FOSSDLE PieFedYour explanation of federation that it "works like email" will be misunderstood
submitted by
CyberTailor
transfem.social/notes/a16rvjhkk34b00tf
The linked post shows how most non-tech people's understanding of email is very very different from most of the people here.
If you want to get non-techy users, then there is absolutely no need to even use the word fediverse or to try to explain what any of this means. If you want to help a friend get onboard, just send them a link to sign up on the same server that you use, or a nice general purpose server. That's it. They sign up, they use it, and THEN they can start to learn about fediverse shit if they care to.
Yes. You can use it without understanding how it works behind the scenes. At some point, they'll run into a situation where it is helpful to learn some part of how the fediverse works and then they can ask about it, generating more content and interaction along the way
"you know how you can't talk to someone on Twitter.com from facebook.com? But you can email from your @gmail.com to someone with an @yahoo.com address?
That's the difference, federated social media is like email in this way."
I'm mostly sure even my elderly parents understood it when I said it...
till they throw you the curveball that they can indeed talk to someone on twitter from facebook.
And you know how, when you subscribe to a mailing list, you will only receive new mail sent to the list if your server happens to “federate” with the sender’s server?
Oh wait, that’s not how e-mail works.
Email providers absolutely block other email providers who abuse their system.
I’m not talking about blocking, but about being unable to see all replies to a post unless you open it on its home instance, which happens all the time on Mastodon.
In my experience, the majority of people doesn't have the slightest clue how mail works. Somehow you type it in and provide it with an address into one of the three indistinguishable fields that are titled "To", " CC", "BCC". And by some black magic it either appears on the screen of the other person. Or it doesn't. That's about the amount of knowledge.
So comparing something to this is kind of meaningless.
Ironically it is often that way with Lemmy as well, outside of Lemmy.World. You write up a post, maybe it makes it to its destination, maybe it does not (for several *days*, after which point extremely few people will see it when it suddenly appears, but down among the older content no longer listed as "new"), maybe people write comments into it, maybe they don't but who even knows if you aren't able to see any of them to be able to respond.
This is definitely a monthly or almost weekly occurrence, even if not quite a daily one, though it depends strongly on what instance you are on.
Also, whether it makes it to the destination or not depends on which server you try to view it from.
And I haven't even begun to start into the defederation artifacts yet!?
Right. Learning Lemmy and the Fediverse takes some effort. The onboarding isn't super smooth and flawless... I think we all know this. I'd still like to see a few design changes. I think generally we're headed in the right direction. Albeit kind of slowly.
I haven't noticed any federation hiccups in quite some time. There was some debacle with two updates. But since then it's been forwarding posts within seconds for me. At least on the last two instances I used.
Almost every single one of my posts has had major issues. Even those from other instances. e.g. Rimu messaged me about this one that did not federate for 2-3 days, and consequently was seen by very few people. And here's one from a difference instance that made it to its destination on !tenforward@lemmy.world, but from its originating server I could see none of the comments, and had to respond from a third account involved in that 3-way attempt at communication. (a post talking about such federation issues on that same server) So to be very clear, I am not saying that instances running PieFed software are having issues, but more that the issues are with Lemmy regardless of software type run.
Uh, right. Sorry, I did not notice you were from Piefed... I was talking about the times when we had the borked Lemmy updates... Did you ever debug or resolve your issues? Is there a way to tell something didn't federate? And is this an issue specific to Piefed? Or to the whole Fediverse? I'm not sure if I'm affected. I occasionally check my posts from another account and it always seems okay. But I mean I don't do it very often.
Yes often I've chased it down to some small degree. The one that Rimu messaged me was near a time of great instability on piefed.social and I got a bunch of gateway errors even so much as trying to reach it as a user (having nothing to do with posting I mean). This instance has calmed down a ton since then and works perfectly these days, but things happen from time to time. Likewise the incident with StarTrek.Website that I mentioned and provided a link describing more.
Other occurrences have still other causes - e.g. a few of them in one community seems to have been due to my posts getting "locked". I have no idea why - perhaps the new mod was just fat-fingering the button? I did not ask. But now the vote counts vary GREATLY (192 vs. 183 vs. 98 vs. 0 etc.) depending on which instance you view it from. If you want to test for yourself, a good one to use is https://piefed.social/post/330559 - though I notice that (fairly recently created) community !tech_memes@lemmy.world does not appear at all on your instance.
