Using your email address as username is a common problem for a lot of users.
Some of them are even completely shocked that they can use a different password and don’t understand, that their mail is just their login credentials for this specific site.
The feature “login with Apple/Google/Facebook” exists for a reason.
For a small period of time I was a god that would bless people with gmail invites lol. That brings me back. I remember compuserve and Hotmail but I don’t remember them being especially complicated at all. Maybe that was before my time…? Which would be nice for once
Before that you’d get your email account provided by the ISP, and before that you’d have to find someone who ran an email server and ask nicely for them to make you an account.
And regarding ease of use: The reason why e.g. SMTP is human-readable is because in the early days SMTP wasn’t the protocol that your email client used to talk to the server. It was the email client.
You’d just telnet to your server and type in the SMTP commands manually.
People did and DO complain about setting up email. ISP email is a great example of this. People forget their IMAP and SMTP address configuration stuff all the damn time. Always have.
I used to do home IT, and I had to help people through that crap constantly.
That said, these days people have gravitated to clients like gmail or outlook. Those push the user onto a certain domain, which makes setup dead simple. This is what mastodon.social is doing now. Making it so people don’t have to think about the instance at sign up.
Yea I’m with you here. I’ve done a good amount of things with computers and setting up email with clients and setting up printers are probably the two “what the fuck why is this so hard!” things I’ve had to do with a computer.
Yeah I agree email kinda sucks. But everyone still uses it, and (as far as I’m aware) people aren’t writing articles about how confusing email is for people and why that makes it a failure. Mastodon and Lemmy are, in comparison, much better and way less confusing but you see that said all the time about them.
When email came out the alternative product was the post office or a fax machine. Even though configuring a client was difficult for some, instant digital messaging communication was new. It was a BIG motivator for people to either figure it out, or hire someone like me to figure it out for them.
People are comparing Mastodon to Twitter, a fairly similar core product. The gap between email and mail was much wider.
I used my isp email address for a brief period and it was always super annoying in some way or another. Not to mention I lost it when I had to switch providers because I moved out of their area. It was a long time ago but they wanted to charge me to keep it when gmail/Hotmail etc already existed lmao bye
This is what mastodon.social is doing now. Making it so people don’t have to think about the instance at sign up.
TBH, I don’t find that all too bad. As long as users can easily move at any time, getting them set up on a popular one first where everything “just works”, they can learn the concepts and get used to the federation stuff. Then after some time, they may realize that a smaller server might fit them better and can then move there. Choosing a server without ever being registered somewhere (in the fediverse) was even hard for me.
In college I had to write a program to send emails. This was around 2012. Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from. There are obviously ways to sign the message and verify it and most email servers block messages that don’t have these because of how trivial it is to fake. It’s basically like putting a name tag on that says “Joe Biden” and everyone believing you’re the president.
I didn’t do anything malicious but I did mildly prank my girlfriend. I don’t remember what I did but I’m pretty sure I told her before I did it. I really didn’t want to end up getting expelled for “”“hacking”“” so I didn’t do anything remotely bad. The irony is the assignment wouldn’t have worked and been as interesting if my campus had the proper security measures to block the messages.
It could be that the web client for our email mentioned something about the sender being unverified and not to trust it but I don’t remember.
Most orgs have an internal SMTP server that will accept and send mail to other internal addresses without any special authentication or validation. It’s almost essential for automatic monitoring software and that sort of thing.
Where the barriers go up is at the border to the Internet. And thank goodness, just a couple decades ago it was sheer chaos.
I tried to send a message to support for a company with a form on their website. I got an email back saying it didn’t pass SPF because they used my email address in the From: header.
I did manage to find the email address their PHP script tried sending it to. I emailed them about the problem with solutions to fix it. And of course they never got back to me.
Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from.
I remember realizing this and thinking it was weird too when I was reading about SMTP. Specifically, the MAIL FROM command.
I almost got kicked out of school for this! I sent an email to my girlfriend from some girl that we didn’t like, saying something like “you’re a huge bitch, haha just kidding this is actually jballs not the chick we don’t like.”
Problem is that I wrote my girlfriend’s email address wrong, so it bounced back to the sender (the girl we didn’t like).
So I had to explain to a university dean exactly what I did and how I didn’t actually “hack into” the girl’s email account. That was fun.
Every Reddit and Twitter user over the last few months: "OMG The Fediverse is so hard and complicated how can people figure this out?!?!?!!!!11eleven"
My brother(s) in data: It takes like 5 minutes to understand how it works and you're good to go (maybe 10 if you were the paint-chip-or-glue-eating-type back in school.)
