Technology

I think there's active misinformation being shared about the difficulty of use for fediverse playforms. Yeah it's 20 clicks instead of 5 but it's not that hard.

It's easy to forget outside of communities like this how low tech literacy actually is.

I think I don't understand probably 95% of how the internet works and I'm fairly sure that I'm above average in my general understanding.

If the Fediverse really wants to break into the mainstream, and I'm neither saying it does or it should, then these things need to become easier and straightforward.

Joining a server isn't hard, but finding content outside of the server you have chosen can be. Lemmy seems to be better than Mastodon here, but still.

People don't care about federation as such. They want their social network and they want it all, regardless of which server it sits on, and they want it easy.

As someone who works in IT, I can tell you that ive witnessed firsthand so many people who get viruses because when someone gives them a URL, they dont just go to that site. They go to www.google.com, search for the URL, and blindly click on the first result, which is almost always an ad, and which sometimes is a link to malware. Fun times.

People in 90s and 2000s used to get informed before going online, as it used to be a big spending and commitment. Between all the tech-utopia hype you also got to hear about what to avoid and how to behave.

Nowadays you only need a cheap smartphone and start scrolling through algorithm-fed content indefinitely. No need for technical knowledge because the company takes care of that. No need for an intro class, because who even bothers anymore?

Something I often need to keep in mind is that when I was growing up the home PC was pretty crude and mysterious. You had to learn what a command line was, you had to learn about data backups and file trees, you had to learn about navigation and discovery of the web.

Sure you might not have done any of this stuff for decades now, depending on how you engage with the infernal devices, but if you see a forum you know what that is, how it works, what you expect to find inside. If you see URLs with like foo.com/place@otherfoo you kinda intuitively grasp what that is saying.

But if you're like 20 now probably the first computer you ever touched was a magic box where you just clicked things to open stuff and they managed their own little things. Clicked a thing to install other clicky things. You don't know what a config file is, why would you? you don't really use URLs much, you just click the internet and start typing and then click the right link etc.

To a lot of those people some of this stuff is as arcane as like arch linux is to your average millennial PC user. Despite fedi (and arch! I use arch btw) actually being really simple and obvious there's a barrier of unfamiliarity and a lot of basic skills you need to learn first.