- cross-posted to:
- tech@kbin.social
- technews@radiation.party
To be honest I like the idea of being able to move my account from a server which is offline to a different one. We should have it with ActivityPub too.
To be honest I like the idea of being able to move my account from a server which is offline to a different one. We should have it with ActivityPub too.
My girlfriend noped out of lemmy pretty much immediately after I tried to explain how to set it up and use it. Objectively, it’s a lot more confusing than signing up for something like reddit. She’s also pretty tech savvy, so I can’t imagine normies making the transition in mass.
If these federated alternatives are going to become mainstream, someone will have to step up with an implementation that greatly improves usability and accessibility. Meaning that federation will probably have to be masked to a large degree to reduce confusion. Maybe something more like a distributed network instead of a federated one.
As soon as you start talking techbro nonsense like federation and decentralization, people’s eyes glaze over. People don’t care how things work, they just care that it does what they need it to.
Hate to say it but a lot of us in tech, especially the devs, are really out of touch with end users. They aren’t philosophizing about the internet. I understand why people are excited about the idea of decentralization, and why it matters, but it has to be presented in a way that’s much simpler for people to understand if we actually went people to get on board.
Nah, I don’t buy it, people have been telling me that they don’t understand Twitter, what it is for and so on for years and most of my normal friends never got a Twitter account, while most of them had a Facebook account. It’s not about federated vs. non federated, they all have a federated email account from their school, university, work, etc. and everyone has a username@domain.tld address and nobody is complaining about that it’s not just @username for email. It’s more that it’s not useful for them to have a Twitter account or a Mastodon account or a Lemmy account. If it were useful they would just deal with the complexity like they do with the complexity of Facebook and Email.
I think decentralized social media isn’t really analogous to your email example and is going to be much more confusing and frustrating to an average user. I may sign up with Gmail, but I can still in almost any use case send or recieve an email to whoever I want at other domains. The fact that someone is @X or @Y doesn’t matter to most users–it’s just an extension of the address.
Decentralized Social Media I think would be viewed more like having @Gmail001 through @Gmail100, with users frustrated wondering why they can’t receive an email from their cousin who is on @Gmail088. We’re both on Gmail, what gives
Your Twitter example is spot on. Why would I want to follow specific people? It’s about the content on the platform. Tildes suffers from the same issue, it’s generally not an interesting place to be so people don’t stick around very long.
Personally, I like to follow specific journalist and news orgs that report on topics I’m interested in. That def helps with the breaking news aspect. Besides following talented shitposters like dril ofc.
I am brainstorming some features:
I think it’s telling that people haven’t really cared about the consolidation of the internet at all until recently when the likes of Reddit, Twitter, etc have started to falter and threaten the internet as they know it. They were fine with the status quo and don’t know or want anything different. Not only do they not understand decentralisation - they wouldn’t care or desire it anyway. You’re absolutely right that things are going to have to be masked if we want to see increased adoption of alternative services. We also desperately need increased accessibility options and better instructions and education. Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, etc don’t work like any other service that people commonly use. They have no idea how it functions or what to do, and it confuses them and turns them away.
Exactly, I have an annoying tendency to ramble on about whatever cool thing is happening in the tech world and why I’m using X technology now but nobody cares about that
Managed to sell friends and family on Signal by just explaining it as “WhatsApp without the Facebook spying”, think that’s the way to do it
I’ll say that trying to use Lemmy on a browser was a lot more confusing than using liftoff or summit. I have…I think 4 or 5 accounts put into them and they all sorts of work together seamlessly. It’s kinda cool and impressive. I forget which instance I’m signed into/posting as, which, IMHO is how it should be.