Even if you can figure it out, it’s still just unintuitive and a hassle. Theres a lot of friction and friction is the enemy of adoption. I’m a datacenter engineer and despite know exactly how Mastodon works it would just be too much time and effort to get the content flowing. I setup my account, figured I’d get around to it and never did. I wouldn’t blame any average person for just not feeling. Like putting in the effort.
The only reason I’m on Lemmy because I followed specific subreddits here so I didn’t need to go looking for anything.
Except facebook used to be like that, and somehow we did just fine. Shit myspace just gave you Tom when you signed up for a new account and nobody found that confusing either.
Standards have certainly changed, but it's really not that hard to follow a few people that look slightly interesting and grow your network based on who they post.
Yes clunky, unintuitive social media platforms did just fine back when they were all equally immature, clunky and unintuitive. But social media has changed a lot in the past 20 years and it’s grown to be more intuitive, usable, and relatively frictionless to adopt.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect every Tom Dick and Harry who are used to modern social media platforms built on decades of improvements to form and function, to just dive in head first to an experience that rivals the social media of a bygone era.
Facebook had an advantage in that you very likely already knew 98% of the people you wanted to add as a friend by name, and only had to search their name. After adding your friends, most of the work of setting up facebook is done
I feel like yall are also overestimating the tech comprehension of a lot of the younger generation. Every action has been so simplified some young teenagers are as tech illiterate as some of their grandparents. If its not inmediately obvious or requires a workaround, they just give up.
I mean, Linux does make that percentage lower nowadays tbh. I know some manufacturers care but the grand majority dont see the 0.something as their audience
The older generation grew up in the time that you had “to get it” on some level to do anything.
The current gen ((my) kids 12,15) just don’t use it the moment it doesn’t work. Zero effort, zero will to learn. Because there’s always another option which does work instantly. Fuck privacy, fuck my rights.
Hey I was born in 2001 and use both Mastodon and Lemmy. Stop with the juvenoia.
The fact is most people of any age don’t care how things work and don’t like putting in any extra effort into tech. Imo old people are sometimes worse with this.
People who want to understand how technology works are a minority, and those who actually do understand are an even smaller minority. Nobody can understand how everything they use works to a reasonable level of detail anyway. You either have surface level details of lots of stuff, or more detail about some specific things. Modern systems are just too large and complex to completly fit in a human brain.
Edit: When the comment I was replying to was first written it didn’t include the age of the people they were talking about. Now that I know those it sounds less like a generation issue and more like the behaviour if children and teenagers. I think the person I am replying to needs to understand the difference between generations vs just still being a kid. Although personally I got into the technical side of things as a teenager.
You pretty much need a parent or some other reference person (which can be people in the internet) to teach you that, though. The chance of that having happened is a bit higher the more mature you are, just because you had more time to also figure out the other important things of life.
I think it’s only a small difference though, because the unwillingness to learn new things also increases with age. I think the highest chance for someone to want to know how things work is around 25-35 or something. However, as you say, people of all ages generally don’t care how things work, and all ages have people that do care how things work, it just depends on the person.
But probabilities are still a thing and I think it’s a bit more likely for teenagers to not care to understand how something works.
They didn’t specify the ages when I first replied. Now that they have specified they are kids I think it’s even less of a generation issue and more of a teenager or child vs adult issue that’s being wrongly framed as a generation issue.
100% this. We were paranoid that facebook would melt our kid's brain, but in reality it's messing up our parents' generation.
My 9 yr old is conflicted because all his friends are on Messenger Kids and he wants to talk to them, but doesn't want to give facebook access to his data.
No offense but I feel like as a parent theres a lot you could have done and can still do to mitigate that. Like, it’s reasonable to be mad at the exploitative reasons for tech being the way it is but you’re the parent and you’ve had a lot of control over those things for their entire lives. Not to mention that we’re the generation that embraced the easier tech as a whole. Kinda wild to blame the kids that are literally products of us and our actions.
I’ve seen that a lot at work. If there isn’t a YouTube video going over what they need to do, they are lost. They seem to get scared at basic debugging of output.
Yeah, especially when you imagine that they are accustomed to not having to seek out knowledge or even entertainment. When algorithms feed you everything and your attention becomes a commodity you don't need to develop the skill to actually find it, or the wherewithal to even imagine that you need to go out and find it.
I believe those of us who were online in the 1995-2010 era remember what it was like to have an internet full of possibilities that you could explore and discover, but that was the exception.
