this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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yeah it's basically just good old reddit but with email-like distributed servers.
This is one of of the things that concerns me about society.
There are plenty of people who are unwilling to put in 5 minutes to learn a new skill, such as joining lemmy, and they chalk it up to being unable to.
It's not "basic technology". It's easy to find somewhere to get an email account, but you're not going to find a Lemmy instance on Facebook or in an advert or at work. And Email doesn't usually say "we don't like that instance anymore so you won't get any more messages from there, so you have to sign up to something else" (see Beehaw).
The problem is y'all are tech savvy and have no idea what it's like to not be tech savvy. Hell, my wife is a goddamn computer scientist and can't handle this stuff.
Your wife can't handle what? Googling "lemmy world" and signing up just like any other social media?
She can't or she just don't want to? It's hard to believe that it's the first option.
The perfect platform is one that has great UI, broad functionality, and is just complicated enough to keep out the low hanging fruit. I feel like keeping the barrier of entry just high enough that we don't end up with as many debate perverts and shit talkers as Reddit is preferable.
But Lemmy IS harder to use than alternatives, that's just irrefutable. If I have a Reddit Account, I can interact with any Reddit content in any sub, directly. I don't have to find the version of that post in my instance, DIRECT ACTION.
Sometimes I feel like a federated login (think Google OAuth style) would be far superior to just federating content.
But a central authentication authority would be antithetical to the federated platform ethos. If the central authority goes under or goes rogue, everyone on the platform is boned. The goal of federation is to avoid exactly that.
Yes, which makes the system harder to use, ergo all the comments from normies. There are obvious advantages to federation, but I wish people stopped pretending there aren't any trade-offs.
Honestly, it could be a UX solution, that doesn't need a fundamental change in federation. I can already post as myself to lemmy.ml, even though my account isn't there. So a solution that transparently does exactly that, but while I'm browsing the lemmy.ml instance should be possible. Somewhat similar to how following people on Mastodon on different instances opens a popup for login, then follows them. Honestly, even just an easier/automated way to map from to would help. Currently, it's all instance specific IDs. If posts/comments/etc had a similarly global ID system as communities there'd be a lot less problems. Visiting that post would simply mean replacing the host part of the URL, something a browser plugin could take care of.