- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
The linked post shows how most non-tech people’s understanding of email is very very different from most of the people here.
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I honestly think it stills explains it pretty well. Most casual users will not download a specific client and will be fine with the whole idea of an instance being tied to its user interface. It still explains pretty well that it doesn’t largely matter what instance you sign up for and that any instance can talk to (mostly) any other instance, just like with email.
So yea, I still think it’s a good analogy. It’s not perfect but yea, that’s to be expected from an analogy.
I’m pretty tech minded and I have no idea what the hell any of y’all mean when you say it’s like email because I don’t know the technical details of how email works. I just know how it’s used.
You think non-tech people are gonna understand that? They’re just gonna assume it is email, in the way it is used; not how the shit works under the hood.
When I make the analogy, I just mean the fact that a Gmail account can send emails to a Yahoo account or any other email provider. In the same way, a Feddit.dk account can talk to a yiffit.net account. There is not a single company controlling email and there is not a single company controlling the fediverse. That’s really all there is to the analogy.
I have seen people not think someone with a gmail email could email to someone with a yahoo email
I have also seen teachers who teach ICT be confused when seeing a email that isnt one of the popular ones
I’m really disappointed with Lemmy’s idea of federation: all it is is a bunch of servers mirroring one another, but the user accounts are server-bound. No jumping instance and taking your identity seamlessly with you.
This isn’t really Lemmy’s idea of federation, it’s just ActivityPub, the underlying protocol. Having a mechanism for jumping servers is unfortunately quite complicated and it isn’t clear how it should be done or if it is even possible.
Lemmy does allow you to export and import your settings though, so you can kinda do it but you lose your history.
ActivityPub spec allows content-addressed IDs, just nobody implemented them and now it’s too late.
The problem as I understand it is basically that user IDs in ActivityPub are intrinsically tied to the domain on which the user registered, so you can’t really move a user from one domain to another.
AFAIK the Nostr protocsl sorta let’s you hop around, but it’s full to the brimwith cryptobros, and I’m still not sure how moderation works there.
Yea moderation becomes a big problem once you can’t actually block people. I don’t like that Nostr describes itself as censorship resistent or even censorship free, that’s not a good quality.
…
I’m not very familiar with Nostr, but knowing other distributed protocols, you can just hide messages from selected users in client.
censorship resistent or even censorship free, that’s not a good quality.
Also, wtf did I read?
Censorship-free implies that moderation is impossible. If you don’t have moderation, your social media will turn into a Nazi bar.
you can just hide messages from selected users in client
That’s not good enough. First of all, users don’t want to have to block people before having a good experience. Users don’t want to deal with moderation themselves, but they also don’t want mean people, harassment and nazis. It’s not easy to recruit moderators for online forums, not a lot of people want to deal with that stuff.
But secondly, client-level blocking is not effective. It does not stop those bad users from continuing their bad behavior. In the case of Lemmy, it also doesn’t stop their votes from still affecting your feed.
So yes, censorship-free platforms are not good because censorship-free means moderation-free, and users don’t want that.
First of all, users don’t want to have to block people before having a good experience.
In general conversation in distributed protocols is opt-in, not opt-out. If you see something you don’t like in Briar/Tox/Jami, then it is only because you actively seek it.
Okay, but that is not how the fediverse/Lemmy works at all and I don’t think Nostr works that way either. You can easily see content that you did not explicity ask for (i.e. comments/posts from any user) and I don’t think Nostr is different in this aspect (though I could be wrong).
I think you (and the Nostr people as well) are just muddling terms here. Censorship is about an external 3rd party (usually the Government) preventing you from seeing things you are potentially interested in, not (as in the case of Lemmy) your service provider and their trusted moderators helping you curate your social media experience. If you are unhappy with the moderation you can easily switch to another instance and use other communities.
I mean I don’t disagree, but that’s clearly not what Nostr means when they say censorship resistent, cause by that logic, Gmail and Facebook are as censorship resistent as Nostr is.
