I feel like a much talked about criticism of getting started with Lemmy is that the ‘average person’ doesn’t understand it. I see a lot of technical people, myself included, use words that the ‘average person’ shies away from. Mentioning concepts like servers and Fediverse requires some background knowledge. I propose we start using ‘providers’ instead of servers, as it helps understand the function of it instead of the implementation. There might be more words that could be confusing, so let’s have a conversation about them. Are there any you recognize as being able to be simplified, or is this a non issue?
As a reddit refugee, this is my first post and it’s taken a few hours to get to this point. My work involves getting non technical users to use high end tech and agree that language and terminology can make or break a deployment. Reddit is easy, sign in here and away you go, not quite so with Lemmy. I have learned that if a system isn’t explained as simply as possible, in terms that your grandmother (or boss) can understand, adoption will be harder.
I’m not saying dumb it down entirely, but nobody cares about servers. Providers may be too abstract. Maybe go as far as calling them ‘Homes’ - or something else real world tangible. Once a user gets that on board they can then understand that different homes can talk to each other to form a village or community.
I enjoyed the ‘thing explainer’ books… Cut out all the technical jargon, focus on the user experience and save the detail for those who want to know.
As I say, I’m new here so apologise if I have spoken out of turn out caused offence, I’m watching and learning, and thought my fresh first hand experience may be of use.
I like the word ‘Home’ gives me old school internet vibes. But I fear it too would be abstract if providers is abstract. But home sounds exciting in the way that you could explore the ‘not home’ instances.
The biggest hesitation point for me was “instance” - it’s an odd choice of word IMO, and it made me immediately start thinking “I don’t know what that means, I don’t want to look stupid, I don’t want to get it wrong, I don’t want to make the wrong choice…” etc, etc, etc…
I got past it (obviously, since I’m here) but I think it’s something that could be better.
Particularly (and I realise that this isn’t the only use case) for people considering coming from Reddit. They understand that the structure is Reddit.com/subreddit/post/comment
Obviously comments and posts match up between Reddit/Lemmy, and “communities” are basically the same as “subreddits” so that’s ok.
But “Instance” doesn’t really have an equivalent, especially when you consider “Lemmy” to be equivalent to “Reddit”
In a way though, I feel like Lemmy is not equivalent to Reddit really. In fact Reddit would maybe be more equivalent to an instance - except that it’s the ONLY instance in that particular space. Whereas with Lemmy, there are loads of similar and interacting but nonetheless distinct 'Reddit’s
Maybe the metaphor for new users needs to be, imagine if there were dozens of 'Reddit’s, that were independent of each other, but which could (usually) talk to each other, so you only needed to join one to see (almost) anything on any of them.
I dunno, maybe this is all nonsense, I’m just kind of musing on it as a very new user of Lemmy who is enjoying it but find it hard to explain in a way that appeals to people stuck at the same hesitant stage I mentioned in my first paragraph.
Your metaphor of multiple instances = multiple “Reddits” is exactly how I think of it as a layperson!
A few other people use the email metaphor, but I found it not as digestible since email is not a forum.
Oh that’s good, hopefully it’s not a million miles from being accurate then! ;-)
Yeah, I also got a particular problem with the word instance, as it signals to me there would be different content in one that is not accessible for the others. That’s how it reads at first thought. But this is obviously not the case for Lemmy. It is all shared. That’s why I like the word provider more. Gmail is an email provider. Lemmy.ml is a Lemmy provider, same as lemmy.world .
Ah, I like that - a Lemmy provider, where Lemmy is not a place but a type of thing/service, like “an email” or “a website”
I think it’s a matter of habit.
I mean, all this new stuff is certainly confusing, overwhelming even, I still don’t get how all these different instances can “talk” to each other like there were one, and several other things I don’t get yet.
But I was very confused about reddit terminology as well when I joined reddit 8 years ago, then I learned and it became second language to me.
I believe this is the same, I believe we shouldn’t try to understand everything in a day, just learn a bit at a time, ask questions, ask for help if we’re stuck or feel frustrated, and in time it will become so natural that we’ll stop thinking about it.
Agreed - so much of the internet in the last decade has been about platforms merging or simplifying or imitating others, so people have become much less use to having to learn new things.
Lemmy is like taking a step backwards to when everything wasn’t quite so slickly tailored to friction-free user experience, and having to trust oneself to make the odd step into the unknown.
But that’s ok, because that’s how we learn. One step at a time.
Things aren’t meant to be understood in a matter of seconds. I’m not by any means a tech-savvy person, and it was challenging the first few days to grasp the concept of federation and decentralization. And that’s completely fine. Explaining things to people as if they were five year olds is demeaning to them. We as humanity are meant to evolve and not regress.
Conversation in that respect is indeed important, yet the last week the only week has consisted of people conversing about Lemmy’s structure so there isn’t any lack of communication.
