[rant] Why is this so hard for people?

Zednix, 10 months ago

It is confusing. Simple as. I have an account on lemmy dot ca, but I don't understand how to view or participate in kbin content so I just don't

LostCause, 10 months ago

That happened to me too in the beginning with lemmy coming from kbin, until I discovered the very bottom of the page where it showed me which community I‘m in (odd place to put that).

I made some strange posts like linking to a community I was in. Gets better with time.

sethboy66, 10 months ago

What community you're in is right in the URL and can be found at minimum twice in the sidebar. Just look for @[sub]@[instance], or the previous with @[username] in front of it.

LostCause, 10 months ago

Thank you, all that is so good to know!

I didn‘t see any of that, cause the back of the URL is a bit painful to look for on my phone's browser and the sidebar part is collapsed by default. Now that I know what to look for I‘ll hopefully not get lost again.

DarkThoughts, 10 months ago

The mobile site definitely needs some work, or better some proper apps.

ProfessorFlaw, 10 months ago

You are rn interacting with kbin people xd

ShootBANGdang, 10 months ago

Since nobody said it yet, you should know that this whole thread is k.bin

Otome-chan, 10 months ago

you're participating in kbin content right now...

sdcSpade, 10 months ago

The funny part is, you're viewing and participating in kbin content right here. This is a thread posted to kbin. My reply will look to you as if it was made in lemmy, but it's not. I have a kbin account, and that's the magic at work.

crib, 10 months ago

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

MudMan, 10 months ago

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.

stopthatgirl7, 10 months 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.

fuser, 10 months ago

well, the whole fediverse idea is similar conceptually to the old Usenet newsgroups.

Usenet groups were generally subscribed, read and posted to from your email client, so it's a pretty good analogy, in fact, seeing that Thunderbird supports matrix, it could just as easily be used to view and post to Lemmy communities.

Nadya, 10 months 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.

Catch42, 10 months ago

As the others have pointed out, this is a kbin thread. Since your account is on an instance that's federated, all the content comes to you, you don't have to do anything special.

FiskFisk33, 10 months ago

...this whole thread is on kbin

metaStatic, 10 months ago

I don't know if you're aware but ...

undated9198, 10 months ago

Also, there’s kbin, lemmy, squabbles.io (speed- and layout-wise my favorite) - each with several „federated“ instances. Which to chose? For many, the appeal of a social media platform is that you have ONE place where you can be sure to see/read and reach all others.

And instances are sometimes „unfederating“ or the federation is incomplete, you‘ll never know. Just look at this (on reddit, sorry) : https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/149sm0n/beehaw_defederating_from_lemmyworld_and/
If the admin of one instance decides to de-federate, you're suddenly cut off.

I'm enjoying my time on kbin.social and I genuinely support the idea of federation, but... This is honestly the only major issue I have with the Fediverse. Most of my Reddit/social media posts are related to three or so niche interests. My first Mastodon account was on the central hub for one interest that later defederated with the central hub for another interest. Not being able to interact with 1/3rd of the people I want to interact with just defeats the whole point of joining these kinds of platforms. Moderators just carving out a chunk of the Fediverse for their users is just unacceptable.

TheRecycledMoth, 10 months ago

Is squabbles federated? I don’t feel like it is. But I do love it.

DarkThoughts, 10 months ago

No. Squabbles is neither part of the fediverse nor is it open source. It's its own independent & proprietary platform. It's kbin, Lemmy, and to an extend Mastodon.

atocci, 10 months ago

Looks like you figured it out by accident, this is a kbin thread lol. It's functionally identical to taking part in Lemmy threads, the complicated stuff is happening in the background as our instances communicate. Threads from all instances show up in the "All" tab and you can participate in them just the same as if they were from your own, for the most part. Since you're on a relatively large instance as well, you should be able to search for just about any community you want using Lemmy's own search bar and be able to find one without having to worry about if it's in another instance or not. Chances are, whatever instance its on has been visited by someone else before, so the link between the two already exists. I hope this helps!

CynAq, 10 months ago

You are literally participating in kbin content right now, commenting on a thread on a kbin magazine posted by a user registered to kbin.

bdonvr, 10 months ago

Is there an active "BestOf" community? Lmao

speck, 10 months ago

You gotta admit, this right here is a pretty classic fediverse moment.

anteaters, 10 months ago

I also did not know what a kbin is as of a few minutes ago, but the great thing is, that I really didn't need to know. I guess it feels "complicated" because there is much that can be learned but you don't necessary have to.

People also did not know how the Reddit backends work and just used it but apparently they feel that they HAVE to learn how the fediverse works on day 1.

CheshireSnake, 10 months ago

Tbf, I think that underlines what he was saying. He has no idea where he is, or that he is already participating kbin.

