79
[rant] Why is this so hard for people? (kbin.social)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by McBinary@kbin.social to c/RedditMigration@kbin.social
153 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] hardypart@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

I gotta be honest, I'm a tech person myself and I was also slightly confused when I checked out Lemmy for the first time. There were three major things I had to grasp before I felt like I understood the whole concept:

  1. Browsing "All" shows content from all federated instances
  2. Most big instances are already federated, so chosing the right instance is not really that important
  3. You can participate in other instances with the account of your "home" instance by turning foreigninstance.com/c/Community into homeinstance.com/c/Community@foreigninstance.com, which is a kinda cumbersome process right now, but I'm sure some wily developer will come up with an elegant solution for that in the future (like having the option to automatically turn URLs from foreign instances into home instance URLs).

It kind of makes me want to learn coding, so I can participate and make Lemmy better and better, lol.

[-] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 0 points 1 year ago

For #3 the easiest way is probably just to search for the community. The search shows other instance's communities too.

[-] hardypart@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Which is still cumbersome and too convoluted for most people.

[-] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 0 points 1 year ago

Yeah it's definitely a problem. But I think most casual users would just see posts in their feed, and they can visit the community from the post with no issue.

[-] hardypart@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

That's true, the problem only starts when someone includes a direct link to a community, post or comment of an instance that's not your home instance.

this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
79 points (100.0% liked)

Reddit Migration

196 readers
1 users here now

### About Community Tracking and helping #redditmigration to Kbin and the Fediverse. Say hello to the decentralized and open future. To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/

founded 1 year ago