I don’t think there really is a great difference either. Censorship and moderation are just two perspectives on the same thing. One has bad connotations, the other generally good connotations.
If you don’t have moderation, your social media will turn into a Nazi bar.
Worse, it will immediately devolve into a CP haven. The dark web is dark for a reason.
The dark web is dark for a reason.
Yeah. The reason is Google doesn’t care about them.
I now after many years of living understand most people don’t care or even want to understand how anything works. It completely baffles me.
Everyone I know says I’m smart but nah, I was literally in special Ed classes in school. I’m proven slower than the rest, but I am just curious and want to understand how things work which no one else does. It blows my mind how uninterested people are in the things they use everyday
You might be slower than the rest, but still smarter than them. Hare and turtoise kinda situation. Nothing wrong with being a slow learner, the willingness to learn is where it’s at.
I am just curious and want to understand how things work which no one else does.
It depends on how interested you are in a subject. Everything is interesting, but you may not find everything equally interesting, nor do you have time to know everything there is to know about everything.
For instance, if I fly somewhere, I have a general idea of how wings create lift. But if you try to explain it to me in detail, I’ll tell you to piss off because all I really want to do is travel from A to B.
But I know plenty about other subjects that I’m really into, that I could bore you to tears with and you’d end up punching me in the face if I tried to explain them to you.
It’s not okay to not know anything about something. But it’s okay to know enough.
That’s fine but when people use technology every day, their phones, computers, ect… and not know what a web browser is that’s a whole different level of ignorance. Not just computing tho also cars. I barely know much about cars but I understand the idea of an engine, like you said it’s okay to know enough. If something breaks on my car I look it up on YouTube and learn a little more slowly. Some people tho will drive a car everyday for their entire life and not understand what a piston even is.
You sound like someone who would enjoy The Secret Life of Machines. I’ve never met anyone else in real life who wanted to watch it with me, for the reasons you mention.
Don’t explain anything, there’s literally no point. Why are nerds so insistent that people understand technology?
Just tell people to make an account on any instance, whichever one you like best, and let them experience federation. Even if they never really understand what is happening they can still use the service. It’s not like any of them understand how email works, and yet they all use email. Understanding is worthless. Stop being nerds.
Wife had to do this the other day. She catches me trying to explain and convince tech basically recommending something with an open door to say no or disagree why you like it. She says just tell them to use it and if they love you they will.
And it’s true. I have my extended family on signal.
Work on it, don’t only complain.
Why are nerds so insistent that people understand technology?
Because technology forms the basis of the online environments we inhabit, and gives us the tools to tell how, say, our data is stored and processed.
If you’re going to get in the water, it’s probably a good skill to be able to swim. If you’re going to drive a car and don’t have the faintest idea how the engine works, you’ll be at the mercy of manufacturers and mechanics.
The solution to your issue is not that everybody should conform to the lowest common denominator of technology literacy, but that the general internet user should get a fucking idea of the environment they navigate.
Stop being nerds
Never.
Nerds don’t just want to teach people to swim. They want to teach them about hydrogen bonds and the mineral contents of the water, the processes of water treatment, and the technical requirements for a functional pool.
Nerds don’t just want to teach people to drive. They want to teach them about the engine, the drive train, the underlying transportation infrastructure, and how to change their own oil and tires.
If you want people to swim or drive or use the fediverse you skip all that shit. Normal people do not care.
Stop being nerds.
Nerds don’t just want to teach people to swim. They want to teach them about hydrogen bonds and the mineral contents of the water, the processes of water treatment, and the technical requirements for a functional pool.
And I think that’s beautiful. There is nothing like watching someone explain something they’re passionate about.
There’s something wrong with hurting other people’s ability to access the fediverse with insufferable nerd explanations that have nothing to do with posting.
Well, apparently you consider basic maintenance like changing tires superfluous to driving. Says all I need to know about your mindset on the other subjects.