The primary cause though was a limitation in how the ActivityPub protocol was implemented in the Lemmy codebase, and not having anticipated that ~80% of the entire Lemmy-based Fediverse would concentrate itself onto a single server, Lemmy.World. So how it works is that any "action" - a post, a comment, an upvote or downvote - will be federated out to all the other instances world-wide at a rate of 1 per second. However, if the ping from the other servers to Lemmy.World is itself a significant approximation of that, then the list of actions to be federated will fall behind and take longer to catch up. Eventually after more than a week it gives up entirely, but in the meantime an action can be delayed for days. Poor Aussie.Zone - geographically distant from the EU - has been really having a hard time of it ( https://aussie.zone/post/13429731 ).
Fortunately this problem has already been fixed in the Lemmy codebase by allowing multiple actions to be sent in parallel (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623) - however, what causes the continued problems nowadays is the fact that Lemmy.World is still awaiting that upgrade to 0.19.6 to make use of that change in the codebase (release notes) (actually now 0.19.7 is already out too, having come less than a week after the former, and representing just a few bugfixes, release notes). When Lemmy.World upgrades to one of those, a good deal of these systemic issues should calm down, by a GREAT deal, if not entirely.
Afaik, there is nothing particularly special about instances running PieFed having troubles connecting to any Lemmy instances. In fact it seems rather stable compared to many (even most!) others - particularly StarTrek.Website that has poor uptime. In fact, https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list reports that piefed.social has a *remarkable* uptime rate of 99.89, which I very much believe, compared to the aforementioned StarTrek.Website's rate of 98.20, although a year ago when I left it it must have been significantly poorer b/c it would be down for days sometimes, and every single action took like a minute sometimes, back then. Your own instance reports 98.60 - does that sound right?
Rather, it is Lemmy instances - particularly smaller ones (e.g. https://lemmings.world/post/14171987) - having trouble federating specifically with Lemmy.World.
And then recently there were a bunch of instances having troubles connecting to lemmy.ml too (https://lemmy.world/post/22196027) - though this one is more expected as that one is administered by the developers of the Lemmy codebase, and thus that is the place where they test out all of their new code in beta, prior to deploying it across the entire Fediverse. Sometimes that leads to some REALLY odd behaviors, such as entries disappearing from modlog files that were extremely concerning to people, but it is par for the course with that highly special instance, which is unique in its manner.
Edit: ah and I neglected to answer one of your questions: as you said, the way to tell if something federated properly or not is to check the instance - specifically the one hosting the community that you are sending it to. So e.g. to check a post to !tenforward@lemmy.world, I would visit Lemmy.World. If it is there but not on your home instance, then at least that particular message packet got sent, even if the message packet from Lemmy.World to your instance got lost or fell behind in its processing backlog somehow.
Yup, and people younger than a certain age think email is as archaic as the pony express.
Hilariously, fax machines are as archaic as the pony express. They were invented around 1850.
Abraham Lincoln could have literally sent a japanese samurai a fax.
And we still don't have any worthy successor. In contrast to the pony express.
As a younger tech person, I definitely don't get a lot about email. It's old and weird and arcane and half it's features that match newer services seem to be built on top of hacks that are enforced through convention alone that will break if I decide I like to format my titles a little differently. Third party clients work, but the main providers, Gmail outlook use some proprietary api to make sure their own works well while everyone else gets stuck with shitty imap. There's endless little incompatibilities. It all just feels like delerict tower held together with miles of duct tape. Oh and I still haven't found a good answer to why calendars are so tied up with email.
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I mean it's one thing when you bring together a bunch of services that have no interest in being compatible, verses a bunch that are all conforming to the same standard.
In my country, people above a certain age think sending an email is impressive
I don't think it matters. the specific ways in which email services work or are used are not what the analogy is supposed to explain.
it's supposed to explain how two people who log in to different lemmy instances is different from logging into Facebook and MySpace, or Twitter and Threads.
"how does it work? aren't they different sites?'
"you know how you can have a gmail and someone else can use an outlook email but you can still send emails to each other"
done. even 70 year olds would get it. problem solved. easy, approachable analogy.
Exactly this. The second you utter the word "federation" you can see people's eyes glaze over in real time. The email explainer is good but it really needs to be a short sentence and that's it
I now after many years of living understand most people don't care or even want to understand how anything works. It completely baffles me.
