this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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Agree. But it's not kids, it's stupid people of all ages. Same thing happened with Reddit and with the Internet as a whole. Used to be you had to be a little smart to know you wanted to be on the Internet and figure out how to get it working. Then same was true of forums and IRC. Then same was true of Reddit. But then Reddit changed formats trying to be a TikTok style quick content scroll app, so idiots who just want to scroll started using the site and quality of discussions went down. I hope Lemmy grows but I hope the sign up process stays as it is, to weed out the extra stupid.
I think you‘re onto something. I read a lot of comments of people thinking the fediverse is too complicated to deal with and while I disagree - but also think it has issues - there does seem to be a barrier of entry for a good portion of people in the form of „inconvenience.“ So whoever is here really wants to be here and not just be an anonymous arse. I don‘t think you gotta be particularly smart, you gotta step out of your comfort zone.
Hmm this is also a good point. I've been explaining to redditors that Lemmy is not that complicated and only takes a couple minutes to get started. But reading this, now I'm hoping Lemmy can find the balance between number of active users and quality of content. I'm wondering if my spreading the word on reddit was a bad idea.
Maybe the "work" required to make the jump to Lemmy will be enough to keep lower quality content (for whatever reason) at bay for a bit longer, though. Of course, it won't last forever. All we can do is make our communities good spaces from the get-go and try to maintain them carefully as we grow.
I think the way Lemmy works (wrt federations) makes this less of an issue. Eventually people who like the way things used to be will primarily use oldhead instances that only federate with other oldhead instances. Lemmy.world will end up feeling just like Reddit (more or less) but there will always be spaces for other communities.
I think it‘s good to grow. Lemmy (or the Fediverse, I suppose?) should be as inclusive, convenient, and engaging as can be. It has only just started (in my opinion), we‘ll see how it goes. I like it here so far, feels like people are less prone to jump at your throat for voicing a (harmless) opinion.
Which part of it is supposed to be complicated? I've seen this argument many times, and while I'm still trying to figure out the user interface(s), the whole idea is pretty basic
Yes, this exactly. I'm starting to suspect that either someone very misinformed or someone with an agenda started spreading this rumor.
It just takes one person to reaffirm that it really is "too much work to switch" and "you aren't lazy for not trying" to keep a lot of folks in place.
This kept me off Lemmy until the blackout. I was interested prior to that, but so many people said it was complicated, I figured I'd look into it at some vague point in the future when I had time to untangle the fediverse. Then the baclout happened, and what do you know I had time, and lo and behold it was easy. I'm now a bit annoyed I was dissuaded for so long based on BS about it being complicated.
I just had to find an instance (or "site") that allowed sign-ups and register. My first account was on Kbin since it seemed less buggy on mobile. I feel like they think something's complicated just because it's on a website, or because there are multiple options.
It’s not rocket science but if we’re being honest about it, it’s not exactly an easy concept either. Going from centralised to decentralised for a social network is not an easy idea especially when one isn’t familiar with federation.
For example, at first I was confused because I’d browse a community on lemmy.ml, I’d want to hit subscribe, but then my account is on lemmy.world.
The fact that the website “moves” while I’m reading a post, doesn’t help either.
I had to get a better grip with defederation too. So, on one instance you see 4 comments, but another instance has 5. Because one of the instances doesn’t federate (at least that’s how I understand it now). Or maybe it’s just lag?
Anyway what I’m getting at is I understand why people say it’s complicated and I for one wouldn’t have bothered to get familiar with these concepts if reddit wasn’t going kaboom.
I can‘t tell you since I also disagree. I did basically the same thing I did on Reddit, I only got thrown off seeing multiple „subs“ with the same name.
Some people complained how complicated „explanations“ are. I saw these types of comments on the Reddit Alternatives sub.
I would guess the whole "federation" part. It can be confusing for non tech minded people to try and understand distributed sites. They might not understand that lemmy.world and lemmy.ml while both being lemmy are not the same site.
Getting one’s head around the concept of instances is hard for some people who aren’t used to dealing with tech beyond the basic social platforms.
Is it one social media platform, or is it a bunch of individual ones? The fact that the answer is “it depends” is confusing. Especially when you get into defederation and cross-platform interaction.
Very true. I often make the mistake of thinking that if something makes sense to me pretty quickly, it will be just as quick for others.
We should remember that those of us here now are more likely to be uniquely interested in this tech and thus more able to wrap our heads around these concepts without being deterred. We could always do a better job making it accessible for beginners who don’t benefit from the same background.
I'm also a bit confused by it being 'complex'. I created an account (I chose .world as it had world in the name, as it turned out that was a great decision lol), you log in, click on 'all' and sort by top/day you've essentially got 'Reddit', or am I missing something lol.
It was the worst thing to witness on reddit. A post with tens of thousands of likes and only a handfull of comments
I boosted from 1k karma to 20k by searching 'pun' on every top joke each day for a week.
It's enough that good/bad posts get boosted up/down by votes without them generating Karma.
Intelligent answers aren't always the most popular...
Reddit karma wasn't about popularity or intelligence. It was about who got there first. If you shotgun enough comments into brand new threads your karma will skyrocket.
Also, making comments on the top comments. Plus that's the only way for new replies to have visibility once a thread has over ~1000 replies.
When IRC was entirely people on command line clients that existed on *nix. But that has changed with the ease of use of clients for Windows, and then eventually web clients.