Stop being
nerdshelplessly unskilledFTFY
The majority of people pay other people to do that stuff. Normal people don’t care about your nerd shit.
I change my oil, oil filter, tires, battery, wipers, all that shit. It doesn’t fucking matter though, it’s all superfluous.
Stop. Being. Nerds. Just let people be basic, stop insisting that they know everything before they’re allowed to drive.
People have been using email since they were five and all modern lives depend on it. If they don’t understand federation they will just be confused why they can’t see the content and leave. “I didn’t understand it and it didn’t work” is one of the more commons reasons I’ve seen on Reddit for failing lemmy
The entire world relies on email but you can blow people’s minds if you tell them you can read Outlook emails in Gmail or read Gmail mailboxes in Outlook. The days of everyone having a local email client are long behind us, people don’t know the difference between apps and servers anymore.
“It works like email” means “oh, so I need to create a new account, like when I installed the Outlook app” to most people. Shockingly few people know the bare basics of how email works. You’ll be surprised how many people I’ve spoken to don’t understand that someone@gmail.com isn’t the same person as someone@outlook.com. I have been called a liar and a hacker for demonstrating I could send an email from f.l.lastname@mydomain.tld. Whatever you think the base level of technological knowledge the average person has, it’s ten times higher than what people actually know, and that includes young people.
Doesn’t it default to All? Or at least Local? Shouldn’t they just see a feed of everything if they go to the main page?
The experience is almost exactly the same as Reddit if you don’t worry about federation or technicalities.
I think admins choose, but tbh reddit is also pretty algorithmic these days
But they should still see content, even if they don’t understand anything.
The only way they won’t is if the admins decided users shouldn’t see anything without first subscribing to something, which is a terrible way to ease people in to the service. There needs to be a default feed so normies can use it too!
Unless an instance enrolls in Lemmy-federate, the default behavior is that a user, even on the /all view, will only see local communities, and outside communities that another local user has sought out and subscribed to.
If a newbie joins a small instance and doesn’t know how to seek out communities that interest them with lemmyverse.net, they would likely have a very small range of content in their feed.
Lemmy-federate helps by auto subscribing an instance to participating communities, seeding a wide range of content immediately.
A large instance would offer a good experience either way, but would encourage centralization without Lemmy-federate existing.
Why on Earth would a newbie join a small instance? How would they even find out about one?
Assuming they search Lemmy, and one of top results is the join-lemmy page (second result for me, below Lemmy.world), the server recommendation tool can suggest small instances with only a couple hundred members. For instance, if one selects Art as the topic and English as the language.
Strong agree. Just tell people to go to feddit.org and call it a day
In general, wouldn’t one of the English speaking instances be a better choice?
Long story short, there is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/)
- Lemmy.world is too big
- Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )
- sh.itjust.works names contains “shit”, which can deter users
- lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric
- feddit.org, as you mentioned, is German-centric, but technically English speaking too
- dbzer0 federated hexbear
- programming.dev is topic-centric (and has a database corruption for the last month https://programming.dev/post/20515601?scrollToComments=true)
- blahaj is queer-focused
- discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name
- lemmy.sdf.org does not defederate anyone
- lemmy.zip is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad
- sopuli.xyz doesn’t have “lemmy” or “feddit” in its name
- beehaw is way outdated
- infosec.pub is topic-centric
- aussie.zone is country-centric
- midwest.social is region-centric
The next page has reddthat.com which is known to have federation issues with LW due to its location in Australia, and lemmy.today which does not defederate anyone
I think one of the main reasons why the fediverse didn’t blow up much bigger than it did over the past couple of years is because of the weird and insistent need to explain how it works from every possible angle with seemingly every possible analogy. It’s information overload and it only confuses the shit out of people who do not care in the slightest how it works.
Hmm… maybe if we tell the nerds that they need to add an “abstraction layer” to their explanations that might motivate them to simplify?
