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.
Tbf, I think that underlines what he was saying. He has no idea where he is, or that he is already participating kbin.
Compare that to reddit, and it’s more complicated.
It also underlines what the OP is saying. The average user doesn’t need to do anything or think about anything special to use the platform. Simply making an account and interacting with whatever is on front of you will work.
It’s only complicated if you’re constantly comparing it to reddit in your head and trying to recreate the exact experience here.
Not always. There are the defederated instances, for example. Sometimes things break like lemmy.ml and people are having issues subscribing to communities (it’s apparently just a visual bug, but still). There have been tons of questions about the Fediverse from people who just got here. Kbin, for example, was not federating properly for a while before and we on lemmy could not see any posts on it. That can matter if a specific community is on an instance not accessible to a user for one reason or another.
Edit: I’m not criticizing the Fediverse, but it still has issues to be addressed. It’s pretty young relative to big social media sites like FB, reddit, etc so growing pains are to be expected. But we do need to acknowledge the issues if we hope to fix them later on.
Yes but that’s only relevant if you’re aware of a specific community on a specific instance and expect to be interacting with it on purpose.
It’s completely irrelevant if someone just gives you the name of an instance, tells you to make an account on it and start using. You’ll be perfectly fine reading and commenting whatever’s in your feed.
The only way this breaks is if you’re in an instance that is too small to have local traffic while having technical difficulties with federation. If the instance is active enough or it’s federating normally, someone completely unaware of the concept of federation will be perfectly fine as long as they understand the interface.
They’ll be fine until someone recommends a community on another instance complete with link and suddenly the user is logged out, can’t subscribe to that community, and when they try to log back in by clicking the login link on the page, it says account not found.
For this reason, there is a need for at least a little bit of understanding about how federation works.
This understanding is much more easily achieved after one’s familiar with the basics of their own instance though, isn’t it? Rather than expecting them to imagine the exact user experience of the fediverse before they even made their account, would we not be better off introducing them to a cold open and be helpful later when they have questions?
All of these problems are caused by the same underlying system and trying to explain the system to non-users is the exact wrong way to go about alleviating them. Better interface and UX design is the only thing which can solve this issue.
Yes, but the problem is that the first post they see might contain a link to another instance, they click it and they get lost when they no longer have a session because no one told them that’s how it’s supposed to work. Then they get angry and decide it’s a bug and this whole federation thing doesn’t work. Better interfaces would help, but I don’t think it’d be enough.
True. I agree with you. Hopefully soon most technical issues will be resolved enough to not matter to the average user. I’d love for us to grow more, and I think we should address the barriers that are preventing some “normies” (for lack of a better term) from heading here. I know some are just making up excuses, but hell my mom just learned how to post in facebook middle of last year. Lmao. Some are just easily confused.
Why do they need to know?
See a post, upvote it, comment on it. It’s functionally exactly the same as where they came from. The nuances are dramatically unimportant unless or until someone decides they want to use the platform in a more advanced, detailed way, which is going to be like 5% of us.
There’s literally no reason to explain the concept of federation at all unless someone specifically asks “Hey, how can I do this more advanced thing?” The cat pictures are all right here, on my screen, and I can comment on them the exact same way I did on reddit. The only difference is that the interface is a little rougher around the edges at the moment.
First of all, why shouldn’t they know? I’m pretty sure you’ve seen the posts saying reddit is undeleting posts or that lemmy/kbin is “bad for privacy” because they don’t delete comments? Many of them never even realized or remember how pushshift worked. Because they didn’t know. I won’t advocate jumping in blindly to a site/app because, “trust me bro.” It’s even a good thing people want to know what they’re signing up for.
There are literally reasons to explain how it all works. Just scroll on /all and you’ll find a lot of posts asking stuff about the Fediverse and/or how to navigate it. Or to troubleshoot some issues. Or to ask “how do I search this and that?” Etc. I bet I just need less than a minute on my browser to find a post like that.
Let’s say a newcomer arrives, signs up for beehaw (or lemmy.world since it seems to be a popular lemmy instance), and proceeds to get Jerboa. Do you think the app shows all communities you search for out of the box? No. I’ve been there. I have a lot of communities I’m subbed in that I had to use the direct link and search via browser for me to even find it. You can say, “just use the browser,” but you’d be ignoring the fact that many people are unhappy precisely because they can’t use their app anymore so they obviously navigate via an app.
If someone wants to know, they’ll ask. But just using the platform requires exactly none of that knowledge, and trying to infodump all the technical jargony bullshit onto people right from the beginning is absolutely going to make them go “wow, this is complicated” and not come here. Because you’ll convince them that it matters somehow.
Or maybe kbin is just fucking amazing and I’ve been spoiled by not having to know shit about the backend of this. Maybe Lemmy really is more complicated, or something.
Kbin really is pretty cool. Lol. The only reason I’m not on it is because there’s no app. I’m on mobile 95% of the time so browsers don’t really work for me.
I get what you’re saying, and I agree. I’m just saying for some folks it might not be as simple as you and I think it is. And it wouldn’t hurt if the fediverse became a bit more easier for the non-techie people. Some people (like me lol) just makes things needlessly complicated. I’m still trying to convince people to join us here despite the obstacles.
For what it’s worth, I’m only using kbin on mobile and a lack of app hasn’t been an issue for me. I say this having come from Reddit using Relay for a good 8+ years.
The kbin mobile web app is actually pretty good. I’ve found it adequate for almost everything so far.
Kbin lets you install a Progressive Web App (PWA) which gives you a button that puts it in it’s own separate window from the rest of the stuff running in your browser and to my understanding lets it run in the background to give you notifications if you want (I keep notifications off for most things, so I haven’t tested this aspect).
It might be worth a try. My only caveat is that it isn’t working right in Firefox because they seem to have stopped PWA support, but it works fine in Vivaldi which is chrome-based so other chrome based browsers are probably fine for this use.
Apps are a bit of a relic from the days before responsive web design / mobile-focused web development took off. If you think about it, we really shouldn’t need to download a separate app for every website we visit on a mobile device.
Yeah. I might try it while waiting for an app. I also turn notifications off for everything except phone and chat apps so no notifs is not a dealbreaker. Thanks for the suggestion.
Also, the last part is true. I just remember some “apps” i use nowadays are electron.
Yup, it’s like email but take away recipients. Yea, there’s sorta recipients, but you don’t really know who it’s federated with/etc. We (foss devs) need better optics here. UX is difficult, though i welcome ideas.