I disagree, I have a 9 yr old son and he's all about how everything works. I think the problem is that it's too easy, for most of his questions it takes literally a minute to find a youtube video that explains nearly any concept. I certainly don't mean to belittle that but he'll have some question like "how can a cluster of satellites observe the entire planet" and he can have that question answered in seconds, and be force-fed ten more youtube videos on more of the same.
When I was his age (would have been 1989) that'd be a very difficult question for me to answer. Even though that problem had been solved for hundreds of years, I'd have probably needed to start with an encyclopedia and try to find enough about orbits to dig more. My dad knew a bit about space, maybe he'd have been able to point me in the right direction, but there was never an easy video to answer that.
There's an ability to access knowledge like there never has been before, the breadth and depth of knowledge on the internet is something we could only have dreamed of 30 years ago. The dream was that this equitable access to information would create a more informed and more inquisitive society, but somehow it's just made us lazy.
I'd like to see my kid realize there's not an easy youtube answer and actually go do more digging and synthesize an answer. I think he's well-placed to develop that skill but it's not something most people posess.
I think the problem that comes with that is overstimulation and a lack of boredom. In my experience kids (and perhaps adults as well) learn best if they have to learn in their own speed. Having everything spoon fed to you, especially when it’s an overwhelming amount of information, can get too much and people shut down.
Maybe it’s conspiracy theory territory, but I sincerely believe that the combination of overstimulation, decision fatigue and FOMO by the thousands of entertainment and information sources really doesn’t work well with human brains. I don’t think that people have become more lazy, it’s a form of mental overload.
That's very true too. I like the way Matthew Crawford talks about the Attention Economy and how we're essentially selling our attention to websites in return for "free" content.
I also think there's a real difference between actively sourcing information and mindlessly consuming it. Going to Netflix to specifically watch Black Mirror or Orange is the New Black is substantively different from opening Netflix and letting the algorithm suck away a few hours of your evening. Youtube tutorials are amazing and I've used them for all kinds of home, work and personal projects but it's also very easy to watch a bunch and feel like you know how to do something. I expect watching a really satisfying video of someone hand-cutting a dovetail joint between two pieces of wood releases a good chunk of the dopamine of actually doing it yourself, but it's not the same... not at all.
I don’t think you necessarily disagree as much as not seeing your own child as the outlier they are. When you surround yourself with others who are willing to do bare minimum amounts of research to find an answer, it’s easier to act like it isn’t a problem.
Yet, I live in a country where massive amounts of people are rejecting things that are insanely simply to research and to prove like the efficacy of vaccines, for instance, or whether Donald Trump is a grifting buffoon. These people have no interest whatsoever in doing research that will undermine what they’ve already chosen to believe. Motherfucker we have flat earthers out here building rockets to “prove” the earth is flat. Even some of the ones who do research, like the flat earthers, just move the goalposts and don’t seem to learn when science proves them wrong.
The sad reality is that if there are simple answers in front of them, most people won’t look for harder ones. I simply think your child is an outlier in being willing to do any amount of research on things they are interested in. For many people it’s incredibly hard to get them to even consider doing such a thing.
I think you’re also basing your opinion on your limited world view. Morons have been anti vaccine since they were invented that’s absolutely not even remotely new. Honestly most of your complaints can been seen throughout history in various forms because it’s all just human stuff. I would caution you to try to avoid this thinking if possible because, frankly, it’s some boomer shit. You picking up a sense of superiority and dunking on “kids these days” is just following the same pattern of every generation before you with slightly updated complaints.
I’d love to see humanity as a whole grow out of it and realize that the “kids these days” are just inexperienced people navigating the world exactly like we did. They have similar AND different challenges that they’re reacting to. Many of them behave exactly like you would if you were born in the same gen.
Because all they’re growing up with is dumbed down corporate black boxes of tech devices, along with a narrative that it’s wrong and evil to build, fix, copy, and be curious
Corporations make things easy so when you have to learn how to do it on your own, you’ll see that the cost of time/money/effort as too great and go back to the simple, effective, easy, low-cost corporate solution.
In many ways, it’s not really their fault, it’s driven by corporate control. Of course, it would be nice if they could break free and see that learning how things work is a useful means to an end (fuck, it’s why I know how to sew and have clothes that have lasted over a decade), but you can’t win over everybody.
I don't think they're tech-illiterate in general; there are certain things they don't understand because they've never really had to - filesystems, for instance - but that's no different from most Millennials not understanding CLIs.