Don’t explain anything, there’s literally no point. Why are nerds so insistent that people understand technology?
All people understand Ohm’s law now. It took only 150 years of explaining.
I promise you that if you collect 10 random people and ask them what Ohms law is, at most you get 5 that knows it’s something about electricity. You are lucky if you have one that knows it.
It’s taught in every school… At least in Europe.
Yeah I know it has to do with resistance but I couldn’t quote it to you rn, I’d have to look it up. And I’m vaping rn at .4ohms lol.
If you want to get non-techy users, then there is absolutely no need to even use the word fediverse or to try to explain what any of this means. If you want to help a friend get onboard, just send them a link to sign up on the same server that you use, or a nice general purpose server. That’s it. They sign up, they use it, and THEN they can start to learn about fediverse shit if they care to.
Yes. You can use it without understanding how it works behind the scenes. At some point, they’ll run into a situation where it is helpful to learn some part of how the fediverse works and then they can ask about it, generating more content and interaction along the way
"you know how you can’t talk to someone on Twitter.com from facebook.com? But you can email from your @gmail.com to someone with an @yahoo.com address?
That’s the difference, federated social media is like email in this way."
I’m mostly sure even my elderly parents understood it when I said it…
And you know how, when you subscribe to a mailing list, you will only receive new mail sent to the list if your server happens to “federate” with the sender’s server?
Oh wait, that’s not how e-mail works.
Email providers absolutely block other email providers who abuse their system.
I’m not talking about blocking, but about being unable to see all replies to a post unless you open it on its home instance, which happens all the time on Mastodon.
In my experience, the majority of people doesn’t have the slightest clue how mail works. Somehow you type it in and provide it with an address into one of the three indistinguishable fields that are titled “To”, " CC", “BCC”. And by some black magic it either appears on the screen of the other person. Or it doesn’t. That’s about the amount of knowledge.
So comparing something to this is kind of meaningless.
Ironically it is often that way with Lemmy as well, outside of Lemmy.World. You write up a post, maybe it makes it to its destination, maybe it does not (for several days, after which point extremely few people will see it when it suddenly appears, but down among the older content no longer listed as “new”), maybe people write comments into it, maybe they don’t but who even knows if you aren’t able to see any of them to be able to respond.
This is definitely a monthly or almost weekly occurrence, even if not quite a daily one, though it depends strongly on what instance you are on.
Also, whether it makes it to the destination or not depends on which server you try to view it from.
And I haven’t even begun to start into the defederation artifacts yet!?
Right. Learning Lemmy and the Fediverse takes some effort. The onboarding isn’t super smooth and flawless… I think we all know this. I’d still like to see a few design changes. I think generally we’re headed in the right direction. Albeit kind slowly.
I haven’t noticed any federation hiccups in quite some time. There was some debacle with two updates. But since then it’s been forwarding posts within seconds for me. At least on the last two instances I used.
Yup, and people younger than a certain age think email is as archaic as the pony express.
In my country, people above a certain age think sending an email is impressive
As a younger tech person, I definitely don’t get a lot about email. It’s old and weird and arcane and half it’s features that match newer services seem to be built on top of hacks that are enforced through convention alone that will break if I decide I like to format my titles a little differently. Third party clients work, but the main providers, Gmail outlook use some proprietary api to make sure their own works well while everyone else gets stuck with shitty imap. There’s endless little incompatibilities. It all just feels like delerict tower held together with miles of duct tape. Oh and I still haven’t found a good answer to why calendars are so tied up with email.
Your calendars are tied up with your email because Microsoft Exchange decided to bring that feature to business ages ago and everyone else just copied them. There’s nothing preventing you from using third party calendar apps if that’s what you want, and there are standard protocols to exchange calendars between services. Your email address probably comes with a calendar by default already so most people just use that, but that’s your choice.
As for IMAP, there are a few alternative protocols but desktop mail clients are old people tech anyway. Outlook is just storing your email on their servers for a reason, people don’t want an IMAP alternative, they want an app.
I don’t really know what inconsistencies email supposedly has compared to other protocols. I use a bridge to join my Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/etcetera all in one place, and getting a consistent experience is a layer of hell not even email prepared me for. Telegram doesn’t do some emoji reactions, WhatsApp doesn’t do edits, every messenger needs stickers to be in a specific weird format, and god forbid you try to send files because every service has their own stupid quirks on that. Then there’s formatting, every service supports a specific subset of markdown, all incompatible with each other. And NONE of them allow “line of text, image, line of text” as a single message that can be forwarded. Messenger tech is bound to the same restrictions the Linux kernel mailing lists are. Email is a technical miracle in how it works consistly across platforms.
The only comparable protocols I can think of that come close to email are SMS (awful and insecure), MMS (awful and insecure and unreliable), RCS (only usable if you use Android and insecure in all other contexts). Young people don’t use email because they’ve been tricked into other apps, but it it wasn’t for the “my parents use it so it sucks” attitude that every teenager develops, email would’ve replaced so many shitty messengers.
Hilariously, fax machines are as archaic as the pony express. They were invented around 1850.
Abraham Lincoln could have literally sent a japanese samurai a fax.
And we still don’t have any worthy successor. In contrast to the pony express.
Me, explaining how Lemmy is similar to email…
I think people can handle a simple series of instructions, like (1) download the Voyager for Lemmy app, (2) click the middle button, then click…
What they likely get confused about is the plethora of choices, especially when they aren’t even sure that they want to join yet.
At the risk of bringing up unwanted drama, 100% of the time whenever I mention Lemmy to someone, they have admonished me for having done so. But putting myself into their shoes one day, I did a Google search (🤮) for “Lemmy”, and aside from the singer, the top hit to an actual instance is… surprisingly to me, lemmy.ml. Next I note that the default search method there is “Local”, not “All”. NO WONDER they were telling me how politically “extremist” it (Lemmy) is! They see NONE of the posts from Lemmy.World, sh.itjust.works, etc., unless they are submitted to a community on lemmy.ml. Instead, what someone would see by default is “death to landlords” and all the other posts promoting the violent upheaval of Western society, as ofc capitalism is to blame for literally everything (well I mean…), except somehow only the Western variant is in the wrong and everything done by the likes of Russia or China or North Korea is absolutely fine.
Here’s an old example I just happened to have handy:
(setting aside truth or falsehood, it definitely has a bias to it, as in both sides were equal, and yes this was prior to the USA election)
The #2 search result by DuckDuckGo btw is Lemmy.World (the #1 is ofc the musician:-), probably bc it has ~80% of all Lemmy users on it, so that is appropriate.
We need to put ourselves into their shoes, not our own as if we were ourselves on the other side of that conversation, but appreciate how they will approach the issues. And the methods used by more mainstream people differ from ours.
Either that, or accept that we are strictly another forum community used chiefly by Linux users, and that we will never be more than that.
What they likely get confused about is the plethora of choices, especially when they aren’t even sure that they want to join yet.
Then we need to provide them a single recommendation
While we are talking, a small update on lemmy.cafe: I liked it for a few weeks, but the images stopped showing up properly since a week: https://lemmy.cafe/post/9986198?scrollToComments=true
I now use feddit.org as my default recommendation
Oh no!
That link that you sent me, are you still able to see that post? For me it shows an error, like what happens when a post is deleted by the OP, but I wonder if that is what happened or if lemmy.cafe has switched its main announcement community to be local-only, and if that requires a lemmy.cafe account to read, b/c otherwise I don’t even know what their main announcement community would even be. It might have gotten deleted entirely and/or merged into graybeard, or statecraft, but both have not had posts for a long time (unless they did and whatever problem is affecting the database lately has messed up new posts in it as well).
Well that’s sad.
