But fediverse isn’t ready to take over yet
But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot. The growth that Mastodon has seen thanks to a Twitter exodus has only exposed how hard it is to join the platform, and more importantly how hard it is to find anyone and anything else once you’re there. Lemmy, the go-to decentralized Reddit alternative, has been around since 2019 but has some big gaps in its feature offering and its privacy policies — the platform is absolutely not ready for an influx of angry Redditors. Neither is Kbin, which doesn’t even have mobile apps and cautions new users that it is “very early beta” software. Flipboard and Mozilla and Tumblr are all working on interesting stuff in this space, but without much to show so far. The upcoming Threads app from Instagram should immediately be the biggest and most powerful thing in this space, but I’m not exactly confident in Meta’s long-term interest in building a better social platform.
That so many people think Mastodon is hard to join makes me think that there are a lot of people on the internet now who have never learned how to use the internet
I think there’s active misinformation being shared about the difficulty of use for fediverse playforms. Yeah it’s 20 clicks instead of 5 but it’s not that hard.
As someone who works in IT, I can tell you that ive witnessed firsthand so many people who get viruses because when someone gives them a URL, they dont just go to that site. They go to www.google.com, search for the URL, and blindly click on the first result, which is almost always an ad, and which sometimes is a link to malware. Fun times.
It’s easy to forget outside of communities like this how low tech literacy actually is.
I think I don’t understand probably 95% of how the internet works and I’m fairly sure that I’m above average in my general understanding.
If the Fediverse really wants to break into the mainstream, and I’m neither saying it does or it should, then these things need to become easier and straightforward.
Joining a server isn’t hard, but finding content outside of the server you have chosen can be. Lemmy seems to be better than Mastodon here, but still.
People don’t care about federation as such. They want their social network and they want it all, regardless of which server it sits on, and they want it easy.
Something I often need to keep in mind is that when I was growing up the home PC was pretty crude and mysterious. You had to learn what a command line was, you had to learn about data backups and file trees, you had to learn about navigation and discovery of the web.
Sure you might not have done any of this stuff for decades now, depending on how you engage with the infernal devices, but if you see a forum you know what that is, how it works, what you expect to find inside. If you see URLs with like foo.com/place@otherfoo you kinda intuitively grasp what that is saying.
But if you’re like 20 now probably the first computer you ever touched was a magic box where you just clicked things to open stuff and they managed their own little things. Clicked a thing to install other clicky things. You don’t know what a config file is, why would you? you don’t really use URLs much, you just click the internet and start typing and then click the right link etc.
To a lot of those people some of this stuff is as arcane as like arch linux is to your average millennial PC user. Despite fedi (and arch! I use arch btw) actually being really simple and obvious there’s a barrier of unfamiliarity and a lot of basic skills you need to learn first.
This is what I’ve observed in Gen Z and younger - they just expect functional UIs, and to have pre-setup file directories and libraries, but don’t actually know what those things are and what they do.
Yeah it’s just the result of progress. I’ve watched people my age get stunlocked by carburettor issues or the concept of a choke. It’s unfortunate but sleekness often trades off with user serviceability.
Rather than being all “hgngh grrr the damn kids with their geegaws and whimgets don’t know how to use a simple butter churn” we have to teach people how to feel confident learning different ways of doing things and most importantly why they should care to do so.
People in 90s and 2000s used to get informed before going online, as it used to be a big spending and commitment. Between all the tech-utopia hype you also got to hear about what to avoid and how to behave.
Nowadays you only need a cheap smartphone and start scrolling through algorithm-fed content indefinitely. No need for technical knowledge because the company takes care of that. No need for an intro class, because who even bothers anymore?