I honestly think this talking point is so dumb anyway. The whole concept of generations is actually stupid. They’re just younger people dealing with their own flavor of the bullshit we all had to deal with. Their lives wouldn’t magically be enhanced if they were latchkey kids that struggled to install a hard drive without the internet. I thought we wanted them to have better and easier lives? Isn’t that the whole point? Why would we want them to struggle with our bullshit AND all the new stuff in the world that they’re dealing with now? Plop them in one semester of a beginner computer/programming course and they’ll know as much (if not more) as the average millennial it’s not that deep.
It’s wild that every generation gets dunked on by the ones that came before and so many people still grow up and repeat the cycle. Why? Just be kind to your kids and educate them if you think they’re lacking important knowledge ffs. I’m especially disappointed in millennial parents doing this shit. We’re still getting blamed for idiotic things to this day and you all didn’t even hesitate to pull the same bullshit on your kids. Do better.
To be fair, if you want content on Mastodon, you have to actively go out, find people, and follow them. After you get past that Step 1 of signing up, your home page is empty. There’s no algorithm that automatically deposits content on the main page. You have to do a little bit of work to get anything. As you say, doing this work is not that god damn hard, but sadly for about 80% of people (maybe more), this is an impassible barrier.
On the bright side, once you do get past this barrier, none of the Mastodon content that you are getting is from that bottom eighty percent.
There are some ways to see some trending stuff but yes, it is slightly hidden away and still very different from the algorithmic recommendations we’ve become accustomed to.
@seansand@vis4valentine Yeap first thing they do is say test or hello... And nothing. Then they wonder why there is no one, or why only 1 tab with news especially non English speakers are dumbfounded. I just look at live feed if in mood> see someone asking for help or test> explain # and how important to use them to find people or be found qnd how only # works in search bar. I don't blame them because not every top boosted post has # but a little proding, use # local language and voilà progress
I think the trickiest part is finding people on other instances and needing to copy/paste their links in your home instance's search bar before you can follow or reblog, especially if you're following a link someone's shared elsewhere. It's a small nuisance, but it adds up over time, and it's already more work than most social media consumers want to bother with. For Mastodon to truly take off, that needs to be automated or hidden, because most people are going to give up before they even get an explanation.
I’ve been at soo many jobs where they change something like timesheets to have an extra click when filling out and it’s always “it’s jUsT oNe cLiCk”, and then they’re inevitably sending out a company wide email three months later all mad that people aren’t filling out their timesheets.
Also the first barrier of picking a server (how it works, the rules of every instance, checking who they federate with) and an app (the will to test multiple apps, learning that to login you have to input the server url manually since most aren’t listed in the apps), to the people who read all the things it’s tedious but doable, for the rest it’s “Which one is the RIGHT choice?” and just stay at the door.
Also servers with poorly written rules don’t help (example: mstdn.mx says porn and politics are forbidden, but in reality they allow them as long as you tag then properly).
These kind of posts don’t help either, because it makes people feel like they are too stupid to join and rather stick to the known services, but omit all the actual process that someone has to go through.
If someone explaining why they use an app instead of a website (in a literal comment thread about why people would prefer an app to the mobile site) triggers you in such a way that your only response is to make up an irate strawman… it might be time to log off, step outside and practice interacting with people like an functioning adult.
But they were talking about setting their browser to incognito and/or closing their tab, both things which an app just don’t have. Nevermind that closing a tab does not log you out of your account, both things are things that he just could… not do and are not entirely normal to do when using a browser, so he did actually go out of the way to inconvenience himself in the case of the browser, it is not a strawman.
Also, I’m not triggered. Idk how you arrived at that point. You’re the one calling my statement irate and telling me to go outside and stuff. I was just being calm and slightly making fun of the comment.
The question was, why use an app. Answer was, because some people keep their browser in permanent incognito. Nobody was annoyed or irritated, it’s a completely valid answer why people prefer to do something that way for their reason. Just take the answer and move on.
I disagree, majority of my interaction with Lemmy and Mastodon is on a app on my phone. The mobile site is just okay. Let people choose their interface on how they want their content.
I find it hilarious to watch people struggling with doing things on their phone… while sitting in front of their desktop computer. My phone is for taking calls, sending texts, and playing solitaire. Anything else can wait until I have a real screen available to read it on.
Lots of people don’t have much use or time for a computer. You use the small screen when you can - during work breaks, commuting, doing errands. Shit I used to be a geek and I don’t even have a proper computer.
