Can I just rant a little to you all?
I’ve tried numerous times to help people from reddit set up an account and get started on Kbin (and lemmy), but 4 out of 5 times people can’t seem to grasp the concept of registering an account and starting to use this platform. Even breaking it down into 2 steps, with direct links… They get angry, and then ragequit their attempt in a huff saying how it’s too fucking complicated and it will never take off because it’s so hard.
Ok, I get that the fediverse is complicated if you think deeply about all the interconnectivity and federation etc, but there is no reason you even have to think about any of it to create an account and get started. Like, at all.
It reminds me so much of my 70/y old mother-in-law not immediately knowing how to work a tv remote and shoving it at me after 1.5 seconds saying “here, I can’t figure this out”. When in reality all she had to do was press the fucking big red button…
I’m just so frustrated with people’s complete lack of ability to help themselves.
I think it’s mostly choice paralysis, people are used to have centralised social media and when they enter the fe diverse they are like “where should I go? Which instance is the best one?”. Maybe an automatic instance picker that assigns your closest, moderately populated instance with the option to manually choose would help solve this.
I agree. Picking an instance was really difficult with all the options available. Also, to conciously pick an instance, you would first have to understand what they are and how Fediverse works, which is quite a lot to ask from a person who comes from a centralised social media platform. There are some hurdles that have to jumped, albeit they are quite low. Even low hurdles are still hurdles though and add to the effort which deters many people from joining.