If email were invented today people would complain about how complex and annoying it is to sign up.
Using your email address as username is a common problem for a lot of users.
Some of them are even completely shocked that they can use a different password and don’t understand, that their mail is just their login credentials for this specific site.
The feature “login with Apple/Google/Facebook” exists for a reason.
When it was invented, it was complex and annoying, even by today’s standards.
For a small period of time I was a god that would bless people with gmail invites lol. That brings me back. I remember compuserve and Hotmail but I don’t remember them being especially complicated at all. Maybe that was before my time…? Which would be nice for once
Hotmail was already the easy-mode stuff.
Before that you’d get your email account provided by the ISP, and before that you’d have to find someone who ran an email server and ask nicely for them to make you an account.
And regarding ease of use: The reason why e.g. SMTP is human-readable is because in the early days SMTP wasn’t the protocol that your email client used to talk to the server. It was the email client.
You’d just
telnetto your server and type in the SMTP commands manually.
It is almost impossible to make mastodon similar of an experience as Twitter was. I used Mastodon and found it kinda boring so I didn’t even try. But I did want to use Lemmy since I am a Reddit refugee. I had a pretty hard time trying to figure out how to choose the best instance, where to find my communities (should I join technology at beehaw or lemmy.world?). I still somewhat get confused trying to wrap my head around the fediverse AND I HAVE A FUCKING COMPUTER ENGINEERING DEGREE. If you think that the average user is gonna confidently just make a user and not get confused at all the new concepts you don’t know normies.
I get this to some extent… On the other hand, none of that matters.
What instance to choose? Doesn’t really matter.
What community to subscribe to? Both! If later you figure out you don’t like one of them, just unsub…But yeah, I know normies seem unable to just jump in and see how it works. They just read “fediverse” and don’t know what it is so just reject everything that it’s related to because “it’s too complicated”.
For me personally it’s the FOMO, what if the technology board on that instance is that much better than the one. Do I have to sub to 20 of the same boards? Kinda annoying tbh
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.
Given the number of people I’ve had to walk through downloading my store’s loyalty program app and set up their accounts, I’d believe it.
I had students (at university!) who, instead of starting the program, would either go through the whole process of downloading and installing the program or at least start the installer and installing it again each time they wanted to start the program.
Their voices are missing online simply because they are basically tech illiterate. And I think that is a huge problem.
I’ve seen a number of polls on the age demographics on the fediverse, and they’ve all been pretty consistent … the fediverse is basically on average a Xennial place with a surprising amount of Boomer. There are younger folks, of course, more so on lemmy/kbin than mastodon it seems (which is interesting).
But generally, in line with your comment, there’s a generational filter here that attracts those who remember the value of and how to use the old internet and old computers.
Which, if you think there’s value in what the fediverse is trying to do (free our expression and ownership on the internet), is a problem. Another way of looking at it is that the failure of allowing big-private-monopoly-social platforms to dominate for so long1 will have long lasting side effects including the erasure of what the internet can be in many people’s understanding of the world.
[1]: I’d estimate 2008-2023 as the era of dominant big social, where the closing year of 2023 may be too early or even open ended. That’s 14 years. Which, if we take the web as having started in 1993, and being ~30 years old, is about half the age of the internet. So, it’s a decently objective approximation, then, to say that the web is Facebook etc, especially as the relevance of older things fades. Which only amplifies the harm we allowed to transpire.
Also … check it out … lemmy can do footnotes!! Click the
view sourcebutton to see how I did it if you’re interested.I don’t talk about age, though? As I mentioned in my post being tech illiterate is not necessarily a question of your age group.
Yes. Sorry if it seems I was distorting your message. I was just trying to draw a connection between different kinds of tech literacy and familiarity and how that might track with the demographics here and the history of mainstream tech.
Maybe a stretch, but also maybe I have a point.
No I do think you absolutely have a point!
That more young people than you would expect are missing from places like Lemmy I blame mostly on smartphones and tablets.
Over the last decades the numbers of students who own PCs/Laptops have dropped. When I first worked as a lecture assistant for computational statistics that was around 2011 almost every student had a PC or laptop and knew how to use it (to a different extent between them, of course).
The course is once a year, has about 90 students each time and, since it’s about statistics, there is a mix of students from different fields. Most are from STEM fields, a few from social science or psychology. I could basically watch tech literacy deteriorate over the years.
This years course had only a third of people in it who actually use a PC/Mac outside of the course. There was not a single person who uses Linux this year. For the university’s lecture platform or for online lectures they use their phone, tablet or a tablet computer which runs Android or iOS.
78 % of them did never write a line of code in their lifes, or so they say. The ones who did say they have programming experience often only had one of these “Learning to Code” Apps on their phones.
Most of them need extensive instruction and hand holding to install the programs we use (which is R and RStudio). You do not want to imagine how it is to teach these students basic coding in R. It is both my biggest joy and my biggest sorrow. The stories I could tell…
I highly doubt many of these students would find their way to the Fediverse. They do not think about privacy or freedom online because they are disconnected from the online world, in a way. They are simply consumers who do not feel as a part of it.
