This place has roughly 3,000 people and was intended to be an entire replacement for DaystromInstitute and StarTrek as they were going dark indefinitely. Well, within 4 days the moderators have walked back those statements and opened both subreddits up. I see no incentive for people to come to this website now and while a few may come here in the future, most people will go to r/startrek with 600,000 people.
I literally don’t understand what is there to learn that everyone isn’t already used to in one form or another.
Kbin, lemmy, pixelfed, mastodon, beehaw are all pretty intuitive to start using right away. The account creation process is no different than what is available on mainstream sites.
The federation system sounds a bit intimidating but in reality, it takes about one hour of using your selected service to get used to.
As long as we direct people to instances with a stable stream of content from a large enough number of regular users, they should be absolutely fine.
I mean it’s fair to say that there have been many performance issues as most of the federations were not prepared for the mass influx of people, and for someone literally brand new and without context it’s hard to differentiate between temporary performance issues and fundamental flaws. I agree that all the bellyaching is laughably naive about how quickly websites and services come together and evolve, but we can’t pretend that the growing pains haven’t happened.
Growing pains are a separate issue than the problems associated with “non tech minded people putting up with learning a new service”.
The first is a timing issue. Give it some time and the issues will resolve themselves as far as the average user is concerned. The second one implies inherent difficulties arising from the “tech mindedness” of the users and its interaction with the service experience. I’m saying that the average internet user today is “techi minded” enough, even if they don’t consciously know it, to understand how to use fediverse services intuitively, unless we overthink the introduction and scare people away.
It’s not sufficiently intuitive yet because not everything you can do is reachable by a link. For example, this instance automatically shows us many communities from beehaw.org because users from here have subscribed to them. However, we don’t automatically see every community there, and even if we browse their main page from this instance we don’t have a link to browse all their communities. It didn’t take me long to work out I had to browse beehaw.org from a separate browser tab to see all the communities I could search from startrek.website and subscribe too, but that’s too many steps for most people.
If I browse to a beehaw community from here and click the posts linked from their sidebar I end up on pages on their domain that don’t know I’m logged into startrek.website. It just doesn’t work seamlessly unless you’re very web savvy or have even done some webdev before.
I say all this as someone who likes it here. I’m going to stay and I’ve pinned a browser tab here to replace my reddit tab, but Lemmy needs some dedicated work before people other than the rebellious, adventurous, and ancient net nerds like it.
yea the design of the federation aspects of it is particularly not well thought out.
I think it’s pretty complicated. They need to work on the default “home” page so that it’s populated and turns over. As it is now I’m seeing posts 2 to 3 to 4 days old, from small instances. Default really just needs to be the popular posts from the whole thing.
True, but that’s why I said we should direct people to instances with a stable stream of content and large enough number of regular users.
I’m on kbin.social, and there’s absolutely no shortage of content. The hot page always has content posted within two hours and as people comment on and boost threads, they more or less constantly update.
Ending up in a slow instance is a negative user experience, sure, but it isn’t exactly complicated. It’s no different than ending up on a dead sub on reddit.
I picked lemmy.ca which seemed like a middle of the pack one, which was advised. But they said it didn’t matter because you can see content from all. Can see it and seeing it by default seems to be different because now I have to track it down or something. This is the confusing part. Just give me a default front page. Then I can edit my own subscriptions as I learn.
I’m hearing ya. I’ve created three accounts now, thinking mastadon, lemmy, and kbin are different … which they are, but also they interact and I could just use one of those accounts to interact? But half the time when I click a link I end up somewhere where I need to sign-in to comment. I’ve learnt today, to search that same thing up on my own server, but I’m still well confused. However I’m also excited to keep trying at this unique new platform because I know I’m gonna have an “ah-ha!” moment eventually. lol. It’ll just take a little personal persistence, and I also believe the accessibility and features will evolve and improve as more join in.
Things make a lot more sense once you realize that “instance” is just a hand-wavy synonym for “website”.
“That community is on another website”.
“When I click a link, it takes me to another website”
Etc.
Watch the url. If it’s still showing you’re on the website you have an account on, then you’re working with locally mirrored content, and can comment without barriers. If it’s the url of some other website, then… It’s some other website,and you’re probably not logged in there unless you have an account on that site, just like following links to Twitter or Facebook from Reddit.
The only real differences here compared to centralized social media is that other websites will share the content directly with each other. If they’re asked to.
You can change the sort order, however I can’t figure out any actual sanity to any of the sort orders :(
I also found the whole thing pretty intuitive, but then I’ve been using the internet regularly for long enough that, as you say, everything here is kinda familiar.
But we have to remember that a lot of people are younger and used to apps that “just work” with not even so much effort as having to sign up for an account. When I went to uni in my 30s I literally had to teach the kids what copy and paste meant, how are people like that gonna grasp how to join new communities here?
Or there are people who aren’t as comfortable on the internet as a whole and have only really learned to use the handful of sites they need, anything else is wildly confusing to them even if it operates the same way as they’re used to. Even a site changing where its login button is trips up a surprising amount of people.
It’s not their fault, but the fact remains a lot of internet users are actually not very good at using the internet.
If they’re commenting on reddit they’re used to the idea of signing up for an account.