Everyone I know says I'm smart but nah, I was literally in special Ed classes in school. I'm proven slower than the rest, but I am just curious and want to understand how things work which no one else does. It blows my mind how uninterested people are in the things they use everyday
You might be slower than the rest, but still smarter than them. Hare and turtoise kinda situation. Nothing wrong with being a slow learner, the willingness to learn is where it's at.
It depends on how interested you are in a subject. Everything is interesting, but you may not find everything equally interesting, nor do you have time to know everything there is to know about everything.
For instance, if I fly somewhere, I have a general idea of how wings create lift. But if you try to explain it to me in detail, I'll tell you to piss off because all I really want to do is travel from A to B.
But I know plenty about other subjects that I'm really into, that I could bore you to tears with and you'd end up punching me in the face if I tried to explain them to you.
It's not okay to not know anything about something. But it's okay to know enough.
That's fine but when people use technology every day, their phones, computers, ect.. and not know what a web browser is that's a whole different level of ignorance. Not just computing tho also cars. I barely know much about cars but I understand the idea of an engine, like you said it's okay to know enough. If something breaks on my car I look it up on YouTube and learn a little more slowly. Some people tho will drive a car everyday for their entire life and not understand what a piston even is.
You sound like someone who would enjoy The Secret Life of Machines. I've never met anyone else in real life who wanted to watch it with me, for the reasons you mention.
They all complain about "Muh Open source UI bad" Ok then what is considered a good UI/UX according to you lot (*Not you lot in particular I'm not trying to start any beef here*)
& how does one decide that particular UI is User-Friendly ?
One button to expand pictures similar to RES would be a big improvement
Built-in keyword filters are another one
And of course, multi-communities
Those are cool ideas honestly
A UI can be measured in a bunch of different ways, most of which should be measured and balanced against each other.
I recommend this video essay, where a UX professional (formerly at Microsoft) took over the UX for the FOSS music composing app Musescore and shares a lot of the lessons learned along the way: https://youtu.be/Qct6LKbneKQ
a user friendly user interface is one that the user is already familiar with. It is subjective, determined by the user, and will vary from user to user.
Think about the placement of face buttons for an xbox controller vs a ninttendo switch controller, specifically A and B. The function of menu accept is always on a, and menu back is always on b, but the physical placement of those buttons are opposite on the competing platform. Now think about a playstation controller, and where it puts menu accept and menu back. The glyphs are different, but a nintendo player will find it intuitive while the xbox player will be confused.
Juat copy what is most used so people dont have to learn anything new ever again
I don't expect non-tech people to ever come to or care about this place, or Mastodon.
Part of social media is predation. There is a draw to Facebook, even if it is the endless sea of bullshit emanating through it, the marketing of products and echo chambers.
They watch Adam Sandler movies, lad. We've already lost.
It's a draw. We have no draw, other than being DIY NPR (now with 5% more tankies). It's a draw, but it won't draw them. It's not what they care about.
I have seen people not think someone with a gmail email could email to someone with a yahoo email
I have also seen teachers who teach ICT be confused when seeing a email that isnt one of the popular ones
I'm really disappointed with Lemmy's idea of federation: all it is is a bunch of servers mirroring one another, but the user accounts are server-bound. No jumping instance and taking your identity seamlessly with you.
This isn't really Lemmy's idea of federation, it's just ActivityPub, the underlying protocol. Having a mechanism for jumping servers is unfortunately quite complicated and it isn't clear how it should be done or if it is even possible.
Lemmy does allow you to export and import your settings though, so you can kinda do it but you lose your history.
AFAIK the Nostr protocsal sorta let's you hop around, but it's full to the brimwith cryptobros, and I'm still not sure how moderation works there.
Yea moderation becomes a big problem once you can't actually block people. I don't like that Nostr describes itself as censorship resistent or even censorship free, that's not a good quality.
...
I'm not very familiar with Nostr, but knowing other distributed protocols, you can just hide messages from selected users in client.
Also, wtf did I read?
Censorship-free implies that moderation is impossible. If you don't have moderation, your social media will turn into a Nazi bar.
That's not good enough. First of all, users don't want to have to block people before having a good experience. Users don't want to deal with moderation themselves, but they also don't want mean people, harassment and nazis. It's not easy to recruit moderators for online forums, not a lot of people want to deal with that stuff.
But secondly, client-level blocking is not effective. It does not stop those bad users from continuing their bad behavior. In the case of Lemmy, it also doesn't stop their votes from still affecting your feed.
