Having spent a lot of time on Mastodon… There are tons of people there talking about federated and self-hosted services, software freedom, censorship, encryption, tech regulation… A very narrow range of topics directly surrounding the fediverse get a lot of attention.
But nobody talks about anything else. Nobody goes to Instagram to talk about Instagram, nobody goes to Tiktok to talk about Tiktok, nobody goes to Facebook (at all). People use social media to either talk to their friends or talk about their hobbies and interests.
And if your hobby is tech, that’s fine, enjoy. I like tech too. But please, if you have anything else to say, say it. The fediverse will never appeal to the masses if we don’t embrace a wide variety of hobbies and interests.
We need people here talking about cooking. We need people here talking about fashion. We need people here talking about immigration policy. We need people here talking about everything people enjoy!
Yes, if you go to /m/fashion right now, it’s… barely there. You’re not going to get a ton of conversation when you post there. But that’s not the point. The point is to build out the community, so that, a year from now, as more and more people attempt to post and engage, there is a conversation. There’s a reason to be on the fediverse besides the meta circlejerk over how great the fediverse could be in theory.
This is the “content” people are craving. Find or start a magazine for your city, or your town, or your country. Write a post. Share posts from your favorite blogs. Comment on something, if you have anything to say at all. Share a youtube video—yes, a youtube video, I know, youtube sucks, but at least it gives us a path to a community here.
You ever been on forums? You know what it’s like to not have upload privileges as a user and have to upload everything manually on some pix host?
The fediverse is like that and will most probably stay like that. Why? Cuz space costs money, and people host their own instances.
This fact (having to upload your content on external hosts, rather than just hitting the image upload button and the thing gets uploaded on the instance) coupled with how different the fediverse is and how harder it currently is to find communities you might like, is a no go for most normies. Deal with it 🤷.
Reddit became huge off the back of imgur, only developing its own (asstacular) image upload service in recent years. I haven’t had to upload many photos to kbin yet (it seems to work fine), but I can’t imagine imgur being a problem if I had to use it.
I highly doubt this is part of the problem.
That was true 13+ years ago, when most normies didn’t even have a FB account, let alone a reddit account. Back then reddit was mostly full of geeks, they know how to upload images on pix hosts, that was never a problem for them, and it isn’t now, that’s why we use Lemmy, dispite of it lacking a lot of things that a social media platform in 2023 is most definitely supposed to have. But, we don’t care. Normies care. The don’t like having to switch 10 different apps to upload an image, to have to copy/paste comm URLs in search because your instance still doesn’t federate with the instance with the comm that you’d like to join, they don’t like not being able to follow users (Lemmy still doesn’t support that), they don’t like having 50 different apps that basically do the same thing (which, of course, it’s the whole point of joining an open source network, choice). They want consitency, which is the only thing that the fediverse will never have, and the whole point of even having a fediverse (you don’t like a policy on an instance? fine, move, no one’s stopping you 🤷). When you take away consitency from them, they feel overwhelmed and this thing is just too complicated, end of story.
See, normies were never a part of forums, IRC, BBSes. They’re late internet adopters. They have no idea how things were, that different servers might have different rules, some require SSL, some don’t, others might wan’t you to register the uname with an email, etc. They will never get the defederated aspect of the fediverse. It’s like speaking some alien language to them, it simply does not compute. Corporate centealized media is all they know.
It’s really not that hard to explain. Just tell them it’s like email, they’ll get it.
I swear, most techies think that non-techies are another species. It’s not that hard to explain things, and not everybody is as incompetent as our mothers. Young people understand technology better than old people, not worse, not sure how that part has you confused.
But yeah, being able to post photos directly without going to imgur is easier and more intuitive, I’m glad it seems to be built into kbin without any issue.
You’re talking about people that open up FB accounts with a phone number… they don’t understand the concept of email.
They don’t even understand the concept of phone numbers, they just know they dial and get the other person on the other end, that’s it.
