatory landing page with the "about us", but this is not a solution either. How do you know that the instance has competent sysadmins? I've seen instances with exposed logs with IPs, private info etc. Its impossible to know and its literally roulette.
I have ended up having a different account in different intsance in each of my devices, which I actually enjoy tbh but claiming "just sign up" is bullshit. I may even sign up in one that the admin decides to shut down tomorrow. If I don't know the risks of randomly selecting an instance it is almost certain that something will happen that will piss me off.
Going to play devil’s advocate and say this is similar to the early days of e-mail, and e-mail has since matured quite a bit. Normal users don’t need to worry about the intricacies of IMAP or POP3 or SMTP in general.
Idk, I wasn’t really around in those early days, but it’s my guess that the experience wasn’t as turnkey as it is now.
Similarly, we’re in the early days of the fediverse, and while it’s not as complicated as the aforementioned example, I do believe the experience is going to get more and more streamlined as time goes on, just as it did with email.
At the moment I’m just glad they don’t charge for use the way old email did, and in some cases, still do
Hey sorry I deleted my comment b/c I realized it was basically the same as the top comment. But since you replied, what I said was: "Anyone who claims the Fediverse is hard... just ask them if they use email. Is that hard?".
And yea to be fair, it's not just federation that makes it hard. There are still some missing features that could smooth over the complexities of federation.
It doesn't matter what "instance" you sign up for with email, you'll get all mail. But just the email for YOU. If you pick federated on Mastodon you get half a billion messages a minute and none of them are for you.
But that's how twitter works too, so the concept wouldn't be alien if you've used twitter before. I actually was pretty confused by how you're supposed to use twitter when I first used it (how do you follow a conversation between multiple people, how do you find people in a certain field, etc).
I would argue that mastodon has a huge advantage over either email or twitter since it doesn't bring any new ideas, it's just a combination of things that people have been using for a while. It just "fixes" twitter, it shouldn't have been centralized in the first place.
No, Twitter has an algorithm. As much as people hate them, algorithms are what make social media actually interesting. 99.99% of creators I follow on TikTok (for example) I would have never ever found if all I had was a chronological feed of messages.
@r1veRRR I was on social media both before and after algorithmic curation, and I find it no more interesting now (less if anything). YMMV.
Possibly an extreme take, but have you seen everything you need to see? As in, is there no need for you to discover and learn about new things, concepts, ideas, people? Sure, you can hope that something interesting pops up on your chronological page, but that's a 1 in a million chance. You might say "just search for that new thing", but that's antithetical to discovery. How can I search for something I didn't know existed? How many movies, games, books would I have missed out on without at least some algorithmic help?
For reference, I was around for the time of the forums too. It's not the downfall of society to not have algorithmic recommendations, but it absolutely decreases discoverability of new interesting things, and conversely, the dissemination of important ideas. Sure, I knew about communism etc. before I started using TikTok. But only there did the algorithm give me great creators that explained stuff in an understandable way. Only there did I find out about coops, from an actual coop owner(?).