I just mean a screen big enough to display a decent amount of information. Trying to browse websites on a phone when you can only see a little bit of text at a time, or you have to keep swiping to see different products because they can only show one image at a time… I honestly don’t know how anyone deals with the incredible waste of time. You figure a typical computer screen is at least 2-4 times larger than a cell phone screen, and many of us are running two or more monitors on their computer, and using a cell phone screen starts to feel like looking at the world through a ten foot length of pipe.
to the people who read all the things it’s tedious but doable, for the rest it’s “Which one is the RIGHT choice?” and just stay at the door
Exactly. I'm a programmer and I do server administration on a small scale, but when I went to sign up for Mastodon my first reaction was, "How the hell am I supposed to know what instance I want my account to be on?" and I left. After a couple of weeks of absorbing random bits of information about how federation works I went back and completed the account creation process, but I really doubt that the average user who just wants to sign up for a service and use it is going to get past that step.
I really don’t understand what’s so difficult about picking an instance you like. Find an instance- Like the content? Rules look okay to you? Boom, done.
I agree. The information should be easily available if they are interested, but end users shouldn't be required to know about the underlying mechanics of the fediverse simply in order to create an account and browse.
Great thing about lemmy and most of the apps being open source is we users can add those features in ourselves. I’m sure they will be later, the fediverse is only now starting to grow after all.
Hmm, maybe if an app’s creator hosted their own instance just for accounts (i.e. with no posts of its own). That way, a new user can download an app, set up an account on that app’s dedicated accounts server, and start browsing all the other instances from there.
I flirted with journalism before getting my degree in CS.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the faculty and many of the students were almost proudly “bad at math” and basically bad with tech too, other than learning the basics of a Macbook.
Doesn’t have to be that way and many journalists are smart, great people, but there’s a weird self fulfilling culture when it comes to tech. Not totally sure about how tech focused writers would be similar or different.
“In many cases, they got into journalism to stay away from math.” Journalists love to joke about how we suck at math.
Edit 2: I guess I was bringing up my experience to be an example of how many journalists do not have a strong grasp of technical concepts and sometimes are almost proud of that. So it doesn’t surprise me that many may have struggled with Mastodon.
That being said, that attitude is far closer to the average user than, say, the user base of this platform, which is likely far more tech savvy. Streamlined user experience is not a bad thing if you desire mainstream use and is something that could be improved, though Mastodon has been making strides in that regard.
It’s interesting to me how often “math skills” are conflated with “the ability to understand technology.” Like I’m passionate about HCI/social computing research, comfortable navigating the Fediverse, jailbroke my iPod as a teen, modded Civilization (DOS) as a kid — I’m also “just okay” at math lol, didn’t even take Calculus in HS. I wonder how many people (like the journalists you describe) feel discouraged from exploring technologies because of the false “math skill = tech skill” narrative, even if plenty of people who suck at math excel at understanding technologies!
(I also wonder how many people who “suck at math” don’t actually suck at math but weren’t given a good math education during school — but that’s a rant for another thread 😂)
One of those computer people that family/friends bug to do all their computer stuff here. Been the designated technology fixer person since the 90s. I’m absolutely atrocious at maths (funnily enough, given a terrible education for it in school).
I’m a software engineer of 10 years. I’ve had a few roles during that time. Sr Engineer. Architect. Director of Engineering. Not only have I almost never used any math every time I did I copy pasted the algo to use from stack overflow or similar tech blogs. I did terrible at math in HS, never took calc struggled with trig and graduated HS with a 2.7 gpa and never went to college. Who the fuck started this meme of programming === math. The only thing close to math in programming I’ve done is when I learned the basics of lambda calculus when I was flirting with learning functional programming
Meanwhile, when you sign up for Threads your timeline is nothing but shitty influencers for the first few days, yet somehow they manage to press on through that without getting the vapors or whatever.
Social media is not social media any more. It's a one way stream of thinly coated commercials and political propaganda, behind a veil of interaction so that people feel some false sense of agency over the whole thing. In the ideal scenario, everything is perfectly tailored to targeted groups so that the whole experience feels very "engaging".
When people say the fediverse is hard, what I suspect they mean is that they don't manage to make it addictive in the same way.
People leaving Twitter are slaves looking for a new master or junkies looking for a new high. Using Mastodon as a Twitter replacement is hard in the same way it's hard to use commercial-grade glue as a substitute for heroin.
Hey I find Lemmy and Mastodon addictive enough. Then again I still use mainstream platforms too. Mainly because their are things I want to look at and people I folloe that haven’t or won’t move over.
I don't use mainstream platforms much (other than direct messaging), and was pretty fine with Mastodon. I'm finding Kbin a bit too addictive though, maybe especially because I never really used Reddit in the first place.