So yes, censorship-free platforms are not good because censorship-free means moderation-free, and users don't want that.
Why do CryptoBros live rent-free in your head ? One of Lemmy's donation methods links to a Cryptocurrency wallet So are you gonna leave Lemmy ?
They're annoying yes, but can be ignored
ActivityPub spec allows content-addressed IDs, just nobody implemented them and now it's too late.
https://gitlab.com/spritely/golem/blob/master/README.org
The problem as I understand it is basically that user IDs in ActivityPub are intrinsically tied to the domain on which the user registered, so you can't really move a user from one domain to another.
It's not true, all ActivityPub IDs are URIs
Yes exactly - those URLs contain the domain name, so you can't change servers for a user as their ID is tied to the domain.
There once was a discussion going on to implement DIDs in ActivityPub.
Unfortunately you can't just change the ID format as it would require a breaking change to the protocol.
pretty much. That's why the discussion is still on draft.
This is exactly like email though.
You have a gmail account that is tied to google. You have to login to gmail to access your email but you can email anyone in the world. Some people use different providers so they have different email addresses.
If you want to change providers there is no easy way to do it. You can use imapsync or export to pst and import to new provider and so on, or maybe your new provider gives you tools for importing mail from your old mailbox but it's not a feature of email protocol(s) to do this.
Me, explaining how Lemmy is similar to email…
I really think there is no problem here. There is one side that screeches, "We need more people in Lemmy! Lemmy is too obscure and hard to use! We need better UX and less techno-babble when people are trying to sign on!" We also have the opposite side saying, "Fuck the normies! I want my federated server @tek.know.kult for the most austere obscurantists only!"
Let's be real, guys. If your federated server is weird and obscure, the normals are not going to really encounter it, and they're not that into all the federation beef. They want to go to lemmy-website.com, put in a username and password, and fuck off to look at funny memes and rage at news stories.
I would say I am at least on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to tech literacy, maybe even the top quartile, and I only sort of understand how the Fediverse works, and no offense guys, I don't *really* care that much. I looked at Reddit for the funny memes and to rage at news stories, and when they took my favorite app away (Sync for Reddit), I couldn't be fucked to get advert-aids on the official app, so I jumped ship. Lemmy is just a bit less engaging, just a bit less addictive, and frankly I'm perfectly happy with that. Huzzah for having a bit more of a doomscroll-life balance.
People will come along with FOSS as well as CS options for joining the Fediverse, things like Threads and Voyager and BlueSky, and the culture of Lemmy will shift likewise. The great news is that with Federation, it will be easy to create islands of autists and weirdos to keep their purity cults as funny as they want them to be, and I think that's beautiful.
I honestly think it stills explains it pretty well. Most casual users will not download a specific client and will be fine with the whole idea of an instance being tied to its user interface. It still explains pretty well that it doesn't largely matter what instance you sign up for and that any instance can talk to (mostly) any other instance, just like with email.
So yea, I still think it's a good analogy. It's not perfect but yea, that's to be expected from an analogy.
I'm pretty tech minded and I have no idea what the hell any of y'all mean when you say it's like email because I don't know the technical details of how email works. I just know how it's used.
You think non-tech people are gonna understand that? They're just gonna assume it *is* email, in the way it is used; not how the shit works under the hood.
When I make the analogy, I just mean the fact that a Gmail account can send emails to a Yahoo account or any other email provider. In the same way, a Feddit.dk account can talk to a yiffit.net account. There is not a single company controlling email and there is not a single company controlling the fediverse. That's really all there is to the analogy.
Yes becase they're not looking to understand the protocol behind federarion anymore then you dowbt understand the protocol behind email, so they will grok better then you how it works bybusibg the email allegory, sending from gmail to outlook works for them.
I also use the phone network as another allegory if their eyes do glaze over, i can be with one phone company and phone somone on another companies plan. They have little idead of the prorogation of radiowaves etc that makes that all work.
They don't care how it works under the hood. They just want to know what I'm laughing at.
Frankly, I don’t think this is that big of a deal. First introduce them to an instance, then once they figure that out, show them the apps and other ways to access that instance.
It's also not even close to how email works and plenty of people use email apps that aren't tied to a provider.
The app I'm using today has nothing to do with the instance I use.
Just like email... clients just speak a protocol, and use a particular manner of presentation.
That's literally my point.
Most people know that email isn't tied to a provider app.
