It reminds me a little of the old internet. I like how relatively small it feels, and that people post content for the sake of the content, not to promote themselves. I haven’t found my usual corners yet, the ones I used to hang out in on older platforms, but I figure that’s just a matter of time. I’m not super nostalgic for the old internet or anything, but it’s nice to find at least a hint of something human-centered somewhere.
I hope it doesn’t fall apart and that it keeps growing.
I was skeptical when I switched to Linux, but then I ditched Windows on my dual boot for good. It was a hugely positive experience, and it really felt like freedom. I’m hoping this will be the same.
And don’t be mad at me if I act totally clueless here sometimes 'cause all that is new to me.
I kind of wish I could remember what it was like to find federation confusing so I could explain it better to newbies.
It’s usually just confusion at the idea that things live on other websites. The most common mental model people seem to have for decentralized systems is… centralization. Just, centralized somewhere else.
I remember when the Twitter users flooded Mastodon. Everyone seemed to have this sense that “Mastodon” was a place “over there”, and that the website they were using – if they even recognized that they were using a website, thanks to the appification of everything – was just a dumb terminal. Like, instead of using Twitter, they were using a secondary website that itself ws using Twitter. So, people got really confused about why content was missing, why they couldn’t see the post history of some users, etc. They felt like they were being arbitrarily blocked from seeing parts of “Mastodon”, rather than understanding that they’d just signed up for the equivalent of a magazine subscription and would not be getting the back catalogue for free.
I’ve tried to explain it as being able to request content from Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky from an account on MySpace. Only there’s 500 Facebooks, 2000 Reddits, 10,000 Twitters, 300 Instagrams, and 1500 Blueskies. And also, 1000 other MySpaces. You can request content from those other websites, but because you are not viewing those websites, just requesting that they send some of their content to you you only get the small parts that you specifically asked for. Otherwise, your MySpace would get overwhelmed and burn down around you.
I’m still workshopping this, though. It has not been as effective as I hoped for.
I am still interested in explaining it too just because I think it’s cool. The best luck I’ve had was to to point out a username belonging to a different server and then opening up that server in a browser and explaining that “so when they go on lemmy they visit lemmy.world, and here’s their home feed, but I visit lemmy.ca, with this home feed. though we can still see [mostly] the same posts in the all feed, and talk to eachother like {insert email example}.”
Something about pointing out the server’s url helps. Like if there was only lemmy.world in the whole world it would still function, but the all feed would be the same as the home feed.
Yeah I feel like it’s not going to get through to people until it’s more common.
Also tbh people don’t really need to know all the details to make full use of the fediverse. Like most people probably have vastly simplified or wrong ideas about how email works, or how websites themselves work, but they know enough for their purposes.
They don’t need to know the details, no, but the new user experience – especially on Mastodon-based websites – can be very confusing without at least a basic understanding of the syndication-based nature of the place. Lemmy and Piefed aren’t quite so bad about it, you can see the Local or All feed by default when going to your website of choice, but also because users coming from Reddit have been used to having an empty main feed if they haven’t subscribed to anything yet, while Twitter has been providing an algorithmic feed of “for you” content for a while now.
And because the Mastodon developers seem to very badly want to obfuscticate the nature of the network, and want “Mastodon” itself to be the title character, and not any particular masto-based website, the default that users get is their subscription feed, and not the Local feed.
People think Mastodon is dead, because it doesn’t work the way they expect.
This was especially bad during the Twitter exmigration, because people just joined whatever random Mastodon-based website they came across, and were trying to find each other again, and didn’t understand how searching for users on other websites worked. They seemed to think it was dumb that their website wasn’t aware of users on a completely different website, where the only thing they had in common was that they were running the same website engine.
People coming from highly curated environments need to know at least a little bit about how the whole system works in order to embrace the system. Otherwise, they interpret the limitations are arbitrary.
Yeah I’m not a huge fan of Mastodon throwing its weight around. Like I was setting up a snac2 server and I had to add so many extra endpoints to interface with Mastodon instances.
That’s a big problem, yeah, but it’s also the issue that Mastodon bends over backwards to hide the fact that it’s a network of different websites. It’s a pain in the ass to skin, there’s no native template management, there’s limited built in customization or branding opportunities. Mastodon is about Mastodon, and about recruiting site admins to promote the Mastodon brand.
It’s like if every WordPress-based website was about how the site is made with WordPress, and they all looked the same, and had the same header that just read “WordPress”.
It’s obnoxious and self-serving, and it would be very confusing to new users to the web.