Can I just rant a little to you all?

I’ve tried numerous times to help people from reddit set up an account and get started on Kbin (and lemmy), but 4 out of 5 times people can’t seem to grasp the concept of registering an account and starting to use this platform. Even breaking it down into 2 steps, with direct links… They get angry, and then ragequit their attempt in a huff saying how it’s too fucking complicated and it will never take off because it’s so hard.

Ok, I get that the fediverse is complicated if you think deeply about all the interconnectivity and federation etc, but there is no reason you even have to think about any of it to create an account and get started. Like, at all.

It reminds me so much of my 70/y old mother-in-law not immediately knowing how to work a tv remote and shoving it at me after 1.5 seconds saying “here, I can’t figure this out”. When in reality all she had to do was press the fucking big red button…

I’m just so frustrated with people’s complete lack of ability to help themselves.

  • 14th_cylon@lemm.ee
    10·
    2 years ago

    Ok, I get that the fediverse is complicated if you think deeply about all the interconnectivity and federation etc, but there is no reason you even have to think about any of it

    you must be kidding. there is no reason to think about that?

    to find communities/magazines you have to use some 3rd party tools (you may be lucky and see something in the “all” feed, but that is not guaranteed), then when you find it, you can’t just click subscribe, you have to grab the url, go back to another tab where you are logged into your instance and subscribe by manually constructing the url, or pasting the url somewhere (maybe, haven’t tried that way).

    don’t take me wrong, i am fan of open source, which is why i am here, but if you don’t see how this is complicated for average non-tech-savy user, then i am not sure what to tell you.

    • atocci@kbin.social
      7·
      2 years ago

      Using 3rd party tools I don’t understand, I just use the magazine search bar in Kbin itself. Searching for a term works just fine to get me to any magazines or communities I want to subscribe too, and I’ve found replacements for any subreddit I’ve cared to look for so far.

      • 14th_cylon@lemm.ee
        0·
        2 years ago

        and does that search through lemmy communities as well? because lemmy search definitely doesn’t return kbin results. and i am not even sure if it returns 100% of lemmy results, it is hard to verify that :D

        • atocci@kbin.social
          1·
          2 years ago

          It does! I’ve subscribed to tons of Lemmy communities like that. Lemmy’s search does return Kbin results as well though, I just checked. I searched “News” from lemmy.world and found the Kbin.social News magazine I was looking for.

          Just to check some more, I also tried searching for the Reddit Migration and Technology magazines and it found them both using only their names, no urls or @'s needed.

          You should only need the url if you’re the first person on an instance to subscribe to a community, after that it should be indexed for everyone.

          • 14th_cylon@lemm.ee
            1·
            2 years ago

            it works. and if opened from there, it allows me to subscribe by clicking on subscribe… now i have no idea why i have been doing it so complicatedly. shame on me…

            thank you.

    • McBinary@kbin.socialOP
      6·
      2 years ago

      It must be a different experience on lemmy. On kbin I only need to click on a post and the magazine/community is listed in the sidebar - I only need to click the subscribe button.

      • bdonvrA
        1·
        2 years ago

        That’s only if your instance has discovered it already.

        If nobody else on your instance has ever looked for it then you will have to do what they described.

        Test it now. Go to browse.feddit.de and find some obscure community that doesn’t show up if you search just the name in Kbin. Now take the full URL and search it. It should get “discovered”. EDIT: Actually it’s even less intuitive on KBin. You can’t just search the URL. You have to format it as such: [email protected]. On lemmy you can do either [email protected] or https://instance.com/c/community. This is more convenient to just copy/paste.

        This is an issue that’s worse for smaller instances. Larger instances like kbin.social are likely to have already discovered the vast majority of anything worth subscribing to.

    • Otome-chan@kbin.social
      5·
      2 years ago

      I don’t see how it’s hard for a non-tech-savvy user to use. The actual usage is near-identical to reddit. Pretty much the only hurdle in that regard is trying to subscribe to magazines on other instances that haven’t been synced yet. Other than that? It works the same as reddit. If you think kbin is too hard, how tf were you using reddit?

      • crib@kbin.social
        1·
        2 years ago

        I work in tech and even for me it took a few minutes to grasp that kbin and lemmy instances could all communicate with each others. If you’re used to the centralized web then it might be foreign that kbin can read lemmy content etc. It’s like saying instagram can be used to access Twitter for a normal person.

        But for now I don’t think the normal user has to be the priority. They will learn when they have to move to be able to access the content they are after