Woosh! Your point went right over my head there! Hahaha, my bad
Apparently I phrased it badly because every vote on it is down lol.
So it's probably my bad.
I think people can handle a simple series of instructions, like (1) download the Voyager for Lemmy app, (2) click the middle button, then click...
What they likely get confused about is the plethora of choices, especially when they aren't even sure that they want to join yet.
At the risk of bringing up unwanted drama, 100% of the time whenever I mention Lemmy to someone, they have admonished me for having done so. But putting myself into their shoes one day, I did a Google search (🤮) for "Lemmy", and aside from the singer, the top hit to an actual instance is... surprisingly to me, lemmy.ml. Next I note that the default search method there is "Local", not "All". NO WONDER they were telling me how politically "extremist" it (Lemmy) is! They see NONE of the posts from Lemmy.World, sh.itjust.works, etc., unless they are submitted to a community on lemmy.ml. Instead, what someone would see by default is "death to landlords" and all the other posts promoting the violent upheaval of Western society, as ofc capitalism is to blame for literally everything (well I mean...), except somehow only the Western variant is in the wrong and everything done by the likes of Russia or China or North Korea is absolutely fine.
Here's an old example I just happened to have handy:
(setting aside truth or falsehood, it definitely has a bias to it, as in both sides were equal, and yes this was prior to the USA election)
The #2 search result by DuckDuckGo btw is Lemmy.World (the #1 is ofc the musician:-), probably bc it has ~80% of all Lemmy users on it, so that is appropriate.
We need to put ourselves into *their* shoes, not our own as if we were ourselves on the other side of that conversation, but appreciate how *they* will approach the issues. And the methods used by more mainstream people differ from ours.
Either that, or accept that we are strictly another forum community used chiefly by Linux users, and that we will never be more than that.
Then we need to provide them a single recommendation
While we are talking, a small update on lemmy.cafe: I liked it for a few weeks, but the images stopped showing up properly since a week: https://lemmy.cafe/post/9986198?scrollToComments=true
I now use feddit.org as my default recommendation
Oh no!
That link that you sent me, are you still able to see that post? For me it shows an error, like what happens when a post is deleted by the OP, but I wonder if that is what happened or if lemmy.cafe has switched its main announcement community to be local-only, and if that requires a lemmy.cafe account to read, b/c otherwise I don't even know what their main announcement community would even be. It might have gotten deleted entirely and/or merged into graybeard, or statecraft, but both have not had posts for a long time (unless they did and whatever problem is affecting the database lately has messed up new posts in it as well).
Well that's sad.
If I were you I would ask feddit.org to switch their default sort behavior from "Local" to "All" so that it will be a more welcoming experience for the wider Fediverse looking to see memes and such from the likes of Lemmy.World etc. and not just itself.
It at least defederates from 2 of the big 3, though it also defederates from lemmynsfw.com, which I don't know why so many people (from Reddit in particular) insist on having that in their same account but I bet some people will be resistant to it, but oh well.
May I ask though: why not use lemmy.ca as the default recommendation? It has 4.5x the userbase as feddit.org (the same MAU, just 4.5x more accounts total, so I guess a bunch of lurkers or inactive accounts, but it is *at least* the same size), 5 admins, already has its default sort set to All, doesn't defederate from lemmynsfw.com, and seems to take user feedback e.g. this recent thread questioning whether to refederate with hexbear.net but based on user feedback deciding overwhelmingly to not. And especially if people in Reddit tend to be from the USA, it would be geographically closer and not confusing to e.g. *first* describe things in German, *then* in English.
Hopefully the issues with lemmy.cafe are temporary, but on the other hand communication about such matters is just as important as not causing them in the first place, plus if it's been a whole week and it's still that way... that does not bode well for the future.
I just checked, it is local indeed
The .ca domain and the logo could deter non Canadians by giving the impression that the instance is geared towards Canadians, which is partially true when you look at the sidebar
I could understand why non-Canadians would rather join another instance
How very interesting... beyond lemmy.cafe then, this is probably how Lemmy implements "local-only" in general, restricting access purely to those who have accounts *on that instance*. I would have hoped for a more nuanced take than simply seeing an error screen for me who lacks that, but it is what it is.