You sure about that? Cuz I’ve had talks with young people that are considered techies amongst their friends, they know a lot less than what techies used to know at that age, which was dissapointing for me. For example, they know that Thor hides their real IP, they don’t know how though. They think it’s somehow magical and that it doesn’t need an IP.
Though I have to admit that I have also met great ones amongst them. The trouble is, they are precious little to be found. And they’re usually the weird kids, not even techies, just pure genious, future coders in most cases. So, no one actually notices them. You’ll hear about them as the guy/gal that invented this or that algo that navigates this or that.
No, I’m not. My mom is afraid of computers, but she understands email just fine. I’ve been able to explain federation to a lot of my non-techie friends. You’re giving me some hypothetical caricature of a technophobe, but I’m telling you, I’ve done it, I’ve explained it to people, it’s not that hard, you just hate people too much to give them a chance.
I assume you’re talking about TOR, and not Thor. I consider myself a techie, I’m a patent attorney with a degree in computer science. I’ve read about how TOR works a few times, and probably once new whatever it is you’re getting at, but I couldn’t tell you how the fuck TOR works now. And I couldn’t care less. And I don’t need to understand it to sign up for the fediverse or upload a photo to kbin or upload a photo to imgur.
You don’t need to be a software engineer with experience in every field of technology to click a link, sign up for an account, and leave a comment. My mom could do it (if she wanted to, although she’s probably get angry at me if I suggested it and talked to her about it for more than 20 seconds).
You’re just being an elitist misanthrope here. This has nothing to do with the issues facing the fediverse.
Really? Then please come over here and try to explain the same to my mom. Cuz I’ve tried it a million times, she doesn’t understand the concept and she doesn’t like to understand at this point, all she knows is, it works, like a phone number, it just works. She doesn’t understand why calling her brother abroad without the country’s calling code doesn’t work, I had to type the number in her phone with the country’s code because she didn’t think that was important and just left the code out… cell operators were also a PITA to explain to her, and I don’t think she got that either, cuz she still asks me what the first 3 numbers in front of the cell are and sometimes I give her bogus codes just to see if she’ll go “don’t screw with me”, but she writes them down and never asks me why is this code different from all of the rest that are in use here… not ever.
So please, don’t tell me everyone understands email, cuz they don’t. I’ll bet you whatever you want that, if you do a street questionare and ask people to explain the concept of email as plainly as possible, over 70% with either get it completely wrong or just shrug and tell they have no idea how it works.
Yeah, Tor, sorry. Had a nick on a game, Thorazine, everyone called me Thor there, so now it just slips sometimes.
You don’t need to understand any of that, apparently you have a logic streak in you since you have degree in computer science. One, not everyone has that gift, two, even if they did, they might not have developed it, and three, you went to uni. Please tell me the world statistic (percentage) of people that actually went and graduated. I haven’t seen the statistic either, but I bet it’s no more than 15% on a global scale, which about sums my estimate of over 80% of the population not being able to understand simple things (yes, they are simple IMO) like email or federation. It’s not that it’s complicated, it’s the attention span problem. Uni teaches to have long studying session, weeks, months at a time. People that never did that, they just can’t force their brain to concentrate on one single thing for more than 5 minutes at a time, especially not if they’re not getting paid for it and none of their friends use that thing that you’re trying to explain. The very concept of freedom and having the choice to do things your way or how you’d like to be run, escapes them. They just don’t care. They use whatever their friends, coworkers, family use. Why? Cuz why not. Everyone else uses it, it’s simple, you just type in your phone, reset you password (cuz none of them actually remember it, they’re not used to remembering stuff) and off you go to using that app on your new device.
