It's funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won't catch on because "federation is too hard to understand" when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
1073 points (97.2% liked)
Fediverse
28735 readers
140 users here now
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 [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
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
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's a difference between 'technically simple' and 'understandable UX'.
Your mom doesn't need to know how ActivityPub works or the intricacies of federation. She just needs to know to log in and go to c/cutecats.
The early-adopter curse here is causing way too much technobabble to be involved in descriptions that just confuse people, and it's technical aspects that the nerd cohort here is fascinated by, but uh, nobody else is.
The real leap will be to resist the urge to pull out the PPT and spend 3 hours and 10,000 words explaining how Lemmy works vs the much more concise how-to-use-Lemmy details that people actually want.
There's a lot of assumptions being made by a lot of people that "normal" people are stupid and couldn't understand 'It's a conversation platform like Reddit, but it's run by it's users and that's why there's a lot of servers who all talk to each other' and so there's a lot of hand wringing about how you have to explain all the details and such, which really, isn't all that true.
Every non-technical person I've explained it to like that immediately understands what it is, how you'd use it, and what it's used for and I'll occasionally get a 'Oh, neat, how does all that work?' question I can then expand on, but that's like, maybe 1 out of 20.
TLDR: too many details is not helpful for most people, and nerds loooooove going into more detail than anyone could possibly care about
Welcome to the Nerdiverse, where normies are kept out of.