Yeah, I get that and thought the same, but otoh at least it is a straightforward and easy-to-understand bias, explicitly stated outright (unlike e.g. "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers"). If we were to follow that logic though, the rather high predominance of the German language over and above the English one, the latter of which in particular often is left out, is also quite off-putting to me. e.g. see this page: https://feddit.org/c/fediverse, which does *not* have a German explanation first and then an English one, but instead offers purely a German one and then... that's it, it stops there. English-speaking people are not only after-thoughts, but often *not* thought of at all. Which to be clear is fine btw - it's their server and they can do as they please with it - but I would not want to use it as the front face for all for *all* of Lemmy, for that reason, especially if that is a kind of signal that they are sending that similarly to lemmy.ca others are "welcomed" but they aren't the primary focus. And then the default sort being set to Local rather than All just compounds the issue all the more - other instances are again an after-thought, rather than the primary focus.
In contrast, "Canadian" is at least North American, but more importantly so long as it is using English rather than French, lemmy.ca is not as off-putting as feddit.org is, imho. Also, after the elections, A LOT of more liberal/less conservative (including "centrist") minded people I bet are going to be okay with a Canadian social media rather than a "murica" one.
Especially when the choices are so limited.
- lemmy.sdf.org has only a single admin
- beehaw.org has very restrictive moderation practices, and they do not want a wider audience increasing their workload further
- Lemmy.today does not defederate from... anything it would seem (and I confirmed that I can access ChapoTrapHouse from it, so it is not merely missing a Blocked tab in its instances list, it's real)
- startrek.website is themed and consistently has many federation issues, probably stemming from hardware ones (its uptime is not ideal)
- ttrpg.network similarly and significantly worse reported uptime
- discuss.online is quite nice actually, and I still use it as my primary "Lemmy" instance, though it only has 2 admins, who were balancing running it and trying to develop Sublinks, though it does not defederate from hexbear and that's a dealbreaker right there (imho), much less lemmy.ml
- and then everything else after that, sorted by MAU and restricting country=United States on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, is at least half as small as lemmy.cafe
I think we should keep Discuss.Online in the back of our heads moving forwards - although otoh it might become an unstable/experimental instance if it were to suddenly shift over to use Sublinks ahead of any other Lemmy instance. Otherwise, the only advantage of e.g. lemmy.ca or feddit.org is that they both defederate from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, which lemm.ee has a firm resistance to ever doing.
It looks like you have an account at lemmy.ca - did you like it? It seems to offer roughly the same uptime as feddit.org.
They don't block hexbear: https://discuss.online/instances
One other aspect against recommending lemmy.ca as the one recommended instance is that some Canadian users would prefer the instance to stay local: https://lemmy.ca/post/23600231
Which makes complete sense to be honest, speaking English does not mean that any English speaking user should come to their server while it's specifically country-named and focused.
I know how email works but it sure didn't help me understand the fediverse.
It's just one thing in email servers functioning that is similar in the fediverse, everything else is not similar. It is just confusing to compare the two to anyone not yet knowing how the fediverse works IMO.
"It's like the postal service!"
"It's like the internet!"
Just say it's like reddit (or a social media) but free and open and anyone can have/make one, or use an existing one. For free.
/Rant off
Same. I don't know why people keep trying to use the email example, personally I found it too much of an abstract concept that doesn't necessarily work for Lemmy.
If I knew someone used Reddit then I'd just say it's like Reddit but instead of a single authority in charge of Reddit, anyone can take the Reddit software and host it themselves, and if you create an account on one site you can still subscribe to subreddits on other sites and vote and comment on posts.
Don't explain anything, there's literally no point. Why are nerds *so insistent* that people understand technology?
Just tell people to make an account on any instance, whichever one you like best, and let them *experience* federation. Even if they never really understand what is happening they can still use the service. It's not like any of them understand how email works, and yet *they all use email*. Understanding is worthless. Stop being nerds.
Because technology forms the basis of the online environments we inhabit, and gives us the tools to tell how, say, our data is stored and processed.
If you're going to get in the water, it's probably a good skill to be able to swim. If you're going to drive a car and don't have the faintest idea how the engine works, you'll be at the mercy of manufacturers and mechanics.
The solution to your issue is not that everybody should conform to the lowest common denominator of technology literacy, but that the general internet user should get a fucking idea of the environment they navigate.
Never.
Nerds don't just want to teach people to swim. They want to teach them about hydrogen bonds and the mineral contents of the water, the processes of water treatment, and the technical requirements for a functional pool.
Nerds don't just want to teach people to drive. They want to teach them about the engine, the drive train, the underlying transportation infrastructure, and how to change their own oil and tires.