If I were you I would ask feddit.org to switch their default sort behavior from “Local” to “All” so that it will be a more welcoming experience for the wider Fediverse looking to see memes and such from the likes of Lemmy.World etc. and not just itself.
It at least defederates from 2 of the big 3, though it also defederates from lemmynsfw.com, which I don’t know why so many people (from Reddit in particular) insist on having that in their same account but I bet some people will be resistant to it, but oh well.
May I ask though: why not use lemmy.ca as the default recommendation? It has 4.5x the userbase as feddit.org (the same MAU, just 4.5x more accounts total, so I guess a bunch of lurkers or inactive accounts, but it is at least the same size), 5 admins, already has its default sort set to All, doesn’t defederate from lemmynsfw.com, and seems to take user feedback e.g. this recent thread questioning whether to refederate with hexbear.net but based on user feedback deciding overwhelmingly to not. And especially if people in Reddit tend to be from the USA, it would be geographically closer and not confusing to e.g. first describe things in German, then in English.
Hopefully the issues with lemmy.cafe are temporary, but on the other hand communication about such matters is just as important as not causing them in the first place, plus if it’s been a whole week and it’s still that way… that does not bode well for the future.
I wonder if that is what happened or if lemmy.cafe has switched its main announcement community to be local-only,
I just checked, it is local indeed
May I ask though: why not use lemmy.ca as the default recommendation?
The .ca domain and the logo could deter non Canadians by giving the impression that the instance is geared towards Canadians, which is partially true when you look at the sidebar
it’s geared toward Canadians, hosted in Canada, and run by Canadians. It is, however, not at all restricted to Canadians, or Canadian culture/topics/etc. All are welcome!
I could understand why non-Canadians would rather join another instance
I just checked, it is local indeed
How very interesting… beyond lemmy.cafe then, this is probably how Lemmy implements “local-only” in general, restricting access purely to those who have accounts on that instance. I would have hoped for a more nuanced take than simply seeing an error screen for me who lacks that, but it is what it is.
The .ca domain and the logo could deter non Canadians by giving the impression that the instance is geared towards Canadians
Yeah, I get that and thought the same, but otoh at least it is a straightforward and easy-to-understand bias, explicitly stated outright (unlike e.g. “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”). If we were to follow that logic though, the rather high predominance of the German language over and above the English one, the latter of which in particular often is left out, is also quite off-putting to me. e.g. see this page: https://feddit.org/c/fediverse, which does not have a German explanation first and then an English one, but instead offers purely a German one and then… that’s it, it stops there. English-speaking people are not only after-thoughts, but often not thought of at all. Which to be clear is fine btw - it’s their server and they can do as they please with it - but I would not want to use it as the front face for all for all of Lemmy, for that reason, especially if that is a kind of signal that they are sending that similarly to lemmy.ca others are “welcomed” but they aren’t the primary focus. And then the default sort being set to Local rather than All just compounds the issue all the more - other instances are again an after-thought, rather than the primary focus.
In contrast, “Canadian” is at least North American, but more importantly so long as it is using English rather than French, lemmy.ca is not as off-putting as feddit.org is, imho. Also, after the elections, A LOT of more liberal/less conservative (including “centrist”) minded people I bet are going to be okay with a Canadian social media rather than a “murica” one.
Especially when the choices are so limited.
- lemmy.sdf.org has only a single admin
- beehaw.org has very restrictive moderation practices, and they do not want a wider audience increasing their workload further
- Lemmy.today does not defederate from… anything it would seem (and I confirmed that I can access ChapoTrapHouse from it, so it is not merely missing a Blocked tab in its instances list, it’s real)
- startrek.website is themed and consistently has many federation issues, probably stemming from hardware ones (its uptime is not ideal)
- ttrpg.network similarly and significantly worse reported uptime
- discuss.online is quite nice actually, and I still use it as my primary “Lemmy” instance, though it only has 2 admins, who were balancing running it and trying to develop Sublinks, though it does not defederate from hexbear and that’s a dealbreaker right there (imho), much less lemmy.ml
- and then everything else after that, sorted by MAU and restricting country=United States on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, is at least half as small as lemmy.cafe
I think we should keep Discuss.Online in the back of our heads moving forwards - although otoh it might become an unstable/experimental instance if it were to suddenly shift over to use Sublinks ahead of any other Lemmy instance. Otherwise, the only advantage of e.g. lemmy.ca or feddit.org is that they both defederate from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, which lemm.ee has a firm resistance to ever doing.
