I think this is probably a good thing, it might keep dumb people away.
As an aside, it’s starting to irritate me how often I see people complain the fediverse/threadiverse is too complex or too difficult to understand. I mean, you managed to understand that email accounts live on different servers, but you can’t apply that same mental logic to forums living on different servers?
I am fairly tech savvy. It took me some time to understand the fediverse and how it works. The thing is, you need to read stuff to understand. That is well above the capabilities of like 80% of people. Oh, and you won’t believe how many people I have met that have no idea what a server is or how email works. Trust me, the bar for entry is pretty high for the average joe. It’s a good filter though.
Having spent the last couple of decades in tech support I’d say you’re being very generous with the estimate of ~20% of people being willing and able to read so they can understand something…
The part that confused and pushed me away is the fact that depending on which email server you sign up for, you may not be able to send or receive an email to a server that may or may not already exist. If the person/group that runs the instance you signed up for defederates something, you’re out of luck if you wanted to use that instance without making a dedicated account over there. It also doesn’t help that the federation of different instances isn’t automatic or retroactive. Someone on your instance has to subscribe to something on another instance for the federation to start, and it only starts pulling content from that point forward. If you want to see older content you have to go to that instance at a minimum, and maybe sign up for that instance depending on what it is. Those are the biggest factors against the Fediverse, in my opinion.
Completely agree. Fediverse is cool in theory, but I don’t know if I’m fully convinced it’s a workable replacement as a content aggregator that we’ve come to expect in this day and age. Hell, you already have instances like lemmy.ml banning people for posting news stories that show China or Russia in a negative light. And lemmy.ml is one of the default instances advertised when you look into Lemmy! That’s a terrible first impression for new users and I think it’s going to turn a lot of people away if censorship is a common occurence on bigger instances.
Also, the Lemmy app on Android is not very good. I can’t even upvoted any comments or posts because it constantly times out.
That all being said, I’m cautiously optimistic that devs will be able to improve the platform over time. Like I said, the Fediverse is cool in theory and I like the concept, but it does have some major drawbacks for content consumers, as you pointed out.
Absolutely agree with this. Twitter is still going strong, in part because the fediverse is “too hard.” Reddit isn’t going anywhere.
I think this is probably a good thing, it might keep dumb people away.
As an aside, it’s starting to irritate me how often I see people complain the fediverse/threadiverse is too complex or too difficult to understand. I mean, you managed to understand that email accounts live on different servers, but you can’t apply that same mental logic to forums living on different servers?
I am fairly tech savvy. It took me some time to understand the fediverse and how it works. The thing is, you need to read stuff to understand. That is well above the capabilities of like 80% of people. Oh, and you won’t believe how many people I have met that have no idea what a server is or how email works. Trust me, the bar for entry is pretty high for the average joe. It’s a good filter though.
Having spent the last couple of decades in tech support I’d say you’re being very generous with the estimate of ~20% of people being willing and able to read so they can understand something…
Yeah. I was a lot more cynical before now. Half a year ago I would have said like 5%. And thank you for your service o7.
The part that confused and pushed me away is the fact that depending on which email server you sign up for, you may not be able to send or receive an email to a server that may or may not already exist. If the person/group that runs the instance you signed up for defederates something, you’re out of luck if you wanted to use that instance without making a dedicated account over there. It also doesn’t help that the federation of different instances isn’t automatic or retroactive. Someone on your instance has to subscribe to something on another instance for the federation to start, and it only starts pulling content from that point forward. If you want to see older content you have to go to that instance at a minimum, and maybe sign up for that instance depending on what it is. Those are the biggest factors against the Fediverse, in my opinion.
Completely agree. Fediverse is cool in theory, but I don’t know if I’m fully convinced it’s a workable replacement as a content aggregator that we’ve come to expect in this day and age. Hell, you already have instances like lemmy.ml banning people for posting news stories that show China or Russia in a negative light. And lemmy.ml is one of the default instances advertised when you look into Lemmy! That’s a terrible first impression for new users and I think it’s going to turn a lot of people away if censorship is a common occurence on bigger instances.
Also, the Lemmy app on Android is not very good. I can’t even upvoted any comments or posts because it constantly times out.
That all being said, I’m cautiously optimistic that devs will be able to improve the platform over time. Like I said, the Fediverse is cool in theory and I like the concept, but it does have some major drawbacks for content consumers, as you pointed out.