I find it quite funny that so many people came from Twitter, didn’t have content instantly fed to them and were like “what do I do???” you mean I have to find things myself? the horror!
Not everybody uses social media the same way and some people need instant exposure to the community to get a better start. It doesn't help that these types of posts just make people feel like they're stupid.
I had to get used to it, but then again, I never really used Twitter. I'm not a big fan of Mastodon (the format) but I really do like kbin. I was a reddit user, and this is much more familiar. Nice that it's all really just the same thing just presented in different ways and of course, no single entity controls the whole thing. 😊👍
There is no functional account migration, therefore your choice matter unless you think what you write doesn’t matter, in which case, why write at all ?
It’s very long standing issue, first issue was closed as completed but not complete
Apologies, my familiarity with some of the terms of Mastodon are still a bit rough around the edges. By relationships, do you mean your followers and who you follow?
If so, it does seem like your followers is preserved (so long as nothing inhibits the move signal), as for who you follow its not clear on the docs whether that is preserved or not (and I’ve not done an account move of my own) - but you can export a list of who you’re following from your account preferences, and then reimport it on your new account for sure.
No choice doesn’t matterat all. However, the decision on which mastodon server to use for your social media is about as important as what you’ll choose to eat today for dinner. Yeah, kinda important for the dinner itself and you don’t want some crap, but if you do, you could just eat it anyway for now and try something else tomorrow.
When you pick "federated" you'll see all posts, independent from your instance. But that's pretty much impossible because unless you have Tusky the posts will be too fast.
So yeah, to be able to read anything you have to just read the posts on your instance, meaning it does matter which one you pick.
It’s not even the speed. It’s also the content. All from all instances seems cool until you can’t read 80% of it because it’s in another language. I’m glad those instances exist but when I have to scroll through 5 posts to see one I can read, and it’s some low-effort post (on average) the experience is not a good one
Even after all that work, you’ve gotten through 3 seconds of the world’s timeline
Local is a good one, if your instance is lively enough. Then you can add people and see boosts and your world grows nicely
I find the "explore" page super useful for exploration! Spend a few minutes twice a day or so and the content quality is quite high, great place to branch out into boosts from. On my instance, I also do my best to curate the global feed to be somewhat useful (though things to creep in at the edges, I need to do some culling now for some Misskey bridges that are pretty loud in that feed).
added in March of last year, and not sure about third party apps since I use the official interface. I find it very useful though, between that, hashtags, public lists of people to follow, and boosts, I set my feed up in about 6 hours and it's been on minimal-maintenance-mode since and serving me fine. depends on how much the niche communities you like adopt the Fediverse too, YMMV!
Sorry if this is a dumb but I legit never got into Twitter, and I only use Instagram to follow friends and bands I like.
How do I Mastadon? I’m not being sarcastic, not even a little. Like I literally have absolutely no concept of what I’m supposed to do on it or how to engage with it. Same with pixelfed tbh, like I open it, I see a milliong posts that have no comments or likes, I get confused and then I leave.
Like what do you do? How do you use it? Pretend I’m one of the idiot journalists this post is making fun of, happy to jump on that self-accepting sword!
"Searching for a subject matter that interests you" in Mastodon/PixelFed is all about hashtags. If you're interested in science fiction, try #scifi. You would do well to either sign up for an instance relating to your interests (for example a dedicated scifi instance, like what startrek.website is for Lemmy), or a general purpose one (mastodon.social) where you can get a better overview. If you find an instance related to your interests later on, consider moving there.
As you search hashtags, you'll find interesting people. Follow them. You'll see some interesting posts. Boost them. Adding a star to a post serves no practical function, but it'll make the poster happy anyway (it's the same as upvotes here).
Mastodon is based a lot around boosts - if you see someone boosting a lot of content of the type you're interested in seeing, make sure to follow them and your feed will be populated by content curated by humans, not algorithms.
As long as everybody are federated - but they are not. The bigger instances tend to be federated with everyone, but the smaller/more specialized ones might not yet have federated with each other. Of course you can still follow people from anywhere (as long as they're not actively _de_federated), but searching for hashtags might unfortunately be less powerful for discovery from a smaller server. If you're on a smaller instance not specific to your interests, you might do particularly well to start out finding accounts to follow through some third party list.
