This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.
Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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While I understand and largely agree with your point, I think it's worthwhile to question whether it's reasonable that this is the way people expect the Internet to work.
Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack, so that unless you're somewhat tech-savvy, you can't tell the concept of app apart from the concept of server. Not unlike how Android and iOS have been obscuring many basics of the system to the point that some people don't even know what a filesystem is.
Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved, rather than just "the way things work" and that we need to cather to it. Mostly because FOSS services will always, invariably, struggle to adapt to a conception of the internet optimized for consumption and nothing else.
I agree that people nowadays might struggle to understand what, for instance, a third-party app is, but I also think it's too an unreasonably low bar to just let it be, and have FOSS forever playing acrobatics to somehow adapt to it.
Whether Lemmy should be the one leading this struggle is a whole another argument lol. Somehow forcing people to understand this with Lemmy in particular, without changing anything of the larger culture, will just cause people to not use Lemmy outright.
But this cannot be the way it works. Everyone using the internet needs some bare minimum tech literacy.
I fully agree here. Whatever software they have developed, is not rocket science, and mostly based off of existing standards.
Gmail, Outlook, etc... just a bunch of *DAV servers on top of an emailing service, paired with some SSO. Same goes for Reddit/X/FB. A simple DB just storing some info and doing some fancy sorting based on that info.
Yes!
But, on the other hand it's a two-fold sword.
Corps are making money off of peoples lack of knowledge, and this has been the way of how "offering a service" is being done probably since human history... and yes, it pisses me off as well, especially when it comes to human health and nutrition, etc...
But....
Say, you hire contract workers, to build a house, bc. you don't know how to do it yourself. Then you need to hire someone else to approve the quality of the work that's been done, since again... you lack the knowledge. After you've moved in, something breaks, again... you hire someone to fix it.
Now, at what point do you start learning about all the components involved in a built house? electricity, plumbering, walls, etc... and most importantly, do you even care in learning so or not?
And some people, just don't care. They simply don't. Even if the concept of a topic is very easy to grasp, they simply lack the interest in knowing about how it works.
Say you hire a company to build a house. You don't have the skills or the know-to, but at some point, you'll have to deal with some inevitable aspects of building a house, if only to discuss them with the workers. Say they "force" you to deal with plumbing, for example by including it in the budget. Imagine if you not only don't know how plumbing works, but also what plumbing is. Maybe you've never had to think about it before. What would you do? Would you go to another company that doesn't force you to deal with it, perhaps by not even providing it in the first place?
Say for the sake of argument that this becomes a generalized problem, and companies use it as an excuse to no longer provide plumbing in new houses, as a cost-saving measure. Most people don't seem to care. Over 10 years pass by, and people have gotten used to expect not having running water at home. "It sucks, but that's the way it is I guess".
Now, a community-driven initiative arises to build cheaper houses, complete with running water. Can you imagine most people refusing participating, because building a house with running water implies having to know that plumbing supplies water? That the mere thought of it is already too complicated, and that maybe having fresh water at home is only for people whose special interest is plumbing?
You need some elementary knowledge on things, if only to exist in the world. The Fediverse, and I mean this wholeheartedly, is not that complicated once you grasp the most basic concepts of the internet.
While I won't deny outright that open-source devs most of the time don't think about making their software accessible to the wider public, and that some aspects of decentralized social media still have to be ironed out (duplicated communities on Lemmy are a pet-peeve of mine); these issues are often heavily blown out of proportion. Besides people honestly not understanding some concepts, I think there is also some deliberate anti-intellectualism going on with this topic in particular. People who spend their afternoons troubleshooting Windows just so that their computer games run at 60 FPS suddenly don't know what a website is when Mastodon is mentioned.
I'm pretty certain that this "Fediverse is too complicated" mantra would not have worked at all before 2010.