You proved my point with the last sentence in brackets. People usually don’t care about techie stuff. Techies do, they love it, but regular people… no. Why would I bother explaining something like the fediverse or email to anyone that doesn’t even wanna hear about that. Has anyone ever asked you (out of the blue) “hey man, you know how that mastodon thing works?”. No… and no one ever will… not unless you start explaining first. No one cares dude, because they’re perfectly OK not knowing about that and just living their lives with coproeate social media. It’s a means to and end for them, they don’t actually care about freedom, they don’t even understand why this is free and the other one isn’t, lol 😂, they’re both free to them, except this one is a hell of a lot more complicated for signing up. “Now I gotta chech my email for a confirmation link, great 😒… shit, can’t remember my password 🤦… aaah, fuck this shit.” See how easy it is for normies to give up. Make the sign up process with a phone number and sign ups will skyrocket, I guarantee you that. But… wait, that’s info that I would rather not share with a social network. Yes, for people like you and me, yes, for normies, it’s just easier 🤷.
I’m just real… at least that’s how I see myself.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why wouldn’t you just give her a number and tell her that’s the number? Fuck that, why don’t you just send her a contact and tell her “click on Bob and it’ll call bob! Or tell it to call Bob and it’ll call Bob!” Why the fuck would you ever bother to explain country codes to her? Nobody needs to know about country codes, you’re inventing this problem.
I’m getting the impression that when you say you don’t understand email, you’re talking about how people don’t know how email routing works, don’t understand pop vs imap, don’t understand why the sender field is sometimes not accurate. That’s not what I’m talking about, because it doesn’t fucking matter. Everybody knows everything they actually have any reason to know about email. If I asked a hundred people on the street how to send an email, or check their email, one hundred of them would be able to describe the process successfully. You’re just looking for excuses to call them stupid to make yourself feel smarter.
Well, obviously college isn’t the only sign of intelligence, obviously you don’t need a college degree to operate imgur, or upload a photo to kbin, obviously children don’t have college degrees, and obviously different nations and cultures have different systems and norms around education, but:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cac/intl-ed-attainment
So 40%, as of 2021, in OECD countries. Is that good enough for you, asshole?
Also, fun fact, 4.37 billion people use email: https://techjury.net/blog/how-many-email-accounts-are-there/. (yeah, that article is written weirdly).
How fucking stupid are you? It’s literally called social media. You’re confused about why people would rather see what their nieces and nephews are up to than listen to some stranger rant about how stupid everybody, everywhere is?
you should not be remembering your passwords. You know you’re not supposed to remember your passwords, right? I have hundreds of unique, complex, randomized passwords, I don’t remember them. I know a lot of normies who are smart enough to not remember their passwords, Apple and Google are both making it easy. Why are you remembering your passwords? Are you part of that 80%?
They shouldn’t need to. Most people don’t know how IG works and enjoy it just fine. The reason people don’t enjoy the fediverse is not that it’s too complicated, it’s that it’s not enjoyable enough. If people ask me what the deal is, I explain it, but if they ask me why they should join, I can only talk about theory and potential, because there’s nothing worth doing here, it’s all potential. It needs to be an enjoyable place with people who don’t call them idiots and with people who are talking about things they want to talk about.
You don’t need to roll your own server on the fediverse. You don’t need to compile your own app from source. You don’t need to set up your own image server to share images from. You just need to come here and lurk, or vote, or comment, or post, or whatever, and have some fun.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Plenty of services offer both options because they might as well. Yeah, SMS is less secure. Who cares? This is not a bank account, nobody’s account is gonna get hacked. And email really isn’t secure in the first place. But also, there are plenty of services that only offer email signup, and plenty of people use them, and I’ve never really heard of anybody having an issue signing up with email, my mom manages, my sisters manage, my technophobic cousins manage.
But they would never come to the fediverse in the first place, because the fediverse never really had a selling point that mattered to any of them. They want to see their friends, and their friends don’t use it, or see their hobbies, and nobody talks about their hobbies, or see anything that they could possibly care about, and there’s none of that here. If I paid people to check it out, they wouldn’t stay. I know plenty of people who signed up for accounts and never posted because there’s nothing to talk about, nobody to engage with.