it’s weird that, because once you’re in it’s basically seamless. it’s just that first step of picking a server based on your interests that trips people up, because aren’t you supposed to pick interests after you get in? more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.
Barbuzie@piefed.social 9 hours ago
As a new user (I started using PieFed 2 months ago), the UX can surely be improved, but I feel like the main issue is relative to how users are supposed to use the fediverse: I still don’t have a clue on how the fediverse works and how to use it properly. And I’m motivated in learning to use it. But for someone who isn’t motivated, it’s a huge “no thanks, goodbye”
lime@feddit.nu 9 hours ago
Foni@piefed.zip 8 hours ago
I have never understood the importance of choosing an instance, especially at the beginning. Sign up for any one, try it for a while and if you need to change later, you can do so without problems.
On sites like mastodon where followers are essential it can be a problem, in lemmy where karma is not even accumulated, changing servers does not make you lose more than the 5 minutes it takes you to do it
RobotToaster@mander.xyz 8 hours ago
It’s a bit of a faff to export and import your followed community list
Foni@piefed.zip 3 hours ago
I have changed instances several times and it seems to me to be the simplest mechanism humanly imaginable.
Vittelius@feddit.org 4 hours ago
For new users the local feed is the recommendation algorithm. If you are on a instance that caters to your interests you will discover stuff that interests you there automatically. If you’re not, then you might conclude, that Lemmy has nothing for you and bounce off the platform entirely. This is especially true if you are looking for non-English content.
The paradox situation with federation and instances is that those least likely to understand it are among the more likely to profit from it if they did.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 9 hours ago
more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.
That’s roughly how I chose my instance… I thought I’d choose an instance geographically close to me for latency reasons and such. I didn’t know anything about different Lemmy instances at the time and didn’t (for example) know that my instance actually hosts very few popular communities, so I’d be participating mostly in remote ones. :D
lime@feddit.nu 8 hours ago
yeah but, again, it’s seamless. my instance only hosts content in swedish, but that’s not really a problem. sorting by scaled means i still see things that happen locally mixed in with everything else.
RobotToaster@mander.xyz 8 hours ago
More instances with minimal/no defederation would help. That way you can just tell people to pick one of those instances and it doesn’t matter which one.
lime@feddit.nu 7 hours ago
i mean maybe. i initially chose one of those instances for mastodon, but it turns out when you don’t defederate from anyone, others defederate from you because you act as a proxy for the nazis and pedos to reach other instances. so i couldn’t talk to my friends. it’s a bit of a hassle.
OpenStars@piefed.social 7 hours ago
PieFed.zip is very new-user friendly (see very minimal instance blo ck list). I don’t see the requirement for an endless barrage of new instances being a blocker - the amount that we have now is sufficient to handle far more capacity than the entire Threadiverse is currently capable of demanding from the servers.
Quite the opposite: most stories I see about people talking about the Threadiverse is how toxic AF we are, and elitist leftists, not welcoming to liberal centrists e.g. in the USA. So if the goal were to bring on more people from Reddit (setting aside for the morning whether that is truly a worthwhile aim), then more censorship of toxicity is what would more readily make that happen, not less moderation. e.g. one glance at hexbear and your average Redditor will never come back here again:-P.
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
I disagree, you def would need to block the worst places. A good new-user friendly instance would block far-right and authoritarian content.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 8 hours ago
Welcome to PieFed! I see you’ve got an account and you know how to post comments. What else do you need help with?
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
I’d explain it like this:
Social media are built on ‘protocols’. Protocols tell e.g. social media what they can do and how to ‘talk’ to each other.
The Fediverse is a group of social media that use ActivityPub, Diaspora, or AT Protocol. These protocols allow something special that ‘traditional’ social media like Facebook and Instagram don’t: they can communicate across each other, without using a centralised server for hosting content.
It’s comparable to email; you can mail to someone not using your mail provider, and vice versa.
On one of these fediverse social media, people self-host or join a self-hosted group. Such a group is called an ‘instance’. Each instance functions independently and can have its own policies.
Instances (and users) can decide with which other instances they allow their own content to be seen. They can also decide what instances their users can see content from. An instance that is connected to another instance is said to be ‘federated’ with the latter. If that is not the case, they are ‘defederated’.
Within each instances, there are many communities. There’s a community for Linux, a community for cat pictures, a community for nature, and so on.
View the fediverse like a few forests, linked by many wild bridges. Lemmy might be one forest, Peertube and Mastodon yet other ones.
An instance is like a single tree. And a community a branch. Users are leaves.
Some parts of the fediverse allow these leaves to leave and join another tree.
Traditional social media, on the other hand, are comparable to a single, isolated and big tree, far away from other trees. You cannot jump to other trees, cannot easily go to a forest.
Would that be a good explanation?
Barbuzie@piefed.social 3 hours ago
Wow, thanks a lot, this is the best explanation that I was able to find so far!
vogi@piefed.social 6 hours ago
What do you think about https://phtn.app/ ? Sadly the PieFed support is in Beta for quite a while now, but I do like how clean everything looks. You can also hide away a lot of the complexity but I am not sure if that is the default.
Barbuzie@piefed.social 5 hours ago
I didn’t know it, and I’m trying it. The UX is really nice, though I don’t understand why I needed to submit the reasons why I wanted to subscribe, and why I have to wait to be subscribed to the different communities… But thanks for the suggestion!
vogi@piefed.social 4 hours ago
That is odd, normally you are only asked for a reason when you sign up for a new account and not when you just subscribe to a community. Can you share the community you were trying to subscribe?
I have to wait to be subscribed to the different communities
That is unfortunately in the nature of the decentralization. Your instance cannot be sure that that the instance the community is on will respond in a timely fashion so it shows it as “pending”. The only thing we could maybe do about this is to be overly optimistic. Most requests to subscribe a community go though without a problem so we could just show it being subscribed even though are are not, but that would introduce other problems.
Barbuzie@piefed.social 4 hours ago
My bad choice of wording, they asked me for reasons during sign up, not subscribing to communities. Anyway, thanks for the explanation, any chance you can share also android apps? I’m currently using Summit linked to my PieFed account
Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 9 hours ago
I think we should just hide all of that complexity and just set defaults for everything that the user can decide to change if they want.
BlueSky has 40+ million users, and it’s also technically decentralized like the Fediverse.
aka. you can use the eurosky.social or bluesky.social server etc.