I don’t understand how someone in the comments says they’re tech literate but can’t figure lemmy out. Federation is somewhat akin to email. It’s really not all that complicated, imo, just a bit of extra friction at the onset to pick an instance.
It’s laziness. Them being “tech literate” is probably akin to knowing how to use the internet and signing up for a social media site. Enter email, new password, verify account, done. Understanding how federated social media works should technically not be an issue for them, because it’s literally just an extra step (choosing an instance to sign up with), but they are just too lazy or can’t be bothered to do it.
I’m tech literate - I’ve been on the internet since I connected the university I was working at in the early '90s. I was a system/network engineer until around '15. Choosing an instance is a hurdle that can’t be overlooked. Now that I’m “in” it seems trivial, but it delayed my joining Lemmy for quite a while. No other social media has it, and it just felt wrong. And now that I’ve been here for 2 years I still don’t understand a lot about how it works - like, if I decide I don’t like the instance I’m on now, I assume I’ll lose my history of posts and comments if I move? Again, it’s probably trivial for me to go find out, but we’re just not used to putting any effort into our social media platform. It’s a good thing for that to change, but we can’t ignore the fact that we are asking people to change when they come here.
It’s similar to how Twitter users say Mastodon is “hard”. They want a 1:1 copy of Reddit or Twitter, and don’t want to learn new things because any kind of learning at all is unpleasant.
But that will change when—not if—the network effect of the social web becomes apparent.
I don’t understand how someone in the comments says they’re tech literate but can’t figure lemmy out. Federation is somewhat akin to email. It’s really not all that complicated, imo, just a bit of extra friction at the onset to pick an instance.
Weaponised incompetence.
They don’t want to try something new so they’re going to make it as hard as possible for themselves so they have an excuse to give up.
Then they’re going to post about it hoping everybody stays with them.
And picking any of the big instances is fine and easy. The hard thing would be hopefully you don’t get a tankie instance.
It’s laziness. Them being “tech literate” is probably akin to knowing how to use the internet and signing up for a social media site. Enter email, new password, verify account, done. Understanding how federated social media works should technically not be an issue for them, because it’s literally just an extra step (choosing an instance to sign up with), but they are just too lazy or can’t be bothered to do it.
I’m tech literate - I’ve been on the internet since I connected the university I was working at in the early '90s. I was a system/network engineer until around '15. Choosing an instance is a hurdle that can’t be overlooked. Now that I’m “in” it seems trivial, but it delayed my joining Lemmy for quite a while. No other social media has it, and it just felt wrong. And now that I’ve been here for 2 years I still don’t understand a lot about how it works - like, if I decide I don’t like the instance I’m on now, I assume I’ll lose my history of posts and comments if I move? Again, it’s probably trivial for me to go find out, but we’re just not used to putting any effort into our social media platform. It’s a good thing for that to change, but we can’t ignore the fact that we are asking people to change when they come here.
You can’t move it to a new account.
You can link both of your accounts to each other in your profile and have the same username so that people can recognize you
It’s similar to how Twitter users say Mastodon is “hard”. They want a 1:1 copy of Reddit or Twitter, and don’t want to learn new things because any kind of learning at all is unpleasant.
But that will change when—not if—the network effect of the social web becomes apparent.
I’m tech savvy and it took awhile to understand how Lemmy and federation worked.
Same — that’s why I tend to point people to a specific instance, instead of lemmy as a whole.