FOSSDLE PieFedTantacrul mentions onboarding problems with average people learning to switch to the fediverse as an alternative to Facebook
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moosetwin
edited
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPyJBJTHyO0&t=11268s
This reminds me of Tom Scott's excellent video on electronic voting machines, where he mentioned that the system for counting votes needs to be easily understandable to the average person so that they can adequately trust it.
Okay I watched the few seconds of video at the end of a three-hour long video apparently about Facebook where he mentions "federated social media using open decentralized technologies such as activitypub" as it is known. The ratio of time and effort he's inclined to devote to each topic speaks for itself. My understanding of what he says: "Sounds complicated. I'm not touching it until all my friends are already there."
He's more than capable of joining the fediverse, but he's also a UI/UX designer. I would say his main issue with the fediverse is the amount of friction between a normie being exposed to the concept and actually signing up and engaging with it.
You have to admit that it isn't the simplest thing to do. People have to understand the concept of the fediverse, find an instance that will accept them, sign up (with confirmation required from the instance mods) and then find out how to find communities that they are interested in.
It's not about whether a tech-savvy person can figure it out with some effort, it's about whether normal people can transition away from a monolithic, streamlined, social media to it.
It makes sense. I trust a UI/UX designer with experience that knows what they’re talking about. As much as we like and care for the space there are flaws
That's the argument. Do they, though? I sure didn't when I first signed up.
Most of the people didn't, and that's okay
If Fediverse users don't even agree on whether instances are important or just an implementation detail, how could a new user know?
People have to understand email addresses, domains, the DNS system just to decide which email provider to choose. After that they still need to find people to email.
This email thing will never catch on /s
Hahaha, touché. To be fair though, a lot of people struggle with email.
And if an easier version of email existed, email mightn't have caught on.
I still think defederation is the biggest hurdle. It would be a lot easier if you could just tell people it didn't matter what instance they join, they will be able to follow anyone.
Usually when I mention it people will talk about all the reasons defederation exists, but it doesn't change the fact that if a normal person has to start looking up what instance they can follow uncle ReaganLover69 on, they're probably going to stay on twitter.
Yeah it's a weird internal problem. It has to exist for understandable reasons, but also naturally makes it so that nobody will want to join any but the very largest instance, automatically centralizing it all again.
Plenty of people are joining other instances than LW
Defederation makes it so that figuring out which instance to sign up with in order to see your friends and local businesses (since we're talking about vs Facebook instead of Twitter or Reddit) would be a nightmare for the average person.
I have multiple accounts on some services trying to get to everything I want to see. I mostly gave up on Pixelfed. My main Mastodon account can see people on other instances but has problems seeing their posts. And I'm absolutely not willing to troubleshoot it because between work, a social life, and other hobbies I just don't have the time or give a shit.
I like the fediverse. I'm here. I use it. But I'm only going to use what's convenient and I promise that I have more patience than the average non tech person who wants to sign up using a linked Gmail account and see all the things they expect to see without having to think about it.
Edit: I think my brain skipped the last two sentences in that comment. I just sat here and bitched about something that was already mentioned. I have brought nothing to this discussion and have brought shame upon my house.
No, it's not.
It's literally a concept no normie knows about nor would care about.
They are not trying to follow some tankie on a banned Marxist instance, they're trying to follow cute cat pictures on lemmy.world.
End of the day, just like with safe site filters etc, you'll end up with most instances following similar enough protocols and federating with each other and the vast majority of people seeing the vast majority of people, with some fringes blocked for some people.
Until you accidentally end up on an instance that defederated from lemmy.world and are confused why there are no cute cat pictures
Is there a way to easily find an instance based on what you want to use lemmy for, not just what the instance is about?
Nice! He hasn’t posted anything in ages! But this one may have to wait till I’ve got some time, that is a long one even by Tantacrul’s standards.
When did people stop wanting to learn anything? Everything has to be dumbed down to the level of toddlers otherwise people can't be bothered.
