If email were invented today people would complain about how complex and annoying it is to sign up.
Using your email address as username is a common problem for a lot of users.
Some of them are even completely shocked that they can use a different password and don’t understand, that their mail is just their login credentials for this specific site.
The feature “login with Apple/Google/Facebook” exists for a reason.
When it was invented, it was complex and annoying, even by today’s standards.
For a small period of time I was a god that would bless people with gmail invites lol. That brings me back. I remember compuserve and Hotmail but I don’t remember them being especially complicated at all. Maybe that was before my time…? Which would be nice for once
Hotmail was already the easy-mode stuff.
Before that you’d get your email account provided by the ISP, and before that you’d have to find someone who ran an email server and ask nicely for them to make you an account.
And regarding ease of use: The reason why e.g. SMTP is human-readable is because in the early days SMTP wasn’t the protocol that your email client used to talk to the server. It was the email client.
You’d just telnet to your server and type in the SMTP commands manually.
It is almost impossible to make mastodon similar of an experience as Twitter was. I used Mastodon and found it kinda boring so I didn’t even try. But I did want to use Lemmy since I am a Reddit refugee. I had a pretty hard time trying to figure out how to choose the best instance, where to find my communities (should I join technology at beehaw or lemmy.world?). I still somewhat get confused trying to wrap my head around the fediverse AND I HAVE A FUCKING COMPUTER ENGINEERING DEGREE. If you think that the average user is gonna confidently just make a user and not get confused at all the new concepts you don’t know normies.
I get this to some extent… On the other hand, none of that matters.
What instance to choose? Doesn’t really matter.
What community to subscribe to? Both! If later you figure out you don’t like one of them, just unsub…
But yeah, I know normies seem unable to just jump in and see how it works. They just read “fediverse” and don’t know what it is so just reject everything that it’s related to because “it’s too complicated”.
As someone who worked in IT support at a university and later as a sys admin: I believe MOST people (including young people) can not use the internet or a computer when it goes beyond installing and using a (popular) app from the App Store.
Many people can not, for example, look up a program via search engine, go to its website, find and click the correct download link and then install the program. Many people don’t even use websites anymore, they only use applications.
Their voices are missing online simply because they are basically tech illiterate. And I think that is a huge problem.
Their voices are missing online simply because they are basically tech illiterate. And I think that is a huge problem.
I’ve seen a number of polls on the age demographics on the fediverse, and they’ve all been pretty consistent … the fediverse is basically on average a Xennial place with a surprising amount of Boomer. There are younger folks, of course, more so on lemmy/kbin than mastodon it seems (which is interesting).
But generally, in line with your comment, there’s a generational filter here that attracts those who remember the value of and how to use the old internet and old computers.
Which, if you think there’s value in what the fediverse is trying to do (free our expression and ownership on the internet), is a problem. Another way of looking at it is that the failure of allowing big-private-monopoly-social platforms to dominate for so long1 will have long lasting side effects including the erasure of what the internet can be in many people’s understanding of the world.
[1]: I’d estimate 2008-2023 as the era of dominant big social, where the closing year of 2023 may be too early or even open ended. That’s 14 years. Which, if we take the web as having started in 1993, and being ~30 years old, is about half the age of the internet. So, it’s a decently objective approximation, then, to say that the web is Facebook etc, especially as the relevance of older things fades. Which only amplifies the harm we allowed to transpire.
Also … check it out … lemmy can do footnotes!! Click the view source button to see how I did it if you’re interested.
I don’t talk about age, though? As I mentioned in my post being tech illiterate is not necessarily a question of your age group.
Yes. Sorry if it seems I was distorting your message. I was just trying to draw a connection between different kinds of tech literacy and familiarity and how that might track with the demographics here and the history of mainstream tech.
Maybe a stretch, but also maybe I have a point.
Given the number of people I’ve had to walk through downloading my store’s loyalty program app and set up their accounts, I’d believe it.