News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
I like your thoughts about having them look different from each other in someway to make them distinguishable. I think that might be a smart thing to do if you’re an instance owner.
I also think that we’re not really that far apart in what we’re both saying. When I read your example of the on boarding process for some people, it just reinforces what I said in my original reply, which was “ It's been my experience that people who couldn't figure out how to join Mastodon are the same people that get so used to doing things one way, that when you introduce a different way, they fall apart.” it’s not that ideas like “instances“ are difficult subjects to grasp, it’s that the person who is joining is expecting a different experience. Which I think causes part of their brain to kind of shut down a little. So things start to become confusing. I think this becomes obvious when you talk to people who had no issues joining. What they usually say is something along the lines of “I read it and caught on pretty quick.“ Which was my experience as well. Sure, once I got in it took me a few moments to realize what was what and get a grasp on @names but it was never something that made me say “this is too confusing“. It was just new. And I treated it like that.
Which makes me think that the people who say they don’t understand things like “Federation“ never really tried to understand them to begin with. As you noted, email is a handy comparison to use. When I’ve explained it to them like that, most people kind of smack their head and “get it” pretty quickly after that.
I’ve thought for a long time the first thing that someone should read when they try to join Mastodon is “This isn’t like any social media you’ve ever joined. We do things different, and if you read along, you’ll understand why.” Or something similar to get the person who is joining out of that frame of mind where they think they’re joining something that they’ve done before. I think that would put people in the right frame of mind right away.
But I’ve been known to be wrong before.
I agree. Usually we present Mastodon and other federated platforms as alternatives to other centralized ones and that makes them expect the exact same experience, since, after all, we told them it was just like the other one.
We need to set the expectation that these federated platforms work in a different manner and as such you need to learn a few things before using it.