To me the fediverse is great because you need higher than a room temperature IQ to use it so the posts are already far greater quality and the interactions are more meaningful than any other social network. Meta can keep all the screaming adult children in their platform.
I can tell you that the average person in the last 30 years hasn't wanted to learn shit. I suspect it goes back far longer than that but I was too young to pay any attention.
People like us have always been around but we are not the norm. We thrive on challenge on the advantages of doing things different and better ways. But the vast majority of human history is primarily people just wanting to get by. They spent their extra time shining their floors or waxing their cars. Maybe getting that last decoration up in the foyer. That's why we have so many databases running in Excel, It says easy as possible while just barely skirting by danger.
*clicks video*
Oh god, I'm NOT watching a god damned 3 hour video on facebook vs fediverse!
Seriously! Why did this guy feel the need to make a THREE HOUR VIDEO about social media??? A 10 minute video would have been a bit much, but THREE HOURS AND 9 MINUTES??? ARE YOU HIGH??? Holy shit....
well, you're in luck. because the video is not about that.
In fact, fediverse gets a 10 second mention while the credits roll.
There, now you can watch the 3 hour video. It's fun.
In fact, the very reality of there being a three hour video of someone talking (as in, in written text this'd be a maximum of 10 minutes of reading, for a slow reader) about a supposed onboarding problem with the fediverse is irony at its finest.
Yeah... sure... if you always expand 10 minutes of content into 180 minutes using a wrong format, you might fuck up getting anybody to do anything. You seem to not want them to get what you're trying to teach, maybe.
Did you click the link? The main content of the video is about facebook, I just linked to a 10 second portion of it. You don't need to watch the whole video to understand the clip.
Deleted by author
Why would you downvote a video you haven't even watched
Some people just are like that.
*spicy*
i wouldn't expect anyone to watch a video longer than 3 minutes on the subject.
Guys, the link is time stamped! What lazy bums.
I've just discovered, that time stamps don't work on embeds! (checked on Photon, Tesseract and PieFed)
Well it works on Lemmy.
I saw some naked monster out of even art the other day. It's everywhere on LW as well as lemmynsfw.
Tbf I have never seen that before in the last year, and it was from an account mere minutes old. So this spurt was all over the place but overall quite a rare occurrence.
I've watched the whole video through, and honestly that felt like an underbaked take. People will have difficulty understanding federation? *Seriously!?* Surprise surprise, but if you know what email is, you already understand federation.
Folks (and you 😁), I get you are trying to be helpful but you are missing the point.
I get that I can hit the button. It drives away people in general. People do not like filling out reports. Having to block, report, and moderate your own content is work. Users value having most of that done for them.
I'm sure what this guy is saying has truth to it but here's the actual problem.
The people.
Fediverse will never EVER hit critical mass unless the users and mods stop calling everyone they don't agree with a Nazi. Mods need to actually enforce NSFW shit and do their job. Nobody is going to scroll in their off time when you can randomly have furry dick pop up.
The problem is the people. This place is hostile as fuck to the average user.
I've never seen such content, which community was that? Did you report the content for not being flagged?
If you see unflagged NSFW content just report it and say "unflagged NSFW content." People on your instance and the community's instance will get the report. This is nice so that even if your instance has more strict rules it can still handle the problem if the community's instance doesn't want to.
I'm not saying you're a nazi, but if you think the main problem with social media is that everyone calls you a nazi you should consider the possibility that you might be.
Nazi, transphobe, capitalist scum are popular ones on here.
Exhibit 1 ^
Hey I wasn't the one being called all these things. I tend to avoid communities like that but every time I go to the federated tab I see at least one post like this.
But when they have that content, or even worse stuff such as neo-nazism, shown on Twitter and Facebook, *suddenly* they have no issue! Suspicious.
Most people prefer offensive words over involuntary dick exposure.
TBH this is to be expected from a demographic made up largely of ex-reddit users