Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack,
I fully agree here. Whatever software they have developed, is not rocket science, and mostly based off of existing standards.
Gmail, Outlook, etc... just a bunch of *DAV servers on top of an emailing service, paired with some SSO. Same goes for Reddit/X/FB. A simple DB just storing some info and doing some fancy sorting based on that info.
Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved
Yes!
But, on the other hand it's a two-fold sword.
Corps are making money off of peoples lack of knowledge, and this has been the way of how "offering a service" is being done probably since human history... and yes, it pisses me off as well, especially when it comes to human health and nutrition, etc...
But....
Say, you hire contract workers, to build a house, bc. you don't know how to do it yourself. Then you need to hire someone else to approve the quality of the work that's been done, since again... you lack the knowledge. After you've moved in, something breaks, again... you hire someone to fix it.
Now, at what point do you start learning about all the components involved in a built house? electricity, plumbering, walls, etc... and most importantly, do you even care in learning so or not?
And some people, just don't care. They simply don't. Even if the concept of a topic is very easy to grasp, they simply lack the interest in knowing about how it works.
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Yes! I as well started my Lemmy journey on kbin first.
Back when the API changes were introduced in Reddit, everyone on Reddit kept about lemmy.
Then, in the comments you read stuff like "Lemmy are a bunch of tankies, kbin is better, yada yada"...
Great, now you're already torn between two sides, without even knowing about the basic concepts of how they both work.
You then go to one Lemmy server, and see how bad the UI is, then you check out kbin, and it feels nice.
Well, and the rest is history...
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Say you hire a company to build a house. You don't have the skills or the know-to, but at some point, you'll have to deal with some inevitable aspects of building a house, if only to discuss them with the workers. Say they "force" you to deal with plumbing, for example by including it in the budget. Imagine if you not only don't know how plumbing works, but also what plumbing is. Maybe you've never had to think about it before. What would you do? Would you go to another company that doesn't force you to deal with it, perhaps by not even providing it in the first place?
Say for the sake of argument that this becomes a generalized problem, and companies use it as an excuse to no longer provide plumbing in new houses, as a cost-saving measure. Most people don't seem to care. Over 10 years pass by, and people have gotten used to expect not having running water at home. "It sucks, but that's the way it is I guess".
Now, a community-driven initiative arises to build cheaper houses, complete with running water. Can you imagine most people refusing participating, because building a house with running water implies having to know that plumbing supplies water? That the mere thought of it is already too complicated, and that maybe having fresh water at home is only for people whose special interest is plumbing?
You need some elementary knowledge on things, if only to exist in the world. The Fediverse, and I mean this wholeheartedly, is not that complicated once you grasp the most basic concepts of the internet.
While I won't deny outright that open-source devs most of the time don't think about making their software accessible to the wider public, and that some aspects of decentralized social media still have to be ironed out (duplicated communities on Lemmy are a pet-peeve of mine); these issues are often heavily blown out of proportion. Besides people honestly not understanding some concepts, I think there is also some deliberate anti-intellectualism going on with this topic in particular. People who spend their afternoons troubleshooting Windows just so that their computer games run at 60 FPS suddenly don't know what a website is when Mastodon is mentioned.
I'm pretty certain that this "Fediverse is too complicated" mantra would not have worked at all before 2010.
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The whole process was a massive time and energy drain in the end with no benefit. I don't think anyone with a life would pursue something like this any further. I trialled-and-errored my way to Lemmy.world while I was out of work. Otherwise I'd still be on Reddit.
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It's depressing how many top level comments or replies are about how people like that there is a technical barrier gatekeeping lemmy. Are yall actually leftists or do you just pretend to be while worshipping your own version of social hierarchy in which us nerds are on top?
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If I understand you right, you're saying that you support making software like Lemmy accessible for users of all types. I agree completely.
A little unrelated, but "intelligence" is not a singular thing and nobody is "intelligent" or "not intelligent". Also, because we each have our own limitations, we're not really qualified to evaluate the abilities of another person since we tend to reference ourselves in doing so. IQ is now increasingly seen as not fit for purpose by academics and professionals of education. And all this without mentioning IQ's history is in the support of eugenics. So if the experts are abandoning the idea of IQ, we can do the same and stop beating each other over the heads with it. Then we can get on with focussing on accessibility, which as you say is where our priorities should be.
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Nah, I was talking about their ficticious person in their example scenario.
Since they are obviously here I thought that was obvious.
But I can see you are very self aware yourself and not at all bothered by why altruism scares you
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I agree. I think it's some kind of effect that also has me not wanting to live in a big city. When you see new people every day then never again, it's like you eventually lose some humanity
