Hey everyone, I’m honestly really liking Lemmy so far. Maybe that’s because it feels so much like browsing reddit 10 years ago and I think it’s safe to say many of us have migrated from the blackout. I’d been a Reddit user since 2010 so I’ve witnessed the slow decline over the years but popping here has really driven home how corporate it started to feel–less like a genuine hub of community and more like a manufactured product with low effort content and some genuine discussion/input peppered throughout.
That said, does anyone feel the idea of a federated platform might be confusing to some less network-savvy users? There’s other successful multi-server platforms like Discord but somehow for me the idea of a ‘chatroom’ versus something more like a forum/board seems like it would make more sense to a less informed user. I could see hearing that posts are aggregating from other sites or being cross-visible confusing to individuals who understand web usage as, ‘visit site–post to site–view content on site’.
Does that make sense? lol Anyways, loving the site so far–hope to see it grow!
To add on to this - computers used to run on DOS commands. What made them mainstream was creating a UI which allowed a layperson to use it. So now a graphic designer can focus on artwork rather than needing to understand computer backend.
Similarly, we’re floating around windows '93 or something.
The way I see - we’re the early adopters who can both see the potential and can also affect real change. We’ll be the ones paving the way for future users. For me, figuring out how software works is like a puzzle to me and I find it fun. However, my sibling would find this site completely unusable because their brain doesn’t find this fun, they find this sort of thing overwhelming and complicated.
I’d love to see a mass migration, but without some more user-friendly tools, it’s going to be us nerdy folks having fun in our new sandbox.
Exactly.
For most people, technology is a tool. I don’t want to learn how to build my own train, I want to get from A to B. If there’s no accessible way to ride trains, I’ll just walk or drive a car.
That doesn’t mean, being nerdy about something is bad, but demanding that kind of commitment from everyone is just ignorant.