The greatest advantage of being on a specialized instance is, however, in the feeds: The "local" timeline shows you anything posted by anyone on your instance, while the "federated" timeline shows you anything posted by accounts someone on your server follows. On a large, general server both these feeds will be extremely crowded with all kinds of content. On a specialized instance, it's likely that both timelines will be somewhat interesting, and people might be reading it and discover your posts there as well. :)
That is still enough friction to prevent people from signing up. I didn’t sign up for a long time because trying to choose a server felt overwhelming. It wasn’t until they allowed more sign ups at mastodon.social that I gave it another try.
Therein lies the problem. A lot of people already get decision fatigue trying to choose a server and don’t get past the sign up. Assuming that they are still willing to try and use a third party app, you get to layer finding a good app that works reliably on top of that and learning how to use the app which will be significantly different from the website. There comes a point where it’s not tech illiteracy but a lack of time and interest spending hours how to use a service that is much harder to get into than its competitors.
It seems to be an error with sign-ups through the app, I had the same issue with several different servers, but was able to create an account on their website and then log in through the app.
Even without it, the server navigation and selection (and no option to migrate your userdata) makes the sign up process a problem not worth solving for many… A lot of people will just off-hand decide they don’t really care, and leave. (This kind of onboarding is not sustainable of we want this fediverse to become a long-term fully fledged Reddit alternative, and not just another Voat with a lower percentage of racists.)
P.P.S: Also, apparently Mastodon was mostly Mark Ruffalo tweets (toots? the logo is an elephant, I think?), which are fine but uninteresting.
Same thing when people complain about how difficult it is to sign up for a Lemmy instance. You click sign up and fill out the form, if that’s difficult for you I’m sorry you’ve never used your brain before. It’s like Neo waking up from the Matrix.
Congratulations, you have just chosen the “wrong” instance. What does “wrong” mean? We won’t tell you, and you have no way of knowing until Bad Stuff happens to you.
As someone who worked in IT support at a university and later as a sys admin: I believe MOST people (including young people) can not use the internet or a computer when it goes beyond installing and using a (popular) app from the App Store.
Many people can not, for example, look up a program via search engine, go to its website, find and click the correct download link and then install the program. Many people don’t even use websites anymore, they only use applications.
Their voices are missing online simply because they are basically tech illiterate. And I think that is a huge problem.
I had students (at university!) who, instead of starting the program, would either go through the whole process of downloading and installing the program or at least start the installer and installing it again each time they wanted to start the program.
My brother is a grown-up with a degree in finance and his own company and he also isn’t able to do this.
He also refuses to understand that the photos he took with his phone are actual files on his phone. When he got a new phone and transferred his phone number he didn’t understand why the photos didn’t magically appear on the new phones camera app as well. (I think he was confused because he also uses Google Drive.)
I saw numbers from some study about tech and people’s relationships with it or whatever and it’s insane how many people think Facebook is the entire internet now that they’ve had that integrated browser for so long. It’s just all they ever learned of technology, magic rectangle go to Facebook.
I understand not being “tech savvy,” a “hobbyist,” whatever - but I can’t fathom not bothering to consider how something I use daily works AT ALL. I hate cars but I learned enough to understand how to tentatively diagnose a problem and handle minor maintenance myself, but some people take their car to the dealer like 4x a year instead.
Their voices are missing online simply because they are basically tech illiterate. And I think that is a huge problem.
I’ve seen a number of polls on the age demographics on the fediverse, and they’ve all been pretty consistent … the fediverse is basically on average a Xennial place with a surprising amount of Boomer. There are younger folks, of course, more so on lemmy/kbin than mastodon it seems (which is interesting).
But generally, in line with your comment, there’s a generational filter here that attracts those who remember the value of and how to use the old internet and old computers.
Which, if you think there’s value in what the fediverse is trying to do (free our expression and ownership on the internet), is a problem. Another way of looking at it is that the failure of allowing big-private-monopoly-social platforms to dominate for so long^1^ will have long lasting side effects including the erasure of what the internet can be in many people’s understanding of the world.
[1]: I’d estimate 2008-2023 as the era of dominant big social, where the closing year of 2023 may be too early or even open ended. That’s 14 years. Which, if we take the web as having started in 1993, and being ~30 years old, is about half the age of the internet. So, it’s a decently objective approximation, then, to say that the web is Facebook etc, especially as the relevance of older things fades. Which only amplifies the harm we allowed to transpire.
Also … check it out … lemmy can do footnotes!! Click the view source button to see how I did it if you’re interested.
Yes. Sorry if it seems I was distorting your message. I was just trying to draw a connection between different kinds of tech literacy and familiarity and how that might track with the demographics here and the history of mainstream tech.
That more young people than you would expect are missing from places like Lemmy I blame mostly on smartphones and tablets.
