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…
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.
till they throw you the curveball that they can indeed talk to someone on twitter from facebook.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why on Earth would a newbie join a small instance? How would they even find out about one?
Assuming they search Lemmy, and one of top results is the join-lemmy page (second result for me, below Lemmy.world), the server recommendation tool can suggest small instances with only a couple hundred members. For instance, if one selects Art as the topic and English as the language.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Oh, gotcha, that would be more successful for sure.
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.
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.
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.
censorship resistent or even censorship free, that’s not a good quality.
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.
you can just hide messages from selected users in client
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.
If you don’t have moderation, your social media will turn into a Nazi bar.
Worse, it will immediately devolve into a CP haven. The dark web is dark for a reason.
The dark web is dark for a reason.
Yeah. The reason is Google doesn’t care about them.
I think you (and the Nostr people as well) are just muddling terms here. Censorship is about an external 3rd party (usually the Government) preventing you from seeing things you are potentially interested in, not (as in the case of Lemmy) your service provider and their trusted moderators helping you curate your social media experience. If you are unhappy with the moderation you can easily switch to another instance and use other communities.
I mean I don’t disagree, but that’s clearly not what Nostr means when they say censorship resistent, cause by that logic, Gmail and Facebook are as censorship resistent as Nostr is.
I don’t think there really is a great difference either. Censorship and moderation are just two perspectives on the same thing. One has bad connotations, the other generally good connotations.
First of all, users don’t want to have to block people before having a good experience.
In general conversation in distributed protocols is opt-in, not opt-out. If you see something you don’t like in Briar/Tox/Jami, then it is only because you actively seek it.
Okay, but that is not how the fediverse/Lemmy works at all and I don’t think Nostr works that way either. You can easily see content that you did not explicity ask for (i.e. comments/posts from any user) and I don’t think Nostr is different in this aspect (though I could be wrong).
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.
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.
They can be URNs (like magnet:), as shown above.
Well no they can’t, because that’s not part of ActivityPub. In fact ActivityPub mandates HTTP URLs. Of course, any extension can choose to change that, but since nobody is actually supporting magnet links, it’s not relevant.
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.
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.
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
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 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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