If you want people to swim or drive or use the fediverse you skip all that shit. Normal people do not care.
Stop being nerds.
And I think that's beautiful. There is nothing like watching someone explain something they're passionate about.
There's something wrong with hurting other people's ability to access the fediverse with insufferable nerd explanations that have nothing to do with posting.
"hurting"? someone yapping about the fediverse is a minor inconvenience at worst. A TON of people that are on Lemmy don't know how it works, or even care about how it works, and that's perfectly OK. Nothing wrong with going on !cat@lemmy.world and upvoting the cute cat pictures.
Well, apparently you consider basic maintenance like changing tires superfluous to driving. Says all I need to know about your mindset on the other subjects.
FTFY
The majority of people pay other people to do that stuff. Normal people don't care about your nerd shit.
I change my oil, oil filter, tires, battery, wipers, all that shit. It doesn't fucking matter though, *it's all superfluous*.
Stop. Being. Nerds. Just let people be basic, stop insisting that they know everything before they're allowed to drive.
Those other people are nerds too, now you're gonna tell them to stop being nerds ? Why should incompetent people be rewarded ?
Maybe if more people knew how combustion worked and where the gasoline they burn comes from we wouldn't have as much global warming denialism.
Similarly, if people knew how their posts were served though Facebook, what server costs are, and what their revenue model was, it wouldn't come as such a surprise to them that their privacy was being violated.
But I think you're right though. I've given up on trying to convince the general public of literally anything, at least in the US where it's clear the cult of ignorance has soundly won. How can I tell someone that it's better to use an electric car if they're not willing to understand the carbon cycle? How can I tell someone it's better to be vaccinated if they're not willing to understand herd immunity? How can I tell someone that federated social media is better if they're unwilling to understand what federation even is?
Wife had to do this the other day. She catches me trying to explain and convince tech basically recommending something with an open door to say no or disagree why you like it. She says just tell them to use it and if they love you they will.
And it's true. I have my extended family on signal.
Work on it, don't only complain.
I think one of the main reasons why the fediverse didn’t blow up much bigger than it did over the past couple of years is because of the weird and insistent need to explain how it works from every possible angle with seemingly every possible analogy. It’s information overload and it only confuses the shit out of people who do not care in the slightest how *it* works.
Hmm… maybe if we tell the nerds that they need to add an “abstraction layer” to their explanations that might motivate them to simplify?
People have been using email since they were five and all modern lives depend on it. If they don't understand federation they will just be confused why they can't see the content and leave. "I didn't understand it and it didn't work" is one of the more commons reasons I've seen on Reddit for failing lemmy
Doesn't it default to All? Or at least Local? Shouldn't they just see a feed of everything if they go to the main page?
The experience is almost exactly the same as Reddit if you don't worry about federation or technicalities.
I think admins choose, but tbh reddit is also pretty algorithmic these days
But they should still see content, even if they don't understand anything.
The only way they won't is if the admins decided users shouldn't see *anything* without first subscribing to something, which is a terrible way to ease people in to the service. There needs to be a default feed so normies can use it too!
Unless an instance enrolls in Lemmy-federate, the default behavior is that a user, even on the /all view, will only see local communities, and outside communities that another local user has sought out and subscribed to.
If a newbie joins a small instance and doesn't know how to seek out communities that interest them with lemmyverse.net, they would likely have a very small range of content in their feed.
Lemmy-federate helps by auto subscribing an instance to participating communities, seeding a wide range of content immediately.
A large instance would offer a good experience either way, but would encourage centralization without Lemmy-federate existing.
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This is how you get people whining about there being 8 different "Politics" groups, and insisting they should be allowed to erase the identity of the hosting website.
The patchwork nature of the fediverse is baked into the technology. If people don't at least have a basic model for how it behaves, then they're just going to get pissed off at it and leave.
Ypu don't need to know how an internal combustion engine works to drive, but you have to understand how *driving* works, both from the perspective of operating a car, and from that of the conventions of the road.
"Just find a pretty car and hop behind the wheel" is bad advice for everyone.
Strong agree. Just tell people to go to feddit.org and call it a day
In general, wouldn't one of the English speaking instances be a better choice?