Compare that to reddit, and it's more complicated.

UnshavedYak, 10 months ago

Yup, it's like email but take away recipients. Yea, there's sorta recipients, but you don't really know who it's federated with/etc. We (foss devs) need better optics here. UX is difficult, though i welcome ideas.

DarkThoughts, 10 months ago

The important part is that it isn't actually that important. You aren't having much of a clue about how Reddit's algorithms work either, you just partake in what's presented to you, and same goes for the fediverse. Eventually you get a better grasp about things, but overall it's not a requirement to actually use any of the platforms. People just make things more complicated for them than they actually are.

VoxAdActa, 10 months ago

Why do they need to know?

See a post, upvote it, comment on it. It's functionally exactly the same as where they came from. The nuances are dramatically unimportant unless or until someone decides they want to use the platform in a more advanced, detailed way, which is going to be like 5% of us.

There's literally no reason to explain the concept of federation at all unless someone specifically asks "Hey, how can I do this more advanced thing?" The cat pictures are all right here, on my screen, and I can comment on them the exact same way I did on reddit. The only difference is that the interface is a little rougher around the edges at the moment.

CheshireSnake, 10 months ago

First of all, why shouldn't they know? I'm pretty sure you've seen the posts saying reddit is undeleting posts or that lemmy/kbin is "bad for privacy" because they don't delete comments? Many of them never even realized or remember how pushshift worked. Because they didn't know. I won't advocate jumping in blindly to a site/app because, "trust me bro." It's even a good thing people want to know what they're signing up for.

There are literally reasons to explain how it all works. Just scroll on /all and you'll find a lot of posts asking stuff about the Fediverse and/or how to navigate it. Or to troubleshoot some issues. Or to ask "how do I search this and that?" Etc. I bet I just need less than a minute on my browser to find a post like that.

Let's say a newcomer arrives, signs up for beehaw (or lemmy.world since it seems to be a popular lemmy instance), and proceeds to get Jerboa. Do you think the app shows all communities you search for out of the box? No. I've been there. I have a lot of communities I'm subbed in that I had to use the direct link and search via browser for me to even find it. You can say, "just use the browser," but you'd be ignoring the fact that many people are unhappy precisely because they can't use their app anymore so they obviously navigate via an app.

VoxAdActa, 10 months ago

If someone wants to know, they'll ask. But just using the platform requires exactly none of that knowledge, and trying to infodump all the technical jargony bullshit onto people right from the beginning is absolutely going to make them go "wow, this is complicated" and not come here. Because you'll convince them that it matters somehow.

Or maybe kbin is just fucking amazing and I've been spoiled by not having to know shit about the backend of this. Maybe Lemmy really is more complicated, or something.

CheshireSnake, 10 months ago

Kbin really is pretty cool. Lol. The only reason I'm not on it is because there's no app. I'm on mobile 95% of the time so browsers don't really work for me.

I get what you're saying, and I agree. I'm just saying for some folks it might not be as simple as you and I think it is. And it wouldn't hurt if the fediverse became a bit more easier for the non-techie people. Some people (like me lol) just makes things needlessly complicated. I'm still trying to convince people to join us here despite the obstacles.

brownpaperbag, 10 months ago

For what it's worth, I'm only using kbin on mobile and a lack of app hasn't been an issue for me. I say this having come from Reddit using Relay for a good 8+ years.

McBinary, 10 months ago

The kbin mobile web app is actually pretty good. I've found it adequate for almost everything so far.

EatALime, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Kbin lets you install a Progressive Web App (PWA) which gives you a button that puts it in it's own separate window from the rest of the stuff running in your browser and to my understanding lets it run in the background to give you notifications if you want (I keep notifications off for most things, so I haven't tested this aspect).

It might be worth a try. My only caveat is that it isn't working right in Firefox because they seem to have stopped PWA support, but it works fine in Vivaldi which is chrome-based so other chrome based browsers are probably fine for this use.

Apps are a bit of a relic from the days before responsive web design / mobile-focused web development took off. If you think about it, we really shouldn't need to download a separate app for every website we visit on a mobile device.

CheshireSnake, 10 months ago

Yeah. I might try it while waiting for an app. I also turn notifications off for everything except phone and chat apps so no notifs is not a dealbreaker. Thanks for the suggestion.

Also, the last part is true. I just remember some "apps" i use nowadays are electron.

CynAq, 10 months ago

It also underlines what the OP is saying. The average user doesn't need to do anything or think about anything special to use the platform. Simply making an account and interacting with whatever is on front of you will work.

It's only complicated if you're constantly comparing it to reddit in your head and trying to recreate the exact experience here.

