So, confession time: I was recently helping a new client get set up on the Fediverse—guiding them through their first steps into our glorious decentralized galaxy. And seeing it all again through fresh eyes?
Reader, it was brutal.
So much of what should be table stakes for any social media UX in the year of our Lord 2025 still is missing or deeply broken still. I know progress has been made and a good fight, fought.
Tbh it reads more like a concerned tech person thinks that everyone except them is confused little kitten, not like a list of a real problems that someone experienced. Some of the problems are real some are completely made up ‘problems’.
In fairness, I agreed with his first point to an extent about the difficulty normal people have even understanding the concept of instances. I did once to try to explain it to my mom and was completely unsuccessful. The best metaphor I came up with was that it’s like choosing your local AAA office. You know they’re all AAA but this one might have a theme or perks that you prefer over others. It’s not Location based it’s more theme-based, but same idea. It’s not perfect, but she still didn’t really get it. But then when he refused to demonstrate his solution to the problem, and said we’ll have to wait for his next post to find out, my mind started wandering and I stopped reading.
You use different phone providers can still call each other
This may be even better than the email analogy.
You haven’t ever used email before? That’s an obvious and easy explanation that most people understand.
Your tone is not nice
It wasn’t my intention and re-reading it I can’t find anything that will make it nicer or less nicer. 🥴
I think conceptually to us that works, but it really doesn’t work for the average person.
Partly because you get “if it’s like email, why not just use email?”. Most people don’t understand how email even works, that it’s a kind of federated system, that their account resides with a certain provider/host, etc.
People were starting to get it in the late 90’s/early 2000’s, but then Yahoo/Google happened, then smartphones.
And kids who grew up with smartphones often really don’t get how things work, because their experience is with a capability-limited device where that stuff is even more obfuscated.
At best, average people think in terms of an app, and are utterly uninterested in any behind-the-scenes stuff. And to them, picking an instance is behind-the-scenes. “Why do I have to do any of this?” I mean getting people to create an account and track passwords is hard enough.
In my circle people understand emails, and they aren’t easily stupified by smallest things and don’t rage quit on encountering first unknown word. I have no idea how people think and don’t really want to. Blog post insists on corporate metrics for conversions and whatever for registration flows, you on kids not getting simple concepts.
Fedi grows in organic ways and isn’t an interesting place for everyone and that’s fine.