It looks like you have an account at lemmy.ca - did you like it? It seems to offer roughly the same uptime as feddit.org.
Discuss.Online
They don’t block hexbear: https://discuss.online/instances
One other aspect against recommending lemmy.ca as the one recommended instance is that some Canadian users would prefer the instance to stay local: https://lemmy.ca/post/23600231
Which makes complete sense to be honest, speaking English does not mean that any English speaking user should come to their server while it’s specifically country-named and focused.
If you aren’t too annoyed at a much too long comment, here is part 2 of 2.
I get that you are frustrated with lemmy.cafe, and I whole-heartedly concur that it is for good reasons, but in case it helps, I do think that, based solely on what you’ve told me here and what I can see, CA might be a significantly better fit to Americans than FO would be. Not that either would be horrible ofc:-), I’m just talking about absolutely minimizing any potential friction.
Though DO would be so much more amazingly a perfect fit, and now that I’ve found that previous post, I do strongly think that it will happen (even if lemmy.ml is too much to hope for, though neither FO nor CA defed from it anyway). So if I were you I would use CA for now, but then be ready to switch to suggesting DO very soon? :-D And I hope that I’m helping by saying all of this, rather than coming on too strong like I’m trying to tell you what to do? Rather, I’m trying to emphasize that it is my strong recommendation, as a non-German-speaking American myself perhaps that gives me insight.:-)
Thank you for that post on Discuss.online, let’s see what the admins say.
Between feddit.org and lemmy.ca, both have their issues indeed. Let’s hope Discuss.online can become “the one”, but it would be a bit ironic to recommend the one instance managed by people who created an alternative to Lemmy
I tagged you on my other post - I need to focus more on my job right now, but I’m glad that I can help out that much so that you don’t have to do literally everything:-). It was only after that when I finally discovered this post (b/c previously I had used a browser search for the word hexbear but that only looked at titles), and yet even so I think I covered what jgrim was asking for - actual reasons to do so, not just “hurr me no likey dose others over der”.
If Discuss.Online (DO) were to defederate even only hexbear.net, much less lemmy.ml, I think it would work fantastically well as an option.
That argument pushed against Lemmy.ca (CA) though - I do not agree… mostly. For one, that instance has literally ~1200 MAUs, yet only 21 upvoted that post? And even then, the top community on that instance, mentioned also in that post, is !pcgaming@lemmy.ca with 4.84K MAUs, which obviously is going to show up quite often in the All feed. The solution to that though is to either browse by Subscribed, or else continue to browse by All yet after blocking unwanted communities. If they had wanted to remain Canada-focused, well that ship has already sailed, long ago.
And it is not the only such community either - !fbstolencontent@lemmy.ca (1.79K) and !politicalmemes@lemmy.ca (1.64K) and !fediverselore@lemmy.ca (1.58K) all are geared more towards international (than Canada-only) audiences. That person’s argument was a nonstarted even back then, and since then they have definitely lost - though they can (re-)make the Fediverse into anything that they want by configuring their tools to show only what they are (most) interested in. Tbf, otoh there are also some posts that have a tiny bit of an anti-usa stance, like this one: https://lemmy.ca/post/33447213, though I would hope not a deal-breaker.