CheshireSnake, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Not always. There are the defederated instances, for example. Sometimes things break like lemmy.ml and people are having issues subscribing to communities (it's apparently just a visual bug, but still). There have been tons of questions about the Fediverse from people who just got here. Kbin, for example, was not federating properly for a while before and we on lemmy could not see any posts on it. That can matter if a specific community is on an instance not accessible to a user for one reason or another.

Edit: I'm not criticizing the Fediverse, but it still has issues to be addressed. It's pretty young relative to big social media sites like FB, reddit, etc so growing pains are to be expected. But we do need to acknowledge the issues if we hope to fix them later on.

CynAq, 10 months ago

Yes but that's only relevant if you're aware of a specific community on a specific instance and expect to be interacting with it on purpose.

It's completely irrelevant if someone just gives you the name of an instance, tells you to make an account on it and start using. You'll be perfectly fine reading and commenting whatever's in your feed.

The only way this breaks is if you're in an instance that is too small to have local traffic while having technical difficulties with federation. If the instance is active enough or it's federating normally, someone completely unaware of the concept of federation will be perfectly fine as long as they understand the interface.

CheshireSnake, 10 months ago

True. I agree with you. Hopefully soon most technical issues will be resolved enough to not matter to the average user. I'd love for us to grow more, and I think we should address the barriers that are preventing some "normies" (for lack of a better term) from heading here. I know some are just making up excuses, but hell my mom just learned how to post in facebook middle of last year. Lmao. Some are just confused.

EatALime, 10 months ago

They'll be fine until someone recommends a community on another instance complete with link and suddenly the user is logged out, can't subscribe to that community, and when they try to log back in by clicking the login link on the page, it says account not found.

For this reason, there is a need for at least a little bit of understanding about how federation works.

CynAq, 10 months ago

This understanding is much more easily achieved after one's familiar with the basics of their own instance though, isn't it? Rather than expecting them to imagine the exact user experience of the fediverse before they even made their account, would we not be better off introducing them to a cold open and be helpful later when they have questions?

All of these problems are caused by the same underlying system and trying to explain the system to non-users is the exact wrong way to go about alleviating them. Better interface and UX design is the only thing which can solve this issue.

Wrrzag, 10 months ago

This understanding is much more easily achieved after one’s familiar with the basics of their own instance though, isn’t it?

Yes, but the problem is that the first post they see might contain a link to another instance, they click it and they get lost when they no longer have a session because no one told them that’s how it’s supposed to work. Then they get angry and decide it’s a bug and this whole federation thing doesn’t work. Better interfaces would help, but I don’t think it’d be enough.

RandomWombat, 10 months ago

I think I can understand how confusing this is for people. It took me a while to get used to Reddit originally, and now it is another different environment.

I am kind of running to here because I tried going to Discord and found myself getting rather confused with the many channels/servers (?). I am a tech-idiot. I just like to be in a place where I could see interesting threads to join and chat. I used to go to forums, but those forums slowly died after social media platforms came into prominence. I miss those friendly forum environment, and I struggle to keep afloat in a world that seemed to be moving a lot faster than my brain can follow. :(

socialhope, 10 months ago

Listen here youngster. You are doing just fine. You are here, you are finding threads. You will get the hang of it. It's the internet it grows and changes. Hopefully for the better.

I would say you are doing a lot better than struggling! I hope you find more interesting threads!

McBinary, 10 months ago

I get that, and I'm sort of understanding - just frustrated and wanted to vent earlier...

There is a lot of tech jargon people are throwing around that is wholly unnecessary in the grand scheme of 'just sign up and participate'. People don't need to understand all the backend workings to just participate and I don't know why everyone is focusing so much on it.

The equivalent would be every user trying to understand the inner workings of reddit's website; the servers, the dns records, the load balancing, the network between each server. None of it is necessary to actually use the site.

badgerific, 10 months ago

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...

It's not just you, the one who is helping us, feeling like this. It's us feeling like this too... or atleast I feel like this.

Suddenly, I'm no longer the technologically sound person that I used to be. I'm overwhelmed. My hectic schedule and paucity of free time is not helping the case, either. There's just too much to read about; figure out... Took me a good hour or so just to create an account. Then another good few minutes to login, when it asked "instances" or something that I wanted to login into.

It's quite different from what I'm used to. I'm feeling as though there's so much that I'm being forced to learn. And I'm annoyed, extremely annoyed, that I've been forced to leave the one place I used to enjoy. I miss the content that I used to enjoy on reddit.

People like yourself, ones taking time out of their day to help us, are really a boon right now. For days (really, a couple hours spread across days), I searched for alternatives to reddit. Tried to read and grasp a couple of guides before I made-up my mind to take that plunge.