Long story short, there is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/) - Lemmy.world is too big - Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 ) - sh.itjust.works names contains "shit", which can deter users - lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric - feddit.org, as you mentioned, is German-centric, but technically English speaking too - dbzer0 federated hexbear - programming.dev is topic-centric (and has a database corruption for the last month https://programming.dev/post/20515601?scrollToComments=true) - blahaj is queer-focused - discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name - lemmy.sdf.org does not defederate anyone - lemmy.zip is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad - sopuli.xyz doesn't have "lemmy" or "feddit" in its name - beehaw is way outdated - infosec.pub is topic-centric - aussie.zone is country-centric - midwest.social is region-centric
The next page has reddthat.com which is known to have federation issues with LW due to its location in Australia, and lemmy.today which does not defederate anyone
Honestly I'd say lemmy.world is probably the ideal for redditors, I agree it's too big, but it's probably the safest option for people without a lot of knowledge. sh.itjustworks is also IMO fine if you know the person isn't offended by language.
That's the main issue. Its size creates 5-days delay with some instances
The issues have been here for months, are not going to be fixed any time soon as the latest Lemmy version still has issues like the pictures one: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5196
Some additional details: - https://lemmy.world/post/20575394?scrollToComments=true - https://feddit.org/post/2374543
So Cars are designed & built by nerds, so are you gonna stop driving cars ? Imagine telling people that *you shouldn't bother trying to learn*
I'm telling people that it's okay to be a normie.
And it is.
Car nerds can be car nerds to support the normies who can only drive.
as soon as you say "make an account" their eyes will glaze over. if not, as soon as they hear "instance" their eyes glaze over. if not, as soon as they hear "whichever one you like best" their eyes will glaze over.
Sorry, you misread what I said 😅
*You*, the recommender, are the one picking the instance. Whichever one *you* like best! Don't bother telling them anything about instances, that's a waste of time. Just say "go to lemmy.world and post" and don't bother explaining anything else.
LW pretty much made the Lemmyverse almost centralized, thanks to people like you.
And yet I'm the one on lemmy.ml and you're the one on lemmy.world 🤔
no, I migrated away from LW a few months ago. I am currently on discuss.tchncs.de
I think you confused my current account with the inactive one on LW that I only use for moderating in asklemmy sometimes.
Oh, gotcha, that would be more successful for sure.
All people understand Ohm's law now. It took only 150 years of explaining.
I promise you that if you collect 10 random people and ask them what Ohms law is, at most you get 5 that knows it's something about electricity. You are lucky if you have one that knows it.
Yeah I know it has to do with resistance but I couldn't *quote* it to you rn, I'd have to look it up. *And* I'm vaping rn at .4ohms lol.
It's taught in every school... At least in Europe.
I can only speak for myself here but... A lot of things are taught in school. Most of them weren't something that I use everyday and thus have forgotten about it (some more than others, of course).
Ohm's Law would've been taught to me sometime during highschool (as the other commenter mentioned, I can tell you it relates to electricity but without looking it up I couldn't tell you the actual principle behind it) - I graduated from highschool 10 years ago, and have not had a reason to "flex" that memory ever since then.
Great. So is history, trigonometry and literature.
It doesn't mean adults know it. Most of what you learn in school will be forgotten unless you have a reason to keep using it.
I didn't pick my email my employer did. Other then work ionly use email for account verification, password reset and trqcking shipping. No really i have only sent a dozen or so emails not related to work.
One way to help the feediverse is to drop federation. No one uses that word no one knows what it emans. At best they will be "so its like Star trek".
Lol, I saw "drop federation" and thought you meant the concept itself, not just the word. "Well that doesn't make any sense" I thought. Got it now.
Personally I disagree with the statement, first off, I don't see an alternative explanation offered. the point is an easy analogy to give them rough concepts. looking at the problems listed in the OP.
First off there... so the web client off the bat.... what's the problem there, that we aren't burrying them with "oh if you like you can use alexandrite, or one of 30 other web clients, and then tell it the instance". The point is we're trying to reach out to the non tech savy. If their assumption gets them to something that works, then there isn't a problem, just as not knowing that they can install an e-mail client to check their gmail, isn't stopping them from using gmail.
Now the andriod/ios clients, that is the one drawback, you do have to tell them the name of one of the apps, and tell them to pick the website they made their account on from the dropdown. It's not a huge deal but it is an extra step. If the goal is to reach out to the non tech savy though, the goal has to be to minimize the steps as much as we can.
Then it goes on to say people are picking instances based on moderation politics etc... Lets face it regular people don't... and they don't care. Really like 2% of people actually hit points where moderation is a visible thing to them. usually because they are on the edge of a political side.