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[rant] Why is this so hard for people? (kbin.social)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The best analogy I heard so far is email; everyone gets that you can send an email from gmail to outlook. We are just not used to that websites can interconnect with each other but give it some time and it will be second nature to people

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Please stop with the email analogy. It really doesn't help with anything. You send emails to an email address, people don't think of the back end of that process at all and can't make an analogy to social media where posts just... go out into the ether.

The only reason this is confusing is that tech-heads in these services can't shut up about federation despite federation being largely irrelevant to the experience. The fact that the poster above didn't even notice that the interaction is happening cross-service but still was confused about how to interact cross-service tells you that the way to help people get over how "hard" understanding federation is would be to shut up about it.

I mean, that won't help with people not being willing to just make an account on a place at all, but yeah, everybody is so pleased about the interoperability thing that they make the day-to-day use of federated services seem a lot more convoluted than it is in practice.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago

I actually agree. Nobody explains DNS to people trying to understand how mail works. They don't need to understand MX records, SPF records, DMARC, DKIM, or anything. All they need to know is sign up and how to use the To: field to start sending emails. Hell - you don't even need to and probably don't want to explain the purpose of the CC or BCC fields at this point either.

If a user is trying to actually understand the underlying technology then the email analogy can be a first introduction. But if someone is technical enough to be trying to learn it's better to just teach them about ActivityPub.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Yeah, the email thing keeps getting repeated but doesn’t actually make sense when you think about how people use the fediverse.

I think it as more of as being like what kind of device you use to watch subscriptions. Are you picking a tablet or a smart TV to watch Netflix or Hulu? The device is kbin or lemmy. What communities/magazines you interact with is is like the service. All of them can access the service if you’ve subscribed. You don’t need a Hulu device or a Netflix device, just a device.