I see where you're coming from. And all I can say is, maybe once people get into the head-space to finally migrate, they may be more open to learning. They may still rage a bit about it - I know I am. But they may be open to learn.

Just want you to know that these guides and helps are most welcome right now. Thank you for helping us.

Xer0, 10 months ago

Seriously, the Internet was better before it was so accessible. I might sound arrogant, but I don't care. I want people here who actually have half a clue about how to operate a computer. If someone doesn't even know how to sign up to a website and rage quits, I'm quite glad they aren't here.

Kovari, 10 months ago

Truly an unpopular opinion but honestly I agree with this too. It may sound insensitive but it's part of finding an inclusive community amongst our interests. It isn't easy trying to pertain to many varying stages of computer literacy...

Sheerfire96, 10 months ago

Yeah I won’t lie I’m… very confused but I’m kinda just rolling with it and hoping I figure it out along the way. I can’t speak for others but I find myself generally comfortable with computers and willing to try things out and see what I can do. Some people are afraid to do that and idk how to change it

at_an_angle, 10 months ago

It took me a few days to get a majority of it, but it's not difficult. A few things I need to figure out, but the change was fairly simple.

PeriaptGames, 10 months ago

Anyone got a good tutorial to share for folks who want to jump?

Waitwuhtt, 10 months ago

Valid rant. Those people are probably a little irritated to begin with and overreacting.

It doesn't make it OK but people are people 🤷

Fraeco, 10 months ago

Not everyone is a tech god. I work with IT and tech savvy people but explaining Lemmy (or the fediverse) was challenging at best.

Now image doing this to a dumb 15 year old shitposter that just wants to browse dank memes and has just enough brain power to enter his name using a keyboard.

In a few years, maybe. Now? Nah.

setsneedtofeed, 10 months ago

Back in my day we had to walk uphill both ways to sign up for BBS forums. Kids these days.

TheImpressiveX, 10 months ago

In the snow too!

argv_minus_one, 10 months ago

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…

Might that be a vision problem? Sure, there's a big red button, but that doesn't do you any good if you can't read the label to see what it does.

Keep your eyes healthy, people. In this day and age, having them in good working order is more important than ever.

stylishboar, 10 months ago

You have a good point. Maybe we’ve been focusing too much on why the fediverse is so great from a technical perspective instead of just presenting it as an alternative with better content.

wet_lettuce, 10 months ago

My hot take: I'm okay with a barrier to entry (right now).

Getting setup on the fediverse isn't necessarily a super simple process and there is a bit of learning curve for how it works.

That's okay. I actually like it. Here's why.

It means the people here want to be here. It means the people here understand what it is and more importantly what it isn't. It's not a reddit clone. It's not even old school forums. It's this.

And "this" isn't even it's final form. I fully expect for the fediverse to evolve over the next few months and years. As a community develops and the technology is refined, I am sure it will all get simpler as we knock off the rough edges.

In the mean time, this tiny barrier to entry keeps a lot of the whiners and naysayers away. It keeps people that only want a reddit clone, away. If you want reddit, use reddit. It's not going anywhere anytime soon.

It's a balancing act, because we don't want to turn so many people away that we can't build a reasonable community, but you also don't want a bad copy of a system people are leaving.

trynn, 10 months ago

I can only assume that the people having trouble understanding kbin/lemmy are either relatively young, or relatively inexperienced with technology. Basically those people whose online experience really only started in the era of Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/etc. Those of us who were online in the early 2000s are familiar with web forums. Kbin Magazines/Lemmy Communities are basically just web forums that can be interacted with from any kbin or Lemmy instance that's federated. Those of us who are even older and were online in the 90s (or earlier) are familiar with Usenet. Kbin Magazines/Lemmy Communities are basically Usenet newsgroups, with the particular instance you're on essentially the same as your Usenet provider. Or for the really old folks like me, instances are like BBSes that are connected to each other with FidoNet.

It reminds me of people who get confused getting on Discord for the first time, when it's really just a modern incarnation of chat-rooms or IRC. None of these ideas are new, and people were able to figure out these core concepts decades ago.

darkwing_duck, 10 months ago

That's a GOOD thing. As soon as you dumb it down you get the dumb people coming in.

Cargon, 10 months ago

A lot of these people are hedging their bets about what "platform" is going to "win". I think complaints about technical difficulty are just masking the fact that they are susceptible to peer pressure, and most of their peers are (and will continue to be) on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Most people don't know how DNS or TCP or SMTP works, but that doesn't stop them from using the Internet or email. As others have pointed out, the federated nature of Lemmy et al has almost no impact on a user's adoption, but they see people talking about the technical details, so it becomes the excuse.

I don't particularly want a lot of low value contributors diluting the fediverse anyway. I see all of this as a skill check for admission.