Can I just rant a little to you all?
I’ve tried numerous times to help people from reddit set up an account and get started on Kbin (and lemmy), but 4 out of 5 times people can’t seem to grasp the concept of registering an account and starting to use this platform. Even breaking it down into 2 steps, with direct links… They get angry, and then ragequit their attempt in a huff saying how it’s too fucking complicated and it will never take off because it’s so hard.
Ok, I get that the fediverse is complicated if you think deeply about all the interconnectivity and federation etc, but there is no reason you even have to think about any of it to create an account and get started. Like, at all.
It reminds me so much of my 70/y old mother-in-law not immediately knowing how to work a tv remote and shoving it at me after 1.5 seconds saying “here, I can’t figure this out”. When in reality all she had to do was press the fucking big red button…
I’m just so frustrated with people’s complete lack of ability to help themselves.
It is confusing. Simple as. I have an account on lemmy dot ca, but I don’t understand how to view or participate in kbin content so I just don’t
You are literally participating in kbin content right now, commenting on a thread on a kbin magazine posted by a user registered to kbin.
Tbf, I think that underlines what he was saying. He has no idea where he is, or that he is already participating kbin.
Compare that to reddit, and it’s more complicated.
It also underlines what the OP is saying. The average user doesn’t need to do anything or think about anything special to use the platform. Simply making an account and interacting with whatever is on front of you will work.
It’s only complicated if you’re constantly comparing it to reddit in your head and trying to recreate the exact experience here.
Not always. There are the defederated instances, for example. Sometimes things break like lemmy.ml and people are having issues subscribing to communities (it’s apparently just a visual bug, but still). There have been tons of questions about the Fediverse from people who just got here. Kbin, for example, was not federating properly for a while before and we on lemmy could not see any posts on it. That can matter if a specific community is on an instance not accessible to a user for one reason or another.
Edit: I’m not criticizing the Fediverse, but it still has issues to be addressed. It’s pretty young relative to big social media sites like FB, reddit, etc so growing pains are to be expected. But we do need to acknowledge the issues if we hope to fix them later on.
Yes but that’s only relevant if you’re aware of a specific community on a specific instance and expect to be interacting with it on purpose.
It’s completely irrelevant if someone just gives you the name of an instance, tells you to make an account on it and start using. You’ll be perfectly fine reading and commenting whatever’s in your feed.
The only way this breaks is if you’re in an instance that is too small to have local traffic while having technical difficulties with federation. If the instance is active enough or it’s federating normally, someone completely unaware of the concept of federation will be perfectly fine as long as they understand the interface.
They’ll be fine until someone recommends a community on another instance complete with link and suddenly the user is logged out, can’t subscribe to that community, and when they try to log back in by clicking the login link on the page, it says account not found.
For this reason, there is a need for at least a little bit of understanding about how federation works.
This understanding is much more easily achieved after one’s familiar with the basics of their own instance though, isn’t it? Rather than expecting them to imagine the exact user experience of the fediverse before they even made their account, would we not be better off introducing them to a cold open and be helpful later when they have questions?
All of these problems are caused by the same underlying system and trying to explain the system to non-users is the exact wrong way to go about alleviating them. Better interface and UX design is the only thing which can solve this issue.
True. I agree with you. Hopefully soon most technical issues will be resolved enough to not matter to the average user. I’d love for us to grow more, and I think we should address the barriers that are preventing some “normies” (for lack of a better term) from heading here. I know some are just making up excuses, but hell my mom just learned how to post in facebook middle of last year. Lmao. Some are just easily confused.
Why do they need to know?
See a post, upvote it, comment on it. It’s functionally exactly the same as where they came from. The nuances are dramatically unimportant unless or until someone decides they want to use the platform in a more advanced, detailed way, which is going to be like 5% of us.
There’s literally no reason to explain the concept of federation at all unless someone specifically asks “Hey, how can I do this more advanced thing?” The cat pictures are all right here, on my screen, and I can comment on them the exact same way I did on reddit. The only difference is that the interface is a little rougher around the edges at the moment.
First of all, why shouldn’t they know? I’m pretty sure you’ve seen the posts saying reddit is undeleting posts or that lemmy/kbin is “bad for privacy” because they don’t delete comments? Many of them never even realized or remember how pushshift worked. Because they didn’t know. I won’t advocate jumping in blindly to a site/app because, “trust me bro.” It’s even a good thing people want to know what they’re signing up for.
