this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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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
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.
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.