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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Fediverse
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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
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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).