There are literally reasons to explain how it all works. Just scroll on /all and you’ll find a lot of posts asking stuff about the Fediverse and/or how to navigate it. Or to troubleshoot some issues. Or to ask “how do I search this and that?” Etc. I bet I just need less than a minute on my browser to find a post like that.
Let’s say a newcomer arrives, signs up for beehaw (or lemmy.world since it seems to be a popular lemmy instance), and proceeds to get Jerboa. Do you think the app shows all communities you search for out of the box? No. I’ve been there. I have a lot of communities I’m subbed in that I had to use the direct link and search via browser for me to even find it. You can say, “just use the browser,” but you’d be ignoring the fact that many people are unhappy precisely because they can’t use their app anymore so they obviously navigate via an app.
If someone wants to know, they’ll ask. But just using the platform requires exactly none of that knowledge, and trying to infodump all the technical jargony bullshit onto people right from the beginning is absolutely going to make them go “wow, this is complicated” and not come here. Because you’ll convince them that it matters somehow.
Or maybe kbin is just fucking amazing and I’ve been spoiled by not having to know shit about the backend of this. Maybe Lemmy really is more complicated, or something.
Kbin really is pretty cool. Lol. The only reason I’m not on it is because there’s no app. I’m on mobile 95% of the time so browsers don’t really work for me.
I get what you’re saying, and I agree. I’m just saying for some folks it might not be as simple as you and I think it is. And it wouldn’t hurt if the fediverse became a bit more easier for the non-techie people. Some people (like me lol) just makes things needlessly complicated. I’m still trying to convince people to join us here despite the obstacles.
For what it’s worth, I’m only using kbin on mobile and a lack of app hasn’t been an issue for me. I say this having come from Reddit using Relay for a good 8+ years.
Kbin lets you install a Progressive Web App (PWA) which gives you a button that puts it in it’s own separate window from the rest of the stuff running in your browser and to my understanding lets it run in the background to give you notifications if you want (I keep notifications off for most things, so I haven’t tested this aspect).
It might be worth a try. My only caveat is that it isn’t working right in Firefox because they seem to have stopped PWA support, but it works fine in Vivaldi which is chrome-based so other chrome based browsers are probably fine for this use.
Apps are a bit of a relic from the days before responsive web design / mobile-focused web development took off. If you think about it, we really shouldn’t need to download a separate app for every website we visit on a mobile device.
Yup, it’s like email but take away recipients. Yea, there’s sorta recipients, but you don’t really know who it’s federated with/etc. We (foss devs) need better optics here. UX is difficult, though i welcome ideas.
The important part is that it isn’t actually that important. You aren’t having much of a clue about how Reddit’s algorithms work either, you just partake in what’s presented to you, and same goes for the fediverse. Eventually you get a better grasp about things, but overall it’s not a requirement to actually use any of the platforms. People just make things more complicated for them than they actually are.
You gotta admit, this right here is a pretty classic fediverse moment.
Is there an active “BestOf” community? Lmao
I also did not know what a kbin is as of a few minutes ago, but the great thing is, that I really didn’t need to know. I guess it feels “complicated” because there is much that can be learned but you don’t necessary have to.
People also did not know how the Reddit backends work and just used it but apparently they feel that they HAVE to learn how the fediverse works on day 1.
The funny part is, you’re viewing and participating in kbin content right here. This is a thread posted to kbin. My reply will look to you as if it was made in lemmy, but it’s not. I have a kbin account, and that’s the magic at work.
The best analogy I heard so far is email; everyone gets that you can send an email from gmail to outlook. We are just not used to that websites can interconnect with each other but give it some time and it will be second nature to people
Please stop with the email analogy. It really doesn’t help with anything. You send emails to an email address, people don’t think of the back end of that process at all and can’t make an analogy to social media where posts just… go out into the ether.
The only reason this is confusing is that tech-heads in these services can’t shut up about federation despite federation being largely irrelevant to the experience. The fact that the poster above didn’t even notice that the interaction is happening cross-service but still was confused about how to interact cross-service tells you that the way to help people get over how “hard” understanding federation is would be to shut up about it.
