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...
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
You might be slower than the rest, but still smarter than them. Hare and turtoise kinda situation. Nothing wrong with being a slow learner, the willingness to learn is where it's at.
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.
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.
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.
In my experience, the majority of people doesn't have the slightest clue how mail works. Somehow you type it in and provide it with an address into one of the three indistinguishable fields that are titled "To", " CC", "BCC". And by some black magic it either appears on the screen of the other person. Or it doesn't. That's about the amount of knowledge.
So comparing something to this is kind of meaningless.
Yup, and people younger than a certain age think email is as archaic as the pony express.
Hilariously, fax machines are as archaic as the pony express. They were invented around 1850.
Abraham Lincoln could have literally sent a japanese samurai a fax.
Ironically it is often that way with Lemmy as well, outside of Lemmy.World. You write up a post, maybe it makes it to its destination, maybe it does not (for several days, after which point extremely few people will see it when it suddenly appears, but down among the older content no longer listed as "new"), maybe people write comments into it, maybe they don't but who even knows if you aren't able to see any of them to be able to respond.
This is definitely a monthly or almost weekly occurrence, even if not quite a daily one, though it depends strongly on what instance you are on.
Also, whether it makes it to the destination or not depends on which server you try to view it from.
And I haven't even begun to start into the defederation artifacts yet!?
Right. Learning Lemmy and the Fediverse takes some effort. The onboarding isn't super smooth and flawless... I think we all know this. I'd still like to see a few design changes. I think generally we're headed in the right direction. Albeit kind of slowly.
I haven't noticed any federation hiccups in quite some time. There was some debacle with two updates. But since then it's been forwarding posts within seconds for me. At least on the last two instances I used.
Me, explaining how Lemmy is similar to email…
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.
Why are nerds so insistent that people understand technology?
Because technology forms the basis of the online environments we inhabit, and gives us the tools to tell how, say, our data is stored and processed.
If you're going to get in the water, it's probably a good skill to be able to swim. If you're going to drive a car and don't have the faintest idea how the engine works, you'll be at the mercy of manufacturers and mechanics.
The solution to your issue is not that everybody should conform to the lowest common denominator of technology literacy, but that the general internet user should get a fucking idea of the environment they navigate.
Stop being nerds
Never.
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
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.
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
I think people can handle a simple series of instructions, like (1) download the Voyager for Lemmy app, (2) click the middle button, then click...
What they likely get confused about is the plethora of choices, especially when they aren't even sure that they want to join yet.
At the risk of bringing up unwanted drama, 100% of the time whenever I mention Lemmy to someone, they have admonished me for having done so. But putting myself into their shoes one day, I did a Google search (🤮) for "Lemmy", and aside from the singer, the top hit to an actual instance is... surprisingly to me, lemmy.ml. Next I note that the default search method there is "Local", not "All". NO WONDER they were telling me how politically "extremist" it (Lemmy) is! They see NONE of the posts from Lemmy.World, sh.itjust.works, etc., unless they are submitted to a community on lemmy.ml. Instead, what someone would see by default is "death to landlords" and all the other posts promoting the violent upheaval of Western society, as ofc capitalism is to blame for literally everything (well I mean...), except somehow only the Western variant is in the wrong and everything done by the likes of Russia or China or North Korea is absolutely fine.
Here's an old example I just happened to have handy:
(setting aside truth or falsehood, it definitely has a bias to it, as in both sides were equal, and yes this was prior to the USA election)
The #2 search result by DuckDuckGo btw is Lemmy.World (the #1 is ofc the musician:-), probably bc it has ~80% of all Lemmy users on it, so that is appropriate.
We need to put ourselves into their shoes, not our own as if we were ourselves on the other side of that conversation, but appreciate how they will approach the issues. And the methods used by more mainstream people differ from ours.
Either that, or accept that we are strictly another forum community used chiefly by Linux users, and that we will never be more than that.
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.
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.
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy