I think one thing that bothers me a lot with anything tech related is that while, yes, a lot of things can definitely have improved UX that is more user friendly, a lot of other things already have great UX that has been polished for years but gets a lot of undeserved criticism simply for being different from the status quo and/or requiring even the smallest amount of learning or effort

and I honestly entirely blame corporations that over the last 20 years have done everything to create walled gardens with the promise of "we do everything for you, if you have to think while using a computer that means it's bad"
and it's terrifying how well that worked on so so so many people

sometimes things just require you to sit down for half an hour, read something, learn something, try something you're not used to. that's normal. that is simply how anything even remotely advanced has worked for the thousands of years. you don't pick up an electric drill and throw a tantrum because it doesn't work exactly like a screwdriver. computers are a tool that let you do things, and just like any other tool, may require putting at least the smallest amount of effort into learning something

it's honestly frustrating how normalized "nuh uh i got adopted by [corporation's walled garden] and this is where i live for the rest of my life. anything even slightly different is just bad. why would I ever consider anything else, that's effort and effort is bad" has become

I understand that habits can be very strong, and I get it, adjusting to new things takes time, but it's not the end of the world. "more complex" doesn't necessarily mean "worse", it just means you would need to learn and adjust. teaching math at school doesn't stop at pre-algebra, it goes all the way to trigonometry and calculus because there's a good reason for it to be more complicated than the basics. learn something new, it's good for you.

and of course I believe that only people who want to be tech nerds should be them, in no way should it be a requirements, but I'm sorry, if the bar is at "this social place consists of many small social places connected to eachother. you can pick any small place and communicate with people on any other. you can "follow" people from any small social place and see them in your "home timeline". in the "local timeline" you only see people from your small social place, while in the "federated timeline" you see people from all small spaces your space is connected with. if needed, any social space can disconnect and stop communication with any other social space" and the bar is considered "too high", then maybe something else is wrong because it's a fucking basic concept that is applied to many things in life outside of computers
90% of what is needed to know about the federated model can be explained in a single paragraph without using a single tech word. the paragraph can be read in under a minute. if the bar on that level of knowledge is "too high" then I don't know what isn't. it's okay, and even good, to learn new things. there is no point in actively forcing yourself to avoid learning new things
have you ever been part of a team or a group in a multiplayer role playing video game? have you ever sent an email to more than 1 recipient? have you ever been to school? congratulations! you have experienced small interconnected communities. it's not fucking rocket science

this is not a "we are forcing normal people to understand scary programming things" problem. this is a "corporations are doing everything to make people so strongly anti-learning and so against trying new things that they voluntarily refuse to use anything except for their own product" problem

it's very intentional and absolutely not something that just happened on its own. it's a lot easier and more convenient to keep your users using your product if you turn them against the fundamental concept of "learning other things"

the fact that "websites are hosted by other computers called servers on the internet and are not a magical thing that exists" is not common knowledge anymore and is something that you have /convince/ people about just shows how bad it has gotten

best I can describe it is probably learned helplessness combined with anti-intellectualism and being in an environment where refusing to learn or think about things is somehow considered a positive thing

it's frustrating

@AgathaSorceress The end user has no obligation to use a program just because you want them to.

There's only one reason an end user won't even try a program: you haven't given them a single good reason they should.

These are not reasons:
- I want you to
- It does this, this, and this
- It doesn't do this, or this
- I think you should

The one reason that will always work:
- It does what you want, it's better at it than what you're using now, and I can tell you exactly how to use it.

@AgathaSorceress made the mistake of reading all the replies i can see, and now i wish i could see less
@AgathaSorceress it's also a product of being able to make a hundred servers just from git pushing a yaml file. They're ethereal and magic.

@AgathaSorceress So that's twitter. You've just described twitter.

I'm sorry for being snarky but, this is the exact vibe I got from some of the twitter uses that really should know better.

@AgathaSorceress I agree with this 100%. When someone comes to me for help with something like "how do I transfer contacts to my new phone" its not the question or them asking that is frustrating but the fact they couldn't put in the effort to type a single search query because they've been trained to give up as soon as something doesn't work the way they expect (contacts magically appearing in their new phone). Like the first thing I'm going to do is type that query in
@AgathaSorceress but what about this newfangled serverless thing /s
@AgathaSorceress no, it’s more that choosing a random server has never been a typical onboarding experience for any service
@mediajunkie @AgathaSorceress it was before facebook, twitter and google came though, which actually is the whole point of this thread.

@ulPa @AgathaSorceress i’m from then and it really wasn’t.

I get the whole point of the thread and it’s a kernel of truth wrapped in a lot of weird user blaming and denial of the need for plain language.

@mediajunkie @AgathaSorceress I think most of the confusion comes from people not knowing what a server is especially what they mean with mastodon.
So I agree, this should be better explained, as in the official app they just tell you to choose one, and on the website you have to scroll past all the featured servers to get an explanation of what they are.
@ulPa @AgathaSorceress also “any pronouns are ok” sounds flippant and disrespectful, fwiw
@AgathaSorceress So much. Plus people forget the outages and random interface changes on the walled gardens that they endlessly complained about at the time.

@AgathaSorceress in your experience, what do people believe how that works?

They sure don't believe it "just exists", or do they just not care?

@AgathaSorceress "There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer."

I don't recall who said it, but the reminder circulates in Sysadmin communities from time to time.

@AgathaSorceress re: offtopic: “servers are not a magical thing that exist” funnily enough that’s the direction they took the matrix in newer editions of shadowrun,

in that setting now websites are sorta carved by hand out of the information dimension and would remain functional if you destroyed every piece of electronics on the planet

@AgathaSorceress Heh, maybe stuff like BBS: The Documentary should have things like movie nights.
BBS: The Documentary : Jason Scott : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Long before the Internet escaped from the lab, connected the planet and redefined what it meant to use a computer there was a brave and pioneering band of...

Internet Archive
@lanodan @AgathaSorceress thanks for the link I was shortly on BBS halfway 90s, prior to getting internet. Have some fond memories from that.
@AgathaSorceress we need this but for the fediverse. bang out some copy in an afternoon. shit, I bet some folks on mastodon.art would illustrate it for fun

@AgathaSorceress Sometimes reality is very educative. OVH’s 2021 server fire in Strasbourg taught half of France that their ‘cloud’ was actually a physical - and very vulnerable - array of machines in a basement…

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-ovh-fire-idUSKBN2B20NU

@AgathaSorceress it is liberating to be #selfhosted. or at least in the case of mastodon, hosted by a person whose name I know!

@AgathaSorceress I have it on good authority that websites are hosted on cute fluffy clouds, so that part about "servers" is obviously wrong!

(/s) - my first server was a Sparc 20 running Solaris :P

@AgathaSorceress discord has broken all of our brains, calling Guilds "servers" like jump down a FUCKING MEAT GRINDER