I mean, that won’t help with people not being willing to just make an account on a place at all, but yeah, everybody is so pleased about the interoperability thing that they make the day-to-day use of federated services seem a lot more convoluted than it is in practice.
I actually agree. Nobody explains DNS to people trying to understand how mail works. They don’t need to understand MX records, SPF records, DMARC, DKIM, or anything. All they need to know is sign up and how to use the To: field to start sending emails. Hell - you don’t even need to and probably don’t want to explain the purpose of the CC or BCC fields at this point either.
If a user is trying to actually understand the underlying technology then the email analogy can be a first introduction. But if someone is technical enough to be trying to learn it’s better to just teach them about ActivityPub.
Yeah, the email thing keeps getting repeated but doesn’t actually make sense when you think about how people use the fediverse.
I think it as more of as being like what kind of device you use to watch subscriptions. Are you picking a tablet or a smart TV to watch Netflix or Hulu? The device is kbin or lemmy. What communities/magazines you interact with is is like the service. All of them can access the service if you’ve subscribed. You don’t need a Hulu device or a Netflix device, just a device.
you’re participating in kbin content right now…
Looks like you figured it out by accident, this is a kbin thread lol. It’s functionally identical to taking part in Lemmy threads, the complicated stuff is happening in the background as our instances communicate. Threads from all instances show up in the “All” tab and you can participate in them just the same as if they were from your own, for the most part. Since you’re on a relatively large instance as well, you should be able to search for just about any community you want using Lemmy’s own search bar and be able to find one without having to worry about if it’s in another instance or not. Chances are, whatever instance its on has been visited by someone else before, so the link between the two already exists. I hope this helps!
As the others have pointed out, this is a kbin thread. Since your account is on an instance that’s federated, all the content comes to you, you don’t have to do anything special.
I don’t know if you’re aware but …
…this whole thread is on kbin
Also, there’s kbin, lemmy, squabbles.io (speed- and layout-wise my favorite) - each with several „federated“ instances. Which to chose? For many, the appeal of a social media platform is that you have ONE place where you can be sure to see/read and reach all others.
And instances are sometimes „unfederating“ or the federation is incomplete, you‘ll never know. Just look at this (on reddit, sorry) : https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/149sm0n/beehaw_defederating_from_lemmyworld_and/
If the admin of one instance decides to de-federate, you’re suddenly cut off.I’m enjoying my time on kbin.social and I genuinely support the idea of federation, but… This is honestly the only major issue I have with the Fediverse. Most of my Reddit/social media posts are related to three or so niche interests. My first Mastodon account was on the central hub for one interest that later defederated with the central hub for another interest. Not being able to interact with 1/3rd of the people I want to interact with just defeats the whole point of joining these kinds of platforms. Moderators just carving out a chunk of the Fediverse for their users is just unacceptable.
Is squabbles federated? I don’t feel like it is. But I do love it.
No. Squabbles is neither part of the fediverse nor is it open source. It’s its own independent & proprietary platform. It’s kbin, Lemmy, and to an extend Mastodon.
That happened to me too in the beginning with lemmy coming from kbin, until I discovered the very bottom of the page where it showed me which community I‘m in (odd place to put that).
I made some strange posts like linking to a community I was in. Gets better with time.
What community you’re in is right in the URL and can be found at minimum twice in the sidebar. Just look for @[sub]@[instance], or the previous with @[username] in front of it.
Thank you, all that is so good to know!
I didn‘t see any of that, cause the back of the URL is a bit painful to look for on my phone’s browser and the sidebar part is collapsed by default. Now that I know what to look for I‘ll hopefully not get lost again.
The mobile site definitely needs some work, or better some proper apps.
You are rn interacting with kbin people xd
Since nobody said it yet, you should know that this whole thread is k.bin
Most people don’t really want to move off Reddit. They might see how shitty spez is being, but moving off Reddit will be a big shake up to their online life. So any excuse they can find to stay on Reddit is something they will latch on to. “It’s too complicated” is a good one, because there’s some truth to it, and it’s pretty subjective anyway, so it’s hard to argue with.
Fortunately, there is a small percent of people who embrace new things like the Fediverse, especially if there is good reason to overcome some of the obstacles and make it work. Without those people, we would end up stuck.
Trying to help people move over is a good thing, but it’s not worth getting frustrated with them if they find reasons not to do it. In my view, we’re seeing the end of the current era of the internet (where corporate social media dominates), and moving into a new one (where decentralisation wins out). The people stuck on Reddit will realise this one day, just maybe not today.
The “complicatedness” helps weed out trolls and other low-effort users imo.
The “complicatedness” helps weed out trolls and other low-effort users it seems
I think I can understand how confusing this is for people. It took me a while to get used to Reddit originally, and now it is another different environment.
I am kind of running to here because I tried going to Discord and found myself getting rather confused with the many channels/servers (?). I am a tech-idiot. I just like to be in a place where I could see interesting threads to join and chat. I used to go to forums, but those forums slowly died after social media platforms came into prominence. I miss those friendly forum environment, and I struggle to keep afloat in a world that seemed to be moving a lot faster than my brain can follow. :(
Listen here youngster. You are doing just fine. You are here, you are finding threads. You will get the hang of it. It’s the internet it grows and changes. Hopefully for the better.
I would say you are doing a lot better than struggling! I hope you find more interesting threads!
I get that, and I’m sort of understanding - just frustrated and wanted to vent earlier…
There is a lot of tech jargon people are throwing around that is wholly unnecessary in the grand scheme of ‘just sign up and participate’. People don’t need to understand all the backend workings to just participate and I don’t know why everyone is focusing so much on it.
The equivalent would be every user trying to understand the inner workings of reddit’s website; the servers, the dns records, the load balancing, the network between each server. None of it is necessary to actually use the site.
>sign up for reddit just fine
>claims signing up for kbin.social is too hard
??? it’s the same process???Precisely. Registering for a kbin account is exactly the same as any other site or forum I had to sign up for lmao.
Honestly, I agree. I am not tech savvy, I am actually a pretty basic user of the internet. I just followed the link provided in a post, registered on Kbin, and started enjoying it.
Now, Lemmy did give me more trouble, and it’s the reason I am on Kbin, but even then it was more a matter of having to wait for confirmation. By the time it came I found I preferred Kbin “graphics” (don’t know how to explain it better).
Really can’t understand what people find so difficult. Even the fediverse isn’t a difficult concept: you sign up in one site, you can see posts from other sites too. Simple as that. There’s nothing complicated if you’re just an user and not someone who has to make it work
Ok, I get that the fediverse is complicated if you think deeply about all the interconnectivity and federation etc, but there is no reason you even have to think about any of it
you must be kidding. there is no reason to think about that?
to find communities/magazines you have to use some 3rd party tools (you may be lucky and see something in the “all” feed, but that is not guaranteed), then when you find it, you can’t just click subscribe, you have to grab the url, go back to another tab where you are logged into your instance and subscribe by manually constructing the url, or pasting the url somewhere (maybe, haven’t tried that way).
don’t take me wrong, i am fan of open source, which is why i am here, but if you don’t see how this is complicated for average non-tech-savy user, then i am not sure what to tell you.
Using 3rd party tools I don’t understand, I just use the magazine search bar in Kbin itself. Searching for a term works just fine to get me to any magazines or communities I want to subscribe too, and I’ve found replacements for any subreddit I’ve cared to look for so far.
and does that search through lemmy communities as well? because lemmy search definitely doesn’t return kbin results. and i am not even sure if it returns 100% of lemmy results, it is hard to verify that :D
It does! I’ve subscribed to tons of Lemmy communities like that. Lemmy’s search does return Kbin results as well though, I just checked. I searched “News” from lemmy.world and found the Kbin.social News magazine I was looking for.
Just to check some more, I also tried searching for the Reddit Migration and Technology magazines and it found them both using only their names, no urls or @'s needed.
You should only need the url if you’re the first person on an instance to subscribe to a community, after that it should be indexed for everyone.
it works. and if opened from there, it allows me to subscribe by clicking on subscribe… now i have no idea why i have been doing it so complicatedly. shame on me…
thank you.
It must be a different experience on lemmy. On kbin I only need to click on a post and the magazine/community is listed in the sidebar - I only need to click the subscribe button.
so i just found i have been doing that unnecessarily complicatedly.
I don’t see how it’s hard for a non-tech-savvy user to use. The actual usage is near-identical to reddit. Pretty much the only hurdle in that regard is trying to subscribe to magazines on other instances that haven’t been synced yet. Other than that? It works the same as reddit. If you think kbin is too hard, how tf were you using reddit?