The only way to know for sure would be to create a post and ask if the admins were okay with you using their instance as the default recommendation for Redditors to flock to. That would also hold for feddit.org though, or Discuss.Online (if they were amenable to blocking hexbear.net and especially if they would also block lemmy.ml), the latter of which I at least got the ball rolling for you:-).
Reading through their “welcome, new users!” post, I came across this very interesting comment. A lot of comments express similar thoughts. So while I think that DO would be a better match than CA (and I would guess that you agree? again, after HB were defederated), CA would still be a good match overall, imho. Not perfect, but especially considering the lack of any other options.
However, feddit.org (FO?) has even more of an offputting “vibe” imho than CA. First, I mentioned that it sorts by Local rather than All, which exagerates even more the focus on German-speaking than English-speaking ones. While many posts seem attractive to a USA audience - e.g. “‘Would you survive 72 hours?’ Germany and the Nordic countries prepare citizens for possible war” and “History will judge German chancellor Olaf Scholz for not giving Taurus missiles to Ukraine, the country’s former foreign minister says”, many others would act more as a deterrant e.g. “XXL-Leben: Der Fluch des großen Penis” with pictures of men’s bulging packages not marked NSFW, and a post about Georgia but it’s the country rather than the US state, but mostly I mean that overall on the front-page feed right now I counted and nearly all of the other posts besides those 2 mentioned above (+1 more) are in German. 4 from iech_iel that have the language embedded in an image so not easily machine translatable to other languages.
And even more so than CA that at least has some non-Canadian communities, the communities on FO are even more German- or EU-specific - the top one being !Europe@feddit.org with 3.87K MAUs, which is a bit smaller than !pcgaming@lemmy.ca with 4.84K, and like even !technik@feddit.org that while not unwelcoming to posts in English, the very name of the community itself looks to be in German, as are a large fraction of the posts therein too. I don’t know how receptive to a large influx of English-speaking Reddit users that FO would be… but just purely from looking at the communities and posts that are already there, I don’t think it’s a good “fit”.
To attempt to be crystal clear, obviously the above is all perfectly fine and people on FO can do however they please (and on the international stage, Georgia is a nation/country, not strictly a USA state:-P) - I am talking here strictly about the “fit” for average Americans.
Damn, I’ve hit a character limit:-(.
If you tell someone that fedi instances are like email providers and that your instance is transfem.social, that creates three expecations in your audience:
1)The main, or possibly only, way to access your fedi account on a desktop is through the transfem.social website.
2)The main, or possibly only, way to access your fedi account on a smartphone is through the transfem.social app. This app is completely separate from the apps that could be used to access a fedi account on another instance.
3)The primary difference between transfem.social and other fedi instances is the UI of the website and app.
Frankly, I don’t think this is that big of a deal. First introduce them to an instance, then once they figure that out, show them the apps and other ways to access that instance.
It’s also not even close to how email works and plenty of people use email apps that aren’t tied to a provider.
The app I’m using today has nothing to do with the instance I use.
Just like email… clients just speak a protocol, and use a particular manner of presentation.
That’s literally my point.
Most people know that email isn’t tied to a provider app.
Woosh! Your point went right over my head there! Hahaha, my bad
Apparently I phrased it badly because every vote on it is down lol.
So it’s probably my bad.
I know how email works but it sure didn’t help me understand the fediverse.
It’s just one thing in email servers functioning that is similar in the fediverse, everything else is not similar. It is just confusing to compare the two to anyone not yet knowing how the fediverse works IMO.
“It’s like the postal service!”
“It’s like the internet!”
Just say it’s like reddit (or a social media) but free and open and anyone can have/make one, or use an existing one. For free.
/Rant off
Same. I don’t know why people keep trying to use the email example, personally I found it too much of an abstract concept that doesn’t necessarily work for Lemmy.
If I knew someone used Reddit then I’d just say it’s like Reddit but instead of a single authority in charge of Reddit, anyone can take the Reddit software and host it themselves, and if you create an account on one site you can still subscribe to subreddits on other sites and vote and comment on posts.