Over the last decades the numbers of students who own PCs/Laptops have dropped. When I first worked as a lecture assistant for computational statistics that was around 2011 almost every student had a PC or laptop and knew how to use it (to a different extent between them, of course).
The course is once a year, has about 90 students each time and, since it’s about statistics, there is a mix of students from different fields. Most are from STEM fields, a few from social science or psychology. I could basically watch tech literacy deteriorate over the years.
This years course had only a third of people in it who actually use a PC/Mac outside of the course. There was not a single person who uses Linux this year. For the university’s lecture platform or for online lectures they use their phone, tablet or a tablet computer which runs Android or iOS.
78 % of them did never write a line of code in their lifes, or so they say. The ones who did say they have programming experience often only had one of these “Learning to Code” Apps on their phones.
Most of them need extensive instruction and hand holding to install the programs we use (which is R and RStudio). You do not want to imagine how it is to teach these students basic coding in R. It is both my biggest joy and my biggest sorrow. The stories I could tell…
I highly doubt many of these students would find their way to the Fediverse. They do not think about privacy or freedom online because they are disconnected from the online world, in a way. They are simply consumers who do not feel as a part of it.
Reminds me of one time I was running a course in how to user git for uni students. Setting people up at the beginning, getting them just to install GitHub desktop, and someone puts their hand up having trouble installing the app. I get to them and see an iPad in the desk. Sighs, I explain that’s not going to work (maybe it does now?). They don’t understand why, because they can install so many other apps. I convinced them eventually. Not that I blame them, but it was interesting to see the user friendliness of a device basically block them from doing things and even understanding how that was happening.
For many with laptops, the course often became a gateway to the terminal and not finding it scary any more.
Hot take though, the unvetted exe downloads of Windows is why it gets such a bad rep for viruses. We really so need more of a repository system like Linux has. Normal people can’t be trusted to install their own software
Microsoft tried, they have the Windows Store and certain programs push you to use it, but UWP is an absolute disaster both from a user and a developer perspective so nobody wants that.
Microsoft took a good idea (software repositories) and turned it into a bad idea (software repository controlled by microsoft and you’re not allowed to add/install/validate other repositories).
They could have built (hell, even USED) apt, but they built Store.
I’m sure it’s not lack of technical skill it’s a mental block, I’ve helped so many people set up software that is literally clicking ok a dozen times then they’re like ‘oh let me print this, hang on I need to compile a firmware update and flash it using a telegraph key…’ big brands have the shittiest software, but people feel they should be able to understand because it’s professional but something like an open source federated social network is nerd stuff so they feel the the shouldn’t be able to.
Case in point, I installed MPV on a friends laptop because VLC wouldn’t play the file without crashing, the install process is super simple but they have green on black hacker terminal output instead of a process bar and you type Y when prompted instead of clicking yes – it gave her anxiety just watching me do it, said maybe we should try uninstalling VLC and reinstalling instead… Of course mpv played the video flawlessly and used less CPU and ram doing so which warmed her to it. There’s no way she couldn’t have understood everything and done it herself but the fact it’s not as corporate as VLC would have written it off (and wow that’s a crazy thing to say, I love that there’s so much great open source software that VLC is middle of the road)
Definitely, some people have some weird kind of anxiety when it comes to this. I think in many cases they believe they aren’t intelligent enough to get it and that only really intelligent people can understand these things.
It is the same in math. It has this aura of being super out there. And, let’s be honest, it seems like some people in tech fields try to uphold that notion.
I try so hard to show people how to do things themselves when they ask me to help them with various tech…whatever, and almost universally get told “no.”
Magic rectangle take me to Facebook, if it doesn’t I need someone to make the magic rectangle take me to Facebook, and I refuse to understand it any further.
Which is funny because if you open the App Store and search for Mastodon you’ll find an app you can install and will prompt you to create an account and login.
Yes it will default to mastodon.social or whatever but that’s a fine default.
Folks that say it’s too hard just don’t even want to try.
I’ll add to this that most people don’t understand the difference between a service and a client. Yes, even though they use email, to them it’s just “my gmail” and they don’t think past that. They don’t know you can use different clients, or the web. They just don’t. It’s an app on their phone.
The reason the internet was so great in the early 2000s is that THOSE PEOPLE WERENT ON IT.
I’ve had the most confusing conversation when a relative referred to their browser (Chrome) as “Google” (which to me means the search engine or the company, not the browser). It was only when they later mentioned Firefox as an alternative to Google that I realized what they were talking about.
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