If email were invented today people would complain about how complex and annoying it is to sign up.
OMG another account?! Why can’t I just use my discord smh
In college I had to write a program to send emails. This was around 2012. Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from. There are obviously ways to sign the message and verify it and most email servers block messages that don’t have these because of how trivial it is to fake. It’s basically like putting a name tag on that says “Joe Biden” and everyone believing you’re the president.
I didn’t do anything malicious but I did mildly prank my girlfriend. I don’t remember what I did but I’m pretty sure I told her before I did it. I really didn’t want to end up getting expelled for “”“hacking”“” so I didn’t do anything remotely bad. The irony is the assignment wouldn’t have worked and been as interesting if my campus had the proper security measures to block the messages.
It could be that the web client for our email mentioned something about the sender being unverified and not to trust it but I don’t remember.
I almost got kicked out of school for this! I sent an email to my girlfriend from some girl that we didn’t like, saying something like “you’re a huge bitch, haha just kidding this is actually jballs not the chick we don’t like.”
Problem is that I wrote my girlfriend’s email address wrong, so it bounced back to the sender (the girl we didn’t like).
So I had to explain to a university dean exactly what I did and how I didn’t actually “hack into” the girl’s email account. That was fun.
I sent my gmail address an email from obama@whitehouse.gov and it worked.
Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from.
I remember realizing this and thinking it was weird too when I was reading about SMTP. Specifically, the MAIL FROM command.
Also related.
Spoofing email is hilariously easy. GPG signing really needs to be made easier
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Saying that times have changed doesn’t negate the fact that times have changed.
I don’t get the email analogy.
People did and DO complain about setting up email. ISP email is a great example of this. People forget their IMAP and SMTP address configuration stuff all the damn time. Always have.
I used to do home IT, and I had to help people through that crap constantly.
That said, these days people have gravitated to clients like gmail or outlook. Those push the user onto a certain domain, which makes setup dead simple. This is what mastodon.social is doing now. Making it so people don’t have to think about the instance at sign up.
Yeah I agree email kinda sucks. But everyone still uses it, and (as far as I’m aware) people aren’t writing articles about how confusing email is for people and why that makes it a failure. Mastodon and Lemmy are, in comparison, much better and way less confusing but you see that said all the time about them.
I flirted with journalism before getting my degree in CS.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the faculty and many of the students were almost proudly “bad at math” and basically bad with tech too, other than learning the basics of a Macbook.
Doesn’t have to be that way and many journalists are smart, great people, but there’s a weird self fulfilling culture when it comes to tech. Not totally sure about how tech focused writers would be similar or different.
Edit: Just googling “journalists bad at math” and got this from the Columbia Journalism Review:
“In many cases, they got into journalism to stay away from math.” Journalists love to joke about how we suck at math.
Edit 2: I guess I was bringing up my experience to be an example of how many journalists do not have a strong grasp of technical concepts and sometimes are almost proud of that. So it doesn’t surprise me that many may have struggled with Mastodon.
That being said, that attitude is far closer to the average user than, say, the user base of this platform, which is likely far more tech savvy. Streamlined user experience is not a bad thing if you desire mainstream use and is something that could be improved, though Mastodon has been making strides in that regard.
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.
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.
I’ll add to this that most people don’t understand the difference between a service and a client. Yes, even though they use email, to them it’s just “my gmail” and they don’t think past that. They don’t know you can use different clients, or the web. They just don’t. It’s an app on their phone.
The reason the internet was so great in the early 2000s is that THOSE PEOPLE WERENT ON IT.
I’ve had the most confusing conversation when a relative referred to their browser (Chrome) as “Google” (which to me means the search engine or the company, not the browser). It was only when they later mentioned Firefox as an alternative to Google that I realized what they were talking about.
Which is funny because if you open the App Store and search for Mastodon you’ll find an app you can install and will prompt you to create an account and login.
Yes it will default to mastodon.social or whatever but that’s a fine default.
Folks that say it’s too hard just don’t even want to try.
i couldnt count how many times my younger brother has asked me to delete files for him
I saw numbers from some study about tech and people’s relationships with it or whatever and it’s insane how many people think Facebook is the entire internet now that they’ve had that integrated browser for so long. It’s just all they ever learned of technology, magic rectangle go to Facebook.
