1y ago

Does it feel like the fediverse is exclusively used by older tech nerds?

The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:

~30 years old or older
tech enthusiasts/workers
linux users

There’s nothing wrong with that particular demographic or anything, but it doesn’t feel like a win to me if the entire fediverse is just one big monoculture.

I wonder what it is that is keeping more diverse users away? Is picking a server/federation too complicated? Or is it that they don’t see any content that they like?

Thoughts?

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1.3K comments

I'm new here, and new to federated applications (and fit OP's description perfectly). This federated stuff is going to remain niche unless somebody figures out a way to make it approachable.
Reddit first time:
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> open app > choose some things I like > see all the things
Lemmy first time:
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> open app > ????? > google how to use it > choose a... server? > ?????
- I called this a few weeks ago on reddit and people weren't impressed with my negativity.
  I'm sorry, but you can't start a website with:
  Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform.
  And expect 95% of people to do anything other than close the window.
- Yep, that is literally me. I am not particularly techy or whatever and I came here because RiF shut down and the maker said they would be on lemmy.world. i had no idea what that meant but i made it here.
  Much googling was involved and after i made like 4 accounts on different instances, bumbled around, settled down and learned to subscribe to stuff, i subbed to communities specifically about the fediverse and finding new communities. I also tried like 3 different apps and aettled on Liftoff so far.
  I still havent figured out how to reliably see mastodon or kbin stuff or if i even want to.
  I can see how most people wouldn't bother and have no idea why any of this even matters. I still find reddit much easier to use (and important for ongoing world events like the war in ukraine, where it isnt about what we can aggregate but where posters from that conflict put their content originally, a huge amount gets posted directly to reddit and they dont have time to sit around debating the finer points of internet usage), but philisophically i understand why the fediverse is important.
  Also learning sbout the concept of defederation (as it regarded Beehaw) was a brainmelter and i felt like i was missing out on "content" be ause of how big it was. My other issue was around not undersranding who runs all these instances and quite frankly having no reason to trust they wouldnt do some crazy stuff themselves.
  
  I still havent figured out how to reliably see mastodon or kbin stuff or if i even want to.
  Lemmy is community-oriented, and I'm not sure it has a way to see posts that aren't to a community. Mastodon users can post to a community by tagging it, and you've probably seen posts from Mastodon users without noticing. If you want to see some, here's my photography account. Only posts to Lemmy communities show up at that link, but you'll see more if you view the profile on the original Mastodon server.
  You should be able to view and join Kbin magazines just like lemmy communities. Here's one.
  i felt like i was missing out on “content”
  You are. It happens with email too; it's somewhat difficult to reliably deliver email to gmail.com as a small server for example.
- What if we can't make it more approachable? Should we forever rely on corporations and their unethical platforms to be able to communicate? Just because people aren't willing to learn a few very basic things?
  This is not a problem with the technology, but with people.
  
  This is not a problem with people, but with UX design.
  We don't need a corporation to have usable interfaces. Right now, if you visit join-lemmy.org, the main focus is for people wanting to host an instance, which is only a small part of the advanced user base. The common user won't care about the fact Lemmy is made with rust or that there's a docker image.
  I don't think it's only an issue with Lemmy, lots of open-source projects lack user-friendliness and onboarding.
  
  I agree so much. I feel like your typical user does not need to know 1% of all that. Hell, I don't even think that they need to know much about the whole instances shebang. Scroll through a feed, see a bunch of users from various federated instances say things, the end. The fediverse aspect is something that could be relegated to a help section or something along these lines. Complexity scares people away.
  I seriously wish that Lemmy and the Fediverse in general would boom in popularity because this kind of "free" social media is what people deserve, but I just can't see it happening with how things are now.
  
  People need to know what an instance is. They need to know what defederating means too. They also need to know why the Fediverse is better than centralized alternatives, because otherwise they won't care.
  
  Can I ask you to educate me on why people need to know? I'm struggling to see your point. Surely people will benefit in some way from knowing how the Fediverse works under the hood, but not everyone needs to know, and as you can see this heavy emphasis on the Fediverse's inner workings is, instead, turning people away.
  People are just very used to having things magically work, and I think that it's very natural for them to not want to deal with things that they need to make work. Many people never knew how Twitter or Reddit works under the hood, many never cared, but in the Fediverse it's suddenly brought up as a necessary thing. And I just can't see how that's necessary thing to use such a tool. All I'm saying is that UX-wise, many apps in the Fediverse could feel more seamless.
  I hear you on the Fediverse being better in many many cases, but I also feel like many of the Fediverse's features are all but marketable to the average person. Add in the fact that people feel like there is a learning curve, and what you get is that people lose interest very fast.
  
  In order to be able to choose an instance or change it in the future, a user needs to know what it is first. Maybe we could choose it for them randomly (would that be ethical?), but they still need to know where their account is hosted. If their instance gets defederaded by other instances, then they also need to know what defederation is and how it affects them. Those are just basics needed to fully use the Fediverse and the freedoms it gives you. I'm not saying that people should know exactly what ActivityPub protocol is and how it works. But they need to know the basics about how federation works. This is nothing complicated, so I don't think I'm asking for much.
  In centralized platforms users don't have freedom, so they don't have to worry about any of this. If they aren't willing to learn a few basic things in order to have freedom, then there is nothing we can do for them. We can and should try to educate them, but many people don't see a problem with being abused by corporations. This is not a new problem in software. It has existed for at least 30 years since the Free Software movement was created.
  Lemmy has many UI and UX problems and they certainly need to be fixed. But it's possible that decentralized platforms will always be more complicated to use than centralized ones. If people aren't willing to learn how to use it, that's a problem with them, not with this technology.
  
  Okay, you bring very good points, especially on the "changing instance" one. I think I was seeing things from an ideal point of view, where instances just work and there are no reasons to defederate from other instances (but even though I've not been on the Fediverse for long, I've already seen I think two "big" such cases :( ).
  I would say that choosing it for them is not the way, and assigning it randomly isn't either as there are definitely problems associated with that as well. The best thing that comes to mind is to maybe have some "special" instance (or just an application, kinda like what Mastodon's Android app does - at least with the new update) whose purpose is to guide users through sign up and choosing an instance. I think this would kill two birds with one stone. Guiding users through instance-selection, maybe briefly explaining what an instance is and eventually pointing to more user-friendly docs, could already be much more manageable for everybody, and could feel like a more seamless experience, similarly to traditional social media.
  At the end of the day I feel even more like the Fediverse is almost inherently harder than centralized services, maybe it will take time before people settle with the idea of using something like this. People eventually got how to use the now traditional kind of technology, but I don't know if it's because enough time has passed or because it became a necessity (socially speaking).
  
  The best thing that comes to mind is to maybe have some “special” instance (or just an application, kinda like what Mastodon’s Android app does - at least with the new update) whose purpose is to guide users through sign up and choosing an instance. I think this would kill two birds with one stone. Guiding users through instance-selection, maybe briefly explaining what an instance is and eventually pointing to more user-friendly docs, could already be much more manageable for everybody, and could feel like a more seamless experience, similarly to traditional social media.
  That's a very good idea. The website https://join-lemmy.org could have something like that or we could make a new website for it.
  People are already adjusting to the decentralized services, but it's possible that they will never become popular enough for most people to have to learn how to use them.
  
  Yes, Lemmy's UI is very bad. It would be pretty easy to improve it, if only developers understood this. But I think the part that new users complain about the most is federation. At least I've seen many posts and comments saying that it's too confusing.
  
  I don't think it's necessarily the job of the developers, the main issue IMO is that there's not enough involvement from other specialists such as designers in open-source communities.
  
  Sometimes I try to help, but unfortunately not everyone is willing to listen. I've noticed there are multiple reasons why UI might be bad in a Free Software project:
  developers are not UI experts and they don't know better
  developers are not UI experts and they don't listen to experts or UI is not their priority
  the UI code is so bad that changing it would require rewriting most of the application and nobody has the time to do that, so there is nothing that can be done (this probably doesn't happen in web apps)
  I believe in Lemmy's case it's mostly the 2nd point.
  
  IDK about Lemmy devs, but point 2 is so, so common. Making a point about UX or accessibility in 99% of FLOSS project discussion spaces is incredibly stressful; you can have user research, industry best practice, and years of experience on your side, but you're inevitably met with dismissal and argument. Devs often treat designers as though they're a bunch of artsy crystal-healing crusties, despite the fact that good UX people base their work on actual research and theory grounded in human behavior and psychology. (Calling use of basic design principles "eye candy" for example) Of course, if a dev makes a decision on technical grounds, it must be treated as scripture as far as any remaining designers on the project are concerned. It's no wonder so many FLOSS projects have abominable UX.
  
  True. I feel like usually anything I say about UI is interpreted as just my opinion, which in developer's minds is just as valid as anyone else's opinion. It maybe kinda makes sense, since those developers don't really know me, but there is nothing I can say to change their minds. So they remain stuck with a bad, inefficient design for no good reason.
  GNOME desktop environment is a good example that having a good UI is possible.
  In Lemmy's case users are forced to take matters into their own hands: !plugins@sh.itjust.works
  
  Exactly. I once made a point about excessive indicators of visual / information hierarchy increasing cognitive load without additional benefit on a subreddit and got downvoted to oblivion. That was not my opinion; that's what industry research indicates!
  Got to say though, I think GNOME is pretty, but a usability nightmare.
  
  It's not based on the same 30 years old design that all popular operating systems are. So it might take some time to learn how to use it. Is that what you meant or do you think that it's badly designed?
  Here is an interesting video about this topic: https://youtu.be/GkxAp2Gh7-E
  
  Yea, I think they make honest to god bad design decisions that hurt usability. A common thread is hiding features / reducing discoverability while making no attempt at progressive disclosure, requiring memorization to complete certain tasks with the interface. This isn't only bad UX, it's an accessibility issue for users with attention and/or memory deficits. Creating a new paradigm is one thing, but with that comes the task of building affordances that help users with the transition, like skeumorphism did back in the day (...and to an extent, skeumorphism should have never been abandoned in the way it was...), something that the GNOME project simply does not do. They also ignore common accessibility recommendations, for example, by using icons without text in their applications, and utilizing mystery-meat navigation methods like hamburger menus, and ignoring long-established patterns for even very basic tasks, like allowing titlebars to become cluttered with interface elements leading to confusion when the user wants to move the window and widgets are in the way. I don't think it's bad at all that the GNOME project is trying to build their own paradigm, but they do so without consideration for the most fundamental usability guidelines.
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/GkxAp2Gh7-E
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
  
  Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !plugins@sh.itjust.works
  
  Also, I always have to have a chuckle when I see what clients produce on their own. Like, they'll cheap out and produce absolute garbage that they're somehow happy with, but the minute you, a design professional, submit a concept or mockup that is far beyond their ability to produce, the client is absolutely full of feedback: "Make the logo 5x bigger!" "Let's use this barely visible shade of blue!"
  
  A few basic things? What are you talking about? Gen-Z doesn't even know how to use a computer. We're fucked!
- This perfectly illustrates the problem with the Internet as a whole in the age of smartphones.
  Your idea of the "first step" is always "open app" but the Internet is not apps. The Internet is servers, and a web browser is the client app for most of it.
  Since I know how to use the Internet, it was simple AF to get a Lemmy account going. I went to https://lemmy.world and signed up. Now I'm on Lemmy.
  If all you know of the Internet is "open app" on your phone, you have a lot more to learn about the Internet as a whole.
  
  I think most common people are accustomed to "being fed", rather than exploring for themselves. That's why most of the original platforms were just getting copy pastes from other platforms. Originality requires effort.
  I personally have been looking at lemmy thinking what's new... Only to realise that maybe it's time "I" create that new. _:=
  
  that's a common problem. kids don't know how to use computers because they're so used to using apps.
  
  I am a former senior web developer and head of a web-based software company, I know how to use the internet. That is not why I use apps. I use apps because they fit into my phone's ecosystem much better than websites. The flow I've illustrated is the most commonly adopted, as others in the reply thread have pointed out.
  
  As a backend developer I know that it's all servers under the hood, but that's not what the internet is. It hurts to say it, but the frontend matters more in that regard. Probably the most used frontend these days is apps, so the internet is apps. Websites are still widely used and indispensable so they are also the internet. Apps and websites are both the internet, just on different usecases.
- Do we really need 10s of millions of people here???!
  Having gone through the time when AOL first allowed its members access to the Internet, the impression I ended up with was that it was exactly having the sub-culture of the time overwhelmed by the vastly larger culture of the AOL members that mainly screwed things up.
  I think the desire for massive crowds is just a reflection of what we've become used to in the last couple of decades rather than the conclusion of thinking it through.
  Mind you, I'm not saying that I have the answer, I'm trying to throw out there the idea that maybe in a forum of forums system "the more" aren't "the merrier" because the sweet spot of participation to make a forum pleasant is somewhere in the middle rather than more always being better.
  
  I think the desire for massive crowds is just a reflection
  of capitalism. outsiders don't consider you successful unless you have x amount of users or make x in revenue or are top 3 in your category. and even when you match the desired characteristics, it's still not enough. what about this quarter? profits over everything. the solution isn't to bend for other people, but to create something that's authentic to you and be satisfied with what you have.
  
  Yeah, that too.
  I reckon that many people's expectation and even desire for what's familiar (a natural human preference for the known and familiar which is often confused with actually liking it) that ends up as a desire expressed in these comments for a BIGGER Fediverse is due to the their constant exposure to big and crowded situations again and again, which in turn is because Capitalism tends to create those in all kinds of context (virtual or otherwise) as they're more profitable.
- i had to actually READ about how to get this program to work and understand its nuances and stuff and research ways to even look at it or what is was
  90% of people are def not gonna do that lol
  
  if they can't then GTFO. (and I say can't knowing full well it means "don't feel like lifting a finger")
  
  Maybe it's not actually that bad to have people who can concentrate for more than 25 seconds.
- I think federated software should probably be focusing on a web-first rather than app-first approach. That has to include an excellent mobile web experience, which Lemmy could use a bit of work on (the software is fairly young and this is not meant as criticism). Mainstream users do have an app-first habit right now. I don't think that's necessarily because people prefer apps to websites, but because companies are pushing apps and deprecating websites. I've read that app users are, on average seven times more profitable than web users.
  It's easy to figure out how and where to sign up when you're linked to https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/. When inviting people to Lemmy, it's probably good to just directly link a server.
- This federated stuff is going to remain niche unless somebody figures out a way to make it approachable.
  And also make the layout attractive. I view Lemmy via a Web browser on my desktop (yeah, I know, my age is showing) and it is...I'll be polite and call it "a work in progress".
- It’s my very first day. There was a small learning curve, but then I just found memmy and it’s back to a normal Reddit like experience for me. Really not too hard at all.
- I'm glad I shared the same experience as someone else

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