I work in tech and even for me it took a few minutes to grasp that kbin and lemmy instances could all communicate with each others. If you’re used to the centralized web then it might be foreign that kbin can read lemmy content etc. It’s like saying instagram can be used to access Twitter for a normal person.
But for now I don’t think the normal user has to be the priority. They will learn when they have to move to be able to access the content they are after
yeah you don’t have to know about that to sign up and use the site so no issues.
For a lot of people, anything new means stress. So their willingness to put up with that new thing and the amount of perceived stress will almost always hinge on the potential (personal) benefits. And the benefits will initially be perceived as not very high. So the willingness to overcome the hurdle/endure stress will be pretty low.
So don’t be too harsh on those people. They’ll join once they perceive it as beneficial enough. ;-)
I don’t properly understand how all of this works.
But signing up to kbin on the weekend was just like signing up for anything else online.
And once I did, replying to posts - like this one - was more or less the same as replying on any other discussion forum.
So…I don’t get it, what’s so hard? Do you really need to understand the technical details underneath to start using this place?
That said, I would like to grasp this whole thing a little better. But I figured the best way to do that is to jump straight in and go from there! :)
I don’t get it, what’s so hard?
One of the biggest obstacles are links to other instances. Imagine a post from lemmy.world appears on your kbin.social frontpage where someone says “Hey, go check out this cool community I found: lemmy.world/c/CoolCommunity”. You click the link and suddenly you’re on another instance where your kbin account doesn’t work. It appears like you would need to create an account on lemmy.world in order to participate. What’s actually true is that you need to change to URL to kbin.social/m/[email protected], then you can subscribe to the community and participate using your kbin account. This is something you need to understand in order to enjoy your time here. A solution for this needs to be implemented, like an option to automatically turn URLs from foreign instances into home instance URLs.
An even bigger issue for me was finding communities in the first place. I have to use !x@y syntax, but maybe also sometimes @x@y? But what is x and what is y when kbin has different syntax and names for things compared to lemmy? Also, it works for some communities but for others it just throws a 404 error?
I’m kinda familiar with it now and I know the little tricks to get it to work, or which steps to take to avoid stepping onto a mine, but it’s still confusing at times. I’m recently seeing cases of comments just not syncing and showing up on kbin but they are visible from my beehaw account. Clicking on posts doesn’t properly navigate you to them and sometimes it’s next to impossible to find them in larger threads.
It’s impressive and very promising tech but it’s very early for massive adoption, it cannot replace reddit as it is.
100% agree. I’m currently trying to find a way how a browser addin could take care of the URL translation (like automatically turning kbin.social/m/memes into feddit.de/c/[email protected] when feddit.de is defined as your home instance in the addin). Then I noticed that feddit.de/c/[email protected] gives me a “404: couldnt_find_community” error and I have no idea why. I also can’t find the BuyItForLife magazine with the community search on feddit.de. I can find other kbin magazines though, like memes. No idea why ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just hope some of this stuff will be fixed with the 0.8 update, otherwise I don’t see how a browser addin could look like. I also wouldn’t know how to translate post and comment URLs automatically.
It seems like nobody on feddit ever subscribed to [email protected] so it never got synced to that instance. My understanding is that it should be found like this the first time, but it never worked for me on lemmy: https://i.imgur.com/pQHfq1N.png .
After this is done, it should start showing up with your link, it definitely seems correctly formatted. It will be missing posts made before it started sync, it doesn’t work retroactively though. On kbin I just use the magnifying glass (not the “all magazines”!) and then it usually finds any community I want.
In short, yeah… it’s a mess
That’s an interesting point, I hadn’t tried doing that yet. Seems fairly fixable though. I guess all this stuff will start to get better soon.
A few weeks ago my neighbor (a nice older woman in her 60s) asked me to fix her TV. I walked into her living room and pushed the power button on the remote.
Sometimes it do be like that.
Other times nice old women are just lonely and make you do random things for company.
I would rather they just ask me to hang out lol
Old woman here (if you consider 50 old). There’s no way I’m just going ask some youngun to just hang out with me. I’d feel creepy.