I understand not being “tech savvy,” a “hobbyist,” whatever - but I can’t fathom not bothering to consider how something I use daily works AT ALL. I hate cars but I learned enough to understand how to tentatively diagnose a problem and handle minor maintenance myself, but some people take their car to the dealer like 4x a year instead.
Is madness.
People HATE learning. It makes them feel stupid. So they just avoid it.
They should try navigating Facebook
Facebook is a fucking nightmare for people used to having control over their browsing.
Someone who hasn’t used Facebook for over 6 years, I’m still trying to convince my grandfather that I don’t actually know anything about the platform and that he probably knows more about Facebook than I do. cause honestly I don’t recognize it anymore
yeah the new Facebooj ui is so fucking confusing.
they don’t even think of their target audience lol
I think it’s a mix of the way journalism works in the age of overstimulation (everything is the best/worst anyone has ever witnessed) and old(er) people being unfathomably tech-illiterate.
And I don’t even mean that negatively. I often really am unable to fathom how disorienting even the slightest change in a software they’re used to is to them.
If my mother were to use the birdsite, and they’d change their theme from blue to red one day, she would literally be unable to use it, because “it’s all different now”
Also, mastodon does have some usability problems, though they are not that big imo.
To be fair, if you want content on Mastodon, you have to actively go out, find people, and follow them. After you get past that Step 1 of signing up, your home page is empty. There’s no algorithm that automatically deposits content on the main page. You have to do a little bit of work to get anything. As you say, doing this work is not that god damn hard, but sadly for about 80% of people (maybe more), this is an impassible barrier.
On the bright side, once you do get past this barrier, none of the Mastodon content that you are getting is from that bottom eighty percent.
One thing I don’t get. Among the gazilion “Oh, it is sooo easy to do this better” complainers are countless developers and designers. This whole Mastodon thing is Free Software, where countless people spent some of their free time and energy to give you what there is today. Complainer devs and UX folks, are your PR’s getting rejected?
So… Someone deluded says it’s super easy to sign up.
Someone points out that it’s really not for a non technical person. Let’s say that someone is me, and let’s say I’m a developer.
Is it suddenly my problem? Is it now my responsibility to fix it? I already have enough problems and responsibilities, thank you. I’m already busy with work and life. I got my own things I’m working on.
Fuck off with that attitude.
There’s no responsibility at all. There’s also full freedom to complain however you wish. If you do that on someone’s free work with which they try to help others, it just doesn’t look very good on you. That’s all.
It’s pretty obvious 99% of users bounce off the signup page. People who think otherwise simply are too disconnected from normie reality
Here is what happens
Let’s join this thing
I have to choose a server ? Ok which one ?
Wow that’s so many, is this important or cani pick at random ?
If you pick wrong, everything you write could be deleted or never seen by anyone.
Ok, well I better choose properly
Read server rules pages for 2-3 minutes
There’s a distraction
Later, joins threads
I wouldn’t even go that far to be honest.
server
“wtf is this”?
You forgot the step where you write three paragraphs explaining why you want a server account and get denied because you didn’t supply sufficient detail for them to approve your application.
And yet, my server where this is policy is thriving. If it grew any faster than it has been there would likely have been even greater technical issues, and there has never been a lack of people to talk to. It’s almost like there are benefits to not letting people create hundreds of bogus accounts that outweigh the small cost to the user!
This obsession with growth is pathological. People have internalized the needs of capital and don’t even understand their own needs.
Meanwhile, when you sign up for Threads your timeline is nothing but shitty influencers for the first few days, yet somehow they manage to press on through that without getting the vapors or whatever.
My account never made it through the first few days before they shut it down for community violation.
I never posted, I just want to be ready for if they ever start federating.
I still don’t even know what the servers on lemmy are, each “subreddit” is a different server?
Its easy to signup & get started, just have to be awake…
I just don’t use Mastodon because I never cared for Twitter.
i also love the “oh noes there are nerds on there!” concern trolling, motherfucker read the wikipedia page on who first adