non technical people don’t understand how computers work. for us it’s intuitive that a computer can have a program on it that listens to a port on the network and serves interactive web pages for for most people “app on phone does something” is all they know. their mwental model is shaped by large corpo offerings.
I think our pitch to the tech illiterate should be “hey look at this great website, great content, mods actually do their jobs, users are friendly” let them sign up thinking a particular instance is just like what their used to, then they discover on their own accord that some users have an extra @example.com at the end, and if they ask explain that there are other websites just like that one, and the websites can exchange messages so it all works like one big website. for apps, just tell them “when you launch it for the first time it asks for your server, just type in the domain name, this app supports multiple websites. good, now put in your username and password and you’re all set”
starting new people off in the browser might be a bit awkward on mobile but saving the federation talk for later is probably best. focus on the surface level appeal (a website that is good and doesn’t suck) and they can learn why it doesn’t suck later
The problem with that is, some instances are just shit, and new users that accidentally end up there will kinda lose interest before learning what instances mean.
Or any instance really that does not defederate from those. “For some reason nobody wants to join our Alt-Left Nazi bar over here… - why can’t people be smart enough to not choose the bear?” (/s btw, in case it was not blindingly obvious).
But Ada and https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/ are hella impressive, and I don’t pretend to understand why the name “blahaj” is turning some people off, but I would think it’s an absolutely perfect opportunity to switch to?
I suppose that still leaves the issue of what to do to replace the wiki - perhaps a locked community with links structured in its sidebar to point to posts?
There are tools that can meet at least some of the needs being asked for, but nothing is perfect.
non technical people don’t understand how computers work. for us it’s intuitive that a computer can have a program on it that listens to a port on the network and serves interactive web pages for for most people “app on phone does something” is all they know. their mwental model is shaped by large corpo offerings.
I think our pitch to the tech illiterate should be “hey look at this great website, great content, mods actually do their jobs, users are friendly” let them sign up thinking a particular instance is just like what their used to, then they discover on their own accord that some users have an extra @example.com at the end, and if they ask explain that there are other websites just like that one, and the websites can exchange messages so it all works like one big website. for apps, just tell them “when you launch it for the first time it asks for your server, just type in the domain name, this app supports multiple websites. good, now put in your username and password and you’re all set”
starting new people off in the browser might be a bit awkward on mobile but saving the federation talk for later is probably best. focus on the surface level appeal (a website that is good and doesn’t suck) and they can learn why it doesn’t suck later
The problem with that is, some instances are just shit, and new users that accidentally end up there will kinda lose interest before learning what instances mean.
Or any instance really that does not defederate from those. “For some reason nobody wants to join our Alt-Left Nazi bar over here… - why can’t people be smart enough to not choose the bear?” (/s btw, in case it was not blindingly obvious).
But Ada and https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/ are hella impressive, and I don’t pretend to understand why the name “blahaj” is turning some people off, but I would think it’s an absolutely perfect opportunity to switch to?
I suppose that still leaves the issue of what to do to replace the wiki - perhaps a locked community with links structured in its sidebar to point to posts?
There are tools that can meet at least some of the needs being asked for, but nothing is perfect.
Strong agree. I posted similar thoughts on https://slrpnk.net/post/18168206