If email were invented today people would complain about how complex and annoying it is to sign up.
In college I had to write a program to send emails. This was around 2012. Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from. There are obviously ways to sign the message and verify it and most email servers block messages that don’t have these because of how trivial it is to fake. It’s basically like putting a name tag on that says “Joe Biden” and everyone believing you’re the president.
I didn’t do anything malicious but I did mildly prank my girlfriend. I don’t remember what I did but I’m pretty sure I told her before I did it. I really didn’t want to end up getting expelled for “”“hacking”“” so I didn’t do anything remotely bad. The irony is the assignment wouldn’t have worked and been as interesting if my campus had the proper security measures to block the messages.
It could be that the web client for our email mentioned something about the sender being unverified and not to trust it but I don’t remember.
deleted by creator
I flirted with journalism before getting my degree in CS.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the faculty and many of the students were almost proudly “bad at math” and basically bad with tech too, other than learning the basics of a Macbook.
Doesn’t have to be that way and many journalists are smart, great people, but there’s a weird self fulfilling culture when it comes to tech. Not totally sure about how tech focused writers would be similar or different.
Edit: Just googling “journalists bad at math” and got this from the Columbia Journalism Review:
“In many cases, they got into journalism to stay away from math.” Journalists love to joke about how we suck at math.
Edit 2: I guess I was bringing up my experience to be an example of how many journalists do not have a strong grasp of technical concepts and sometimes are almost proud of that. So it doesn’t surprise me that many may have struggled with Mastodon.
That being said, that attitude is far closer to the average user than, say, the user base of this platform, which is likely far more tech savvy. Streamlined user experience is not a bad thing if you desire mainstream use and is something that could be improved, though Mastodon has been making strides in that regard.
I suck at math too. But isn’t the work of a journalist to at least double check? Calculators exist for a reason.
As someone who worked in IT support at a university and later as a sys admin: I believe MOST people (including young people) can not use the internet or a computer when it goes beyond installing and using a (popular) app from the App Store.
Many people can not, for example, look up a program via search engine, go to its website, find and click the correct download link and then install the program. Many people don’t even use websites anymore, they only use applications.
Their voices are missing online simply because they are basically tech illiterate. And I think that is a huge problem.
To be fair, if you want content on Mastodon, you have to actively go out, find people, and follow them. After you get past that Step 1 of signing up, your home page is empty. There’s no algorithm that automatically deposits content on the main page. You have to do a little bit of work to get anything. As you say, doing this work is not that god damn hard, but sadly for about 80% of people (maybe more), this is an impassible barrier.
On the bright side, once you do get past this barrier, none of the Mastodon content that you are getting is from that bottom eighty percent.
I think the trickiest part is finding people on other instances and needing to copy/paste their links in your home instance’s search bar before you can follow or reblog, especially if you’re following a link someone’s shared elsewhere. It’s a small nuisance, but it adds up over time, and it’s already more work than most social media consumers want to bother with. For Mastodon to truly take off, that needs to be automated or hidden, because most people are going to give up before they even get an explanation.
Every Reddit and Twitter user over the last few months: “OMG The Fediverse is so hard and complicated how can people figure this out!!!11eleven”
My brother(s) in data: It takes like 5 minutes to understand how it works and you’re good to go (maybe 10 if you were the paint-chip-or-glue-eating-type back in school.)
I feel like yall are also overestimating the tech comprehension of a lot of the younger generation. Every action has been so simplified some young teenagers are as tech illiterate as some of their grandparents. If its not inmediately obvious or requires a workaround, they just give up.
Yeah, especially when you imagine that they are accustomed to not having to seek out knowledge or even entertainment. When algorithms feed you everything and your attention becomes a commodity you don’t need to develop the skill to actually find it, or the wherewithal to even imagine that you need to go out and find it.
I believe those of us who were online in the 1995-2010 era remember what it was like to have an internet full of possibilities that you could explore and discover, but that was the exception.
I don’t think they’re tech-illiterate in general; there are certain things they don’t understand because they’ve never really had to - filesystems, for instance - but that’s no different from most Millennials not understanding CLIs.
It’s pretty obvious 99% of users bounce off the signup page. People who think otherwise simply are too disconnected from normie reality
Here is what happens
Let’s join this thing
I have to choose a server ? Ok which one ?
Wow that’s so many, is this important or cani pick at random ?
If you pick wrong, everything you write could be deleted or never seen by anyone.
Ok, well I better choose properly
Read server rules pages for 2-3 minutes
There’s a distraction
Later, joins threads
And those who don’t, bounce off the fact that it’s not intuitive to follow someone from their user page.
Mastodon is not as complicated as it is sometimes made out to be, but it’a disingenuous to pretend that it’s simple, either.
I wouldn’t even go that far to be honest.
server
“wtf is this”?
They should try navigating Facebook
One thing I don’t get. Among the gazilion “Oh, it is sooo easy to do this better” complainers are countless developers and designers. This whole Mastodon thing is Free Software, where countless people spent some of their free time and energy to give you what there is today. Complainer devs and UX folks, are your PR’s getting rejected?
So… Someone deluded says it’s super easy to sign up.
Someone points out that it’s really not for a non technical person. Let’s say that someone is me, and let’s say I’m a developer.
Is it suddenly my problem? Is it now my responsibility to fix it? I already have enough problems and responsibilities, thank you. I’m already busy with work and life. I got my own things I’m working on.
Fuck off with that attitude.
The problem is the paradox of “it doesn’t matter what server you pick” while also giving them a choice.
If choices don’t matter, why have a choice?
Although I disagree that it doesn’t matter
No choice doesn’t matterat all. However, the decision on which mastodon server to use for your social media is about as important as what you’ll choose to eat today for dinner. Yeah, kinda important for the dinner itself and you don’t want some crap, but if you do, you could just eat it anyway for now and try something else tomorrow.
or we make a few accounts on a few different servers.
we don’t need to identify with our fediverse accounts.
Downvoted. Please don’t post just screenshots of toots.
Please post the text contents in the description for blind folks and a link to the toot for credibility.
Mods, can we please remove this post?
Meanwhile, when you sign up for Threads your timeline is nothing but shitty influencers for the first few days, yet somehow they manage to press on through that without getting the vapors or whatever.
My account never made it through the first few days before they shut it down for community violation.
I never posted, I just want to be ready for if they ever start federating.
