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.
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.
I am just curious and want to understand how things work which no one else does.
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.
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 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.
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.
Why are nerds so insistent that people understand technology?
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.
Stop being nerds
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.
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.
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.
Stop being
nerdshelplessly unskilledFTFY
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 ?
Rewarded?
This is about what is best for getting more people in into the fediverse. I’m telling people to stop being nerds and chasing normies away.
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?
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.
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!
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.
I agree it’s too big
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:
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.
Oh, gotcha, that would be more successful for sure.
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.
Oops, embarrassing. 😅
I have not been convinced lemmy.world being the largest instance is actually a bad thing. It’s bad for federation, I suppose, but they’re all Redditeurs and I appreciate having a containment zone for them.
I have not been convinced lemmy.world being the largest instance is actually a bad thing. It’s bad for federation, I suppose, but they’re all Redditeurs and I appreciate having a containment zone for them.
Most people here are from reddit or other centralized and enshittified platforms such as Twitter.
LW got recommended often and it created a snowballing effect, which is why it became the biggest lemmy instance. Unfortunately people keep doing it and LW admins refuse to close down their registrations temporarily to allow other instances to get some traffic as well. That’s why some people (like me) advise people (like you) to stop recommending LW over other instances.
And LW is not a “containment” zone for former redditors.
Don’t explain anything, there’s literally no point. Why are nerds so insistent that people understand technology?
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.
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 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.
people would love to be entertained by our intellectual discussions!
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 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.
To clarify why lemmy.ml is one of the first results: it was the first Lemmy instance. It’s only the second most populated instance, but I imagine the relative age of the site (5 years, as opposed to lemmy.world’s 1 year) has something to do with it.
It also sucks that join-lemmy.org, which comes up before lemmy.ml for me, defaults to recommending random instances. It really ought to recommend making your first account at lemmy.world and switching to a different instance after you’ve gotten used to the platform. I know it’s not ideal to put all our eggs in one basket, and there is a reasonable effort to move communities away from both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world, but for new users it might be kind of confusing seeing people talk about sh.itjust.works and lemmy.dbzer0.com and programming.dev as if they’re more or less interchangeable
I get the age requirement - as you say it makes sense - though it makes less sense why it isn’t up to date information. Anyway regardless of the why factor it helps me understand where people are coming from when THAT is what they see, which is different than what I do, or what I would see if I personally (who would use DDG rather than Google) would see if trying to look up such a thing today.
I also get why they would want to see an example of a working Lemmy instance, before looking at a website called “join Lemmy” - they aren’t interested yet in JOINING Lemmy, or information related to that, until they have seen what(ever) Lemmy IS first.
One correction: lemmy.ml has now fallen to fifth place in terms of MAUs (Monthly Active Users), with only 2165 compared to Lemmy.World’s whipping 17195. The second place is lemmynsfw.com with 3288, so definitely a steep drop-off from the #1 spot to all others, then #3 lemm.ee with 2996 and #4 sh.itjust.works with 2392. So even just with respect to these top 5 servers alone, ignoring the entire rest of the Fediverse, lemmy.ml makes up at most 7.7% of the Fediverse, which falls further behind with each server added to the consideration (including the one I am on now:-).
I sorta get the historical argument, but isn’t that a bit like saying that an actor is alive bc at one point they were, despite how they are currently dead? Or saying that Russia has not invaded Ukraine, bc at one point that may have been true, though it has not remained true for quite a number of years now. Or saying that Nixon is the President of the United States of America, bc at one point that was legitimately a true fact (yet is not a current one). Google results just seem so hopelessly wrong these days, telling people to put razor blades into their pizza and the like, and that if you stand more than 6 feet away from a nuclear blast you’ll be fine to survive it safely. There are REASONS for all of how those answers came about, but it definitely highlights how they - and therefore by extension Google results (tbf the AI ones in those latter cases) - are incorrect. But that is what mainstream normies are most likely to use regardless? (Even if they ignore the AI garbage)
Also, those instances sorta are interchangeable?:-P Somewhat at least, which is by design of the ActivityPub Protocol that anywhere you are, you can access mostly the same content. That said, I like where you are going with that: in one sense they are, if not “the same” then at least they are interconnected, yet in another sense they each have a distinctiveness to them, with unique local content (which if marked “local-only” cannot be accessed from the outside, without an account on that specific instance) making them different from all others. And distinct admin+moderation practices, and account creation procedures, etc.
Less like email and more like a fleet of pirate/free trader ships each passing their messages to all of the others (excepting defederations), but remaining distinctive entities unto themselves with their own flairs and styles. And anyone can spin up their own ship and tap onto the Fediverse network to become one of them.
What they likely get confused about is the plethora of choices, especially when they aren’t even sure that they want to join yet.
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 wonder if that is what happened or if lemmy.cafe has switched its main announcement community to be local-only,
I just checked, it is local indeed
May I ask though: why not use lemmy.ca as the default recommendation?
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
it’s geared toward Canadians, hosted in Canada, and run by Canadians. It is, however, not at all restricted to Canadians, or Canadian culture/topics/etc. All are welcome!
I could understand why non-Canadians would rather join another instance
I just checked, it is local indeed
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.
The .ca domain and the logo could deter non Canadians by giving the impression that the instance is geared towards Canadians
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.
Discuss.Online
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.
If you aren’t too annoyed at a much too long comment, here is part 2 of 2.
