Is the Fediverse too confusing for non-technical users? | Hacker News Reader

Is the Fediverse too confusing for non-technical users?

mxb.dev

9 pointsmxbck17 comments

So why not use reuse pre-existing terminology? Server, is known to everyone who ever played a game. Why throw away all the user work too learn strange cs-magic words?

At this point its almost pathologic with open source. Incapable to accept a user power assymetry. Everyone has to become an expert. Utopian visions, while leaving the users hanging out to dry in dystopian user experiences.

Year of the linux desktop 2012.

Year of the open source social network 2022.

Year of acceptance that grandma does not want to be a developer 2038.

Sorry for being bitter about this, but those who allow this to go on, are the very same are feeding the software megacorpos of this earth.

This is a similar vibe I was getting too honestly. I checked out the git repo thinking about doing some contributions, but the more I use mastodon the less it feels like the user is being cared about at all. There's a load of cult of technology thinking going on, and choices to remove stuff users expect ('favourite' counts on the timeline) because of idealism ("it will give favouritism to posts with high counts).

The fav count is not accurate except on the original server anyway, due to how the protocol is designed.

If telephones were invented today, we'd hear griping about how looking people up from phone books was too confusing for non-technical users.

Imagine you want to make an email account. You get to choose between gmail, outlook or whatever. It doesn't matter. None of these providers are for specific communities, they're businesses, some funded by ads, some charge money. It doesn't say anything about you which provider you choose. You don't have to worry that you won't be considered a part of some community anymore and will lose your email address.

Anecdote time: We have an internal site for more math exercises in my university. The teachers still have a mix of email providers, like 1/3 gmail, 1/3 hotmail and 1/3 yahoo. Until a few years ago (5?), the students had like 1/2 gmail and 1/2 hotmail, probably due to the MSN Messenger. Now students have 99% gmail, gmail, gmail, because everyone has a cell phone that ask nicely to have a gmail account.

It's just not the content they want if my 65 year old granny can figure out discord because her sewing community is there everyone else can figure out the "fediverse". There is just not enough good content for non-technical users on there. It's all a Kreiswichs as we would say in german.

> Generally speaking: The more independence a technology gives you, the higher its barrier for adoption.

Not at all. No idea where the author got that weird idea from. RSS is nothing like high barrier. IRC neither - list rooms, choose your nick, and chat within 1 minute - no need to even create an account! Everyone who was non-technical was using both of those well before there was anything else.

Ridiculous take.

It's not because those technologies were displaced that they were "high barrier". It's because the newer platforms brought other benefits (and had marketing budgets too, powered by ads).

"federation":network

"instance": server

federated feed":network feed.

"activitypub":magic glue that binds.

"mastodon":one of the backend operating systems.

other than that, what discord has done, "server" is not a weird term for those users so they understand if they join a "server" they can interact with a certain community, the same is the case here but instance is yet another terminology which takes time to understand.

I think these are still technical. No social media company would pick these words, because they'd have branding. Twitter doesn't have posts, it has tweets, and retweets.

I think "federation" would be better as something like "community", and "instance" as "neighborhood" - which have real-life equivalents that someone who knows nothing about computers can understand, or at least maybe make a guess as to what they are.

how about a home/neighbourhood analogy then?

Discord uses server even for groupings that aren't associated with physical or even cloud servers.

Discord borrowed the term from online gaming, as its initial target audience was gamers.

Models like 'subreddit,' 'Discord server,' and 'Facebook group' are simple to grasp because they are stand-ins for physical spaces. Posts are made or read in these specific communal contexts.

To my understanding, Mastodon instances don't fit this model. The most common analogy I see is an email provider, but the mental model most email users operate with is sending a letter to another person. It's not clear what the comparison means beyond 'you can sign up on any instance and people on other instances can see your posts,' which is only part of the story, only partially true, and way too technical.

For Mastodon to catch on there needs to be an intuitive metaphor. It cannot be 'Twitter but X' or 'email but Y'. Twitter itself has the 'town square' metaphor. What is Mastodon?

as i wrote earlier, your "instance" is your "home" while the federated network is your neighbourhood. you communicate with members of your home like @john but with your neighbours as @john@neighour . you can ask your home "manager" to block someone is someone is doing something naughty and if a neighbour is doing something naughty, you can ask your "manager" to block their access to you home, like closing your own blinds. if the offending neighbour gets really loud, your "manager" can have a restraining order banning them from coming to your property.

you can talk to your home members, your immediate neighbours, your neighbours on the other side of the city or the state, whatever....

does that make some sense?

Yes, that's a fine start.

However to me 'home' implies either some level of authority/ownership or a relationship with an owner. From my understanding it's much more difficult to run a Mastodon instance than a Discord server so most new users are encouraged to join the big instances. Without a connection to their 'home,' I think the metaphor breaks down. It seems for most people the choice is between joining a general purpose instance or a 'clique' instance focused on a particular identity or subculture.

People don't want formal allegiances to subreddits, Discord servers, or email providers; these are just the spaces they visit and tools they use. And why should I tell a home manager to block someone when I can block them myself?

I just realized fediverse isn’t some federal government initiative to consolidate their services.

I think the name, particularly with a capital ‘F’ is far too misleading. “Fed” has a well established meaning and it’s not what fediverse means. I wonder if it’s intentionally misleading or just oblivious naming for federated web.

If yes then you should be glad for that. Keep the normies away. Gatekeeping is good.

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