The whole process was a massive time and energy drain in the end with no benefit. I don’t think anyone with a life would pursue something like this any further. I trialled-and-errored my way to Lemmy.world while I was out of work. Otherwise I’d still be on Reddit.
Championing for accessibility is the opposite of gatekeeping, no? And coding doesn’t solve everything. At the moment, the perfect Lemmy instance could be coded and nobody might find it given the plethora of existing ones. Anyway, we disagree and that’s okay.
In the EU there is some amount of data protection and privacy rights, so that matters to quite a few people. Commercial outfits handle those distinctions behind the scenes (eg, US users vs EU users get different amounts of privacy). On the fediverse, the user has to figure this out themselves.
Beyond that, I agree with everything you say. Some of the instances don’t even have the name “Lemmy” in the domain or brand which makes it confusing. Or maybe they’re not Lemmy but just ActivityPub compatible. I have no idea. You can also get unlucky picking a “bad” server. I first joined Kbin.social because it had the best UI at the time but man, it rarely worked and totally put me off.
“If somebody gave up on the registration, how would you know?” Because although I have an account here on Lemmy I can still see discussions on comparable sites.
“If you gave up on the registration, then how are you here?” Because I came back a year later after coming across a good explainer for how the fediverse works.
I’m not going to look at that link.
If any of that were true there wouldn’t be posts and comments here and elsewhere from professional programmers who gave up on the registration process because of bad UX. I was one of them. People don’t give up on registering here because it’s “scary”.
If you’re one of the many people here happy for this to remain a niche for tech people then that’s different.
I’m not trying to say that marketing is empathetic. I’m saying that meeting people where they are at is.
Biodiversity is great. Abandoning confused users isn’t. Those options can still exist without baffling the user.
“Marketing programming” understands the human condition and tries to facilitate people. That part - for all its other failings - is more empathetic than telling people who struggle that we refuse to “dumb down” the process for them.
“I cannot fathom how the idea of having choices could be considered, let alone by so many people to even make this into a controversy, to be bad design. That’s the very thing that makes federation great.”
Because for every choice presented, people want to know the consequences of each one before proceeding. It’s a well understood problem in sales and marketing. People do not want to put themselves in a position where they have to undo. Companies like Apple do this very well. In computer shops, the reason staff are hired is to help get the customer from “wanting a laptop” to “choosing one laptop”, rather than walk away feeling that they need to think about it more.
“Just look at a few of the most populated sites, and pick one that looks good. The choice makes 95% no difference in practice”.
Maybe if they said that on the signup page it would help. I think it would have helped me. But just because you have a sense of what “looks good” doesn’t mean the average person does. It’s the average person that I want to interact with on the internet.
Maybe you’re right, but I think that the issue isn’t that everyone was on one server, but there was nowhere for them to go without loosing touch with the people they connect with there. The fediverse can easily give people an out and they can still stay in touch with the people they want.
“I started out on .world but didn’t like their moderation and defederation practices, so I moved.”
That works for me. But most of us here have been running linux boxes on ARM devices for so long that we have trouble relating to the average user. I met someone recently who makes great contributions to Reddit posts like fact checking and providing digestible research. They’re not tech savvy and I doubt we’ll ever have the value of their contribution here while things are as complicated as they are up front.
Absolute centralisation caused the mess. My suggestion is just initial centralisation. It lets people get active with the platform while they figure out the basics rather than paralysing them with options up front.
Thanks so much! I was using m.lemmy.world, and while it improves most things I struggle with a touch interface on a desktop. Your recommendation is great!
Edit: It seems this has a few teething issues. I’ll see if I can describe them well enough to provide bug reports for. It would be great if this worked well enough for the average user.
“…especially when they have average intelligence.”
People with average experience struggle with the new paradigm. Nothing to do with intelligence and that kind of elitism is the reason I first bailed on lemmy.ml. I would have thought that someone with average intelligence would recognise how many of the worlds problems today stem from people punching down.
Technical aptitude != emotional maturity
Nothing to do with TikTok or this generation. Most users find it complicated and insulting them won’t change reality. I’ve learned that the hard way from my years trying to convert people to Linux.
What Lemmy and Mastodon need to do is to have one canonical instance that they manage well themselves. Everyone gets signed up to that initially and those who want to transfer to another instance afterwards can. That alone could have prevented BlueSky taking the lead the way it did.
Having at least one mega instance is really good, in my opinion. Whether we like it or not, many people struggle with the idea of the fediverse and how to function inside it. If they didn’t have to think about it initially it would help them and the fediverse. BlueSky and the AT protocol should never have happened IMO. But people prefer them because the experience is “better”.
Is there a problem with Lemmy.world? I joined this one to avoid tankies, but I haven’t gotten familiar with the place yet (despite moderating a community lol).
If I understand you right, you’re saying that you support making software like Lemmy accessible for users of all types. I agree completely.
A little unrelated, but “intelligence” is not a singular thing and nobody is “intelligent” or “not intelligent”. Also, because we each have our own limitations, we’re not really qualified to evaluate the abilities of another person since we tend to reference ourselves in doing so. IQ is now increasingly seen as not fit for purpose by academics and professionals of education. And all this without mentioning IQ’s history is in the support of eugenics. So if the experts are abandoning the idea of IQ, we can do the same and stop beating each other over the heads with it. Then we can get on with focussing on accessibility, which as you say is where our priorities should be.