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.
Two examples:
when you’re browsing your follows on mastodon, and click on their follows, the list is not true to their follows (because your server hasn’t fetched them).
and, when you first subscribe to someone’s posts, you can’t see older posts (say they’ve got 100, but you see zero).
I’m aware that there are technical reasons (you weren’t subscribed), and open source reasons (nobody has the time to volunteer to fix it), but these are insufficient to help an anxious new user who’s undecided about the platform.
That’s only Mastodon, which has 7 years of refinement. Don’t get me started on the litany of federation-related edge cases of Lemmy’s UX failings.