Unfortunately(???) no. It's just too confusing for the average user to bother to attempt with it. I'm having fun stumbling through it a bit while I have the weekend off, but the average non tech savvy user is not going to sit down and figure it all out. Happy to be here, though. I think I'm finally settling on lemmy.world as my instance, as you can create your own community here (unlike Beehaw) and it seems pretty chill, but large enough to not just vanish. Hope everyone is well.
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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I don't think it's *super *confusing. I've been playing with it an hour and already feel ready to go. It helps that the first thing on Lemmy.World is an explainer for how communities and servers work. I had a bit of confusion coming from join lemmy to lemmy world.
Having recently taught my completely tech illiterate mother how to sign up and use Reddit I would say it's not any more complex at it's core to a low level user. 'Sign up here, join communities, off you go!' and just skip explaining the back end of it all. She still doesn't get Reddit as an aggregate service but she understandings searching for gardening, and joining the gardening sub gives her gardening posts on her front page.
I think improving onboarding on the Join Lemmy will go a long way to lowering the barrier for entry, offering up simple explanations will make it seem less intimidating. Like the time's people suggest using Lemmy I've seen they explain what it is instead of just being like "It's like reddit, sign up here {Insert server here}." To a low level user how it works won't really matter as long as their personal server continues to exist.
People on the internet always over-estimate the attention span, effort, and tech literacy of the average individual. Most people are going to open the website, be confused at which website they are supposed to join and close the page.
I agree it's not hard at all once you get used to it. But the vast majority of people are NOT going to take the time to do so. It's not even that it's necessarily too difficult, it's that the average user is not going to put in the effort to figure it out if it's not intuitive.
Yes, you could sit down and teach someone how to use a website, but most users are not going to have someone doing that for them or be interested in having someone do that for them.
the difficulty is a feature
if they are legitimately too slow-in-the-minds to work out how lemmy works, then i dont want them here
Just what I was thinking. I mean, yes, it means there will be less people overall, but I think that's a good thing. It reminds me of old school forums where it was a smaller crowd and you'd actually get to know repeat posters over time. A bonus of less people means there should be more quality posts and discussion instead of just repeat questions/posts, etc.
Reddit was just getting too darn big with too much "noise".
BTW, this is my first comment post. It already seems quieter and calmer here.
I think the only confusing part are that there are multiple “instances” that could have similar communities and not just a centralized site. Once you understand that and how it works it’s not so bad.
Does it need to win? Can't it co-exist with others? As long as you have enough people to have nice discussions. You can have that with 10 million people, don't need all 8 billion here... Mastodon is still way smaller than other social media, but still I enjoy it very much. There are enough interesting people there to fill my timelines.
I kinda write biased so I could spur precisely this sort of stimulating response. What will it mean when the large cluster of people aren't quite as readily available though... and finding the hidden communities is once again about being 'in the know'... I'm really just musing over here as I watch the world...
Framing everything in terms of winners and losers is an unfortunate condition. As users who tend to enjoy niche things, we should understand this easily.
Well, currently, I'm confused af and I think I signed up unnecessarily to like three different fediverse sites, trying to understand this. We have a long way to go on the decentralized front when so many corporations and users exist on mainstream platforms.
You're always welcome to sign up with mine xD hahaha xD
I think ultimately, you use one, and then can use that account to affiliate with any other server on the fediverse. I created my own because I also was confused as to why I should pick one server over another when in essence my own should be sufficient.
While I want that to happen, I don't know if we can, so many people use Reddit. And I don't know if they're willing to leave. I talked to a friend and he said Reddit was convenient and he didn't want to switch.
when you are familiar with the enviroment you could make an account for him with a few communities he may like and then let him log in on a specific website. That way he has an easy entry and some content but not the front up confusion