I get that you are frustrated with lemmy.cafe, and I whole-heartedly concur that it is for good reasons, but in case it helps, I do think that, based solely on what you’ve told me here and what I can see, CA might be a significantly better fit to Americans than FO would be. Not that either would be horrible ofc:-), I’m just talking about absolutely minimizing any potential friction.
Though DO would be so much more amazingly a perfect fit, and now that I’ve found that previous post, I do strongly think that it will happen (even if lemmy.ml is too much to hope for, though neither FO nor CA defed from it anyway). So if I were you I would use CA for now, but then be ready to switch to suggesting DO very soon? :-D And I hope that I’m helping by saying all of this, rather than coming on too strong like I’m trying to tell you what to do? Rather, I’m trying to emphasize that it is my strong recommendation, as a non-German-speaking American myself perhaps that gives me insight.:-)
Thank you for that post on Discuss.online, let’s see what the admins say.
Between feddit.org and lemmy.ca, both have their issues indeed. Let’s hope Discuss.online can become “the one”, but it would be a bit ironic to recommend the one instance managed by people who created an alternative to Lemmy
I tagged you on my other post - I need to focus more on my job right now, but I’m glad that I can help out that much so that you don’t have to do literally everything:-). It was only after that when I finally discovered this post (b/c previously I had used a browser search for the word hexbear but that only looked at titles), and yet even so I think I covered what jgrim was asking for - actual reasons to do so, not just “hurr me no likey dose others over der”.
If Discuss.Online (DO) were to defederate even only hexbear.net, much less lemmy.ml, I think it would work fantastically well as an option.
That argument pushed against Lemmy.ca (CA) though - I do not agree… mostly. For one, that instance has literally ~1200 MAUs, yet only 21 upvoted that post? And even then, the top community on that instance, mentioned also in that post, is !pcgaming@lemmy.ca with 4.84K MAUs, which obviously is going to show up quite often in the All feed. The solution to that though is to either browse by Subscribed, or else continue to browse by All yet after blocking unwanted communities. If they had wanted to remain Canada-focused, well that ship has already sailed, long ago.
And it is not the only such community either - !fbstolencontent@lemmy.ca (1.79K) and !politicalmemes@lemmy.ca (1.64K) and !fediverselore@lemmy.ca (1.58K) all are geared more towards international (than Canada-only) audiences. That person’s argument was a nonstarted even back then, and since then they have definitely lost - though they can (re-)make the Fediverse into anything that they want by configuring their tools to show only what they are (most) interested in. Tbf, otoh there are also some posts that have a tiny bit of an anti-usa stance, like this one: https://lemmy.ca/post/33447213, though I would hope not a deal-breaker.
The only way to know for sure would be to create a post and ask if the admins were okay with you using their instance as the default recommendation for Redditors to flock to. That would also hold for feddit.org though, or Discuss.Online (if they were amenable to blocking hexbear.net and especially if they would also block lemmy.ml), the latter of which I at least got the ball rolling for you:-).
Reading through their “welcome, new users!” post, I came across this very interesting comment. A lot of comments express similar thoughts. So while I think that DO would be a better match than CA (and I would guess that you agree? again, after HB were defederated), CA would still be a good match overall, imho. Not perfect, but especially considering the lack of any other options.
However, feddit.org (FO?) has even more of an offputting “vibe” imho than CA. First, I mentioned that it sorts by Local rather than All, which exagerates even more the focus on German-speaking than English-speaking ones. While many posts seem attractive to a USA audience - e.g. “‘Would you survive 72 hours?’ Germany and the Nordic countries prepare citizens for possible war” and “History will judge German chancellor Olaf Scholz for not giving Taurus missiles to Ukraine, the country’s former foreign minister says”, many others would act more as a deterrant e.g. “XXL-Leben: Der Fluch des großen Penis” with pictures of men’s bulging packages not marked NSFW, and a post about Georgia but it’s the country rather than the US state, but mostly I mean that overall on the front-page feed right now I counted and nearly all of the other posts besides those 2 mentioned above (+1 more) are in German. 4 from iech_iel that have the language embedded in an image so not easily machine translatable to other languages.
And even more so than CA that at least has some non-Canadian communities, the communities on FO are even more German- or EU-specific - the top one being !Europe@feddit.org with 3.87K MAUs, which is a bit smaller than !pcgaming@lemmy.ca with 4.84K, and like even !technik@feddit.org that while not unwelcoming to posts in English, the very name of the community itself looks to be in German, as are a large fraction of the posts therein too. I don’t know how receptive to a large influx of English-speaking Reddit users that FO would be… but just purely from looking at the communities and posts that are already there, I don’t think it’s a good “fit”.
To attempt to be crystal clear, obviously the above is all perfectly fine and people on FO can do however they please (and on the international stage, Georgia is a nation/country, not strictly a USA state:-P) - I am talking here strictly about the “fit” for average Americans.
Damn, I’ve hit a character limit:-(.
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 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
If you tell someone that fedi instances are like email providers and that your instance is transfem.social, that creates three expecations in your audience:
1)The main, or possibly only, way to access your fedi account on a desktop is through the transfem.social website.
2)The main, or possibly only, way to access your fedi account on a smartphone is through the transfem.social app. This app is completely separate from the apps that could be used to access a fedi account on another instance.
3)The primary difference between transfem.social and other fedi instances is the UI of the website and app.
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 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 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 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.
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.
Gmail users believe the only ways to access a Gmail account are through the official web client at mail.google.com, and the official Gmail app for iOS and Android.
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.
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”.