Well as a young person I love hanging out with the OGs but I understand it can be awkward to get the initial relationship started haha
Did they initiate the process and ask for help or did you offer?
I’ve been teaching twenty years. If students get themselves to the point of coming with a question based on experience, odds are excellent that they will listen to what I’m saying. If they do something at my suggestion, they are not engaged and do not retain. Same is surely true for learning to use a new website.
So I dunno if this is a suggestion for you or other people reading this post, but consider directing them to magazines/communities that are an actual draw, since people are the actual draw. When they find they cannot post, then they will have incentive to pay attention.
This is so far true for “what is a photon”, “what is consciousness”, “how do you do a kick”, and “why are most metals thermally conductive” so I suspect this isn’t a unique thing. Dangle the incentive, then wait for them to ask how to get involved.
Again, not criticizing especially since I don’t know your approach, hopefully this can help others. The draw is the community and posts, so highlight that way before they ever see a signup page. They can browse the site without an account.
The stoics (ancient philosophers) say: control what you can, but don’t worry about what you cannot.
It’s their approach to life, and it will bite them in the butt eventually, but there’s little you can do about it, so focus on what you CAN do instead?
e.g. you could tell your MIL, patiently (b/c otherwise she’ll feel disrespected & angry & won’t learn), “here, let me help you so that you’ll know in the future: you gotta press this button HERE, and make sure to aim the remote THERE, not over there where you had it pointed, b/c that’s how the signal gets established and it knows what you want it to do”. That’s the other, major part too - putting yourself in their shoes, like she probably knows what button to press, but it wasn’t working, so she immediately turned to you, and since you apparently will cave & do it, why shouldn’t she? IT WORKS!?:-) She may still get angry even then, but if she learns… then you accomplished what you set out to do? :-) But remember that you can’t control whether she learns - only how you offer to teach.
For the other, I’m not sure I know, b/c most people seem to not care about what happened at all, but for those who legit want to come here, maybe make a video walking through the entire sign-in process? “Click here, input stuff there, this is what it looks like”? There may be legit stuff stopping them though - I’m constantly seeing server outages, I had to try multiple times to make my own account even last week before the huge influx, and it’s legit a bit confusing to see all the stuff that’s constantly broken, or named differently or whatever. But if they can SEE it, it would boost confidence.
Though more likely they just don’t want to do it and it’s a mere excuse to begin with - and even once they create the account they’ll still barely use it after that, so again don’t worry about what is outside of your control.:-)
They are coming here because they are angry at Reddit. They are still angry when they get here. Being angry is not conducive to having a good experience of something new, especially if they didn’t want to leave Reddit in the first place. Kbin/Lemmy is being sold as a forced upgrade. It’s like if your word processor has all its icons moved around and put into a side bar that’s hidden until you know where to click. Why the fuck did they do that? We all hate that sort of shit, and that’s what it feels like being forced to come here.
If you are going to promote Kbin/Lemmy, you need to change their mindset before they get here or they will just see a forced downgrade onto a broken Reddit clone.
That’s a fair assessment, and I hadn’t considered the anger from being a forced change. I have good reasons for seeking an alternative and thus invested in making the change. That may not be the case for most.
When one user is having problems, the problem is the user. When it’s multiple users, it’s a pattern and problem with the design.
The problem is that people don’t want to dedicate time to learn new, foreign things, they just want them to work. Because that’s how it is with the stuff they’re used to. Those things just work.
Also, fediverse isn’t ready. Servers aren’t always responding, design isn’t finished etc. So it’s no wonder people find it hard to use – because it’s an unfinished house or maybe more aptly a village.
I just made an account and started browsing the threads. Easy. I still have absolutely no idea how any of this works. The info diagram that was posted around a week or two ago was not very helpful.
I hear you. People have very little pain/change tolerance. Humans want things easy the first time. Those who stick around the fediverse have higher pain tolerance. They are more cognitively flexible. They are principled. There’s a short time of adjustment that one has to tolerate.
I’m thankful for all those who have the strength to say “NO” to the likes of /spez. It’s a small thing but it shows some determination and character.
This surprised me when I realized it: how little frustration tolerance most people have when they don’t understand something at first.
Maybe one factor is that people are already saturated by the complexity they are forced to deal with everyday because of work and bureaucracy, so they won’t put up with something unnecessary.
