Can I just rant a little to you all?
I’ve tried numerous times to help people from reddit set up an account and get started on Kbin (and lemmy), but 4 out of 5 times people can’t seem to grasp the concept of registering an account and starting to use this platform. Even breaking it down into 2 steps, with direct links… They get angry, and then ragequit their attempt in a huff saying how it’s too fucking complicated and it will never take off because it’s so hard.
Ok, I get that the fediverse is complicated if you think deeply about all the interconnectivity and federation etc, but there is no reason you even have to think about any of it to create an account and get started. Like, at all.
It reminds me so much of my 70/y old mother-in-law not immediately knowing how to work a tv remote and shoving it at me after 1.5 seconds saying “here, I can’t figure this out”. When in reality all she had to do was press the fucking big red button…
I’m just so frustrated with people’s complete lack of ability to help themselves.
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.
This understanding is much more easily achieved after one’s familiar with the basics of their own instance though, isn’t it? Rather than expecting them to imagine the exact user experience of the fediverse before they even made their account, would we not be better off introducing them to a cold open and be helpful later when they have questions?
All of these problems are caused by the same underlying system and trying to explain the system to non-users is the exact wrong way to go about alleviating them. Better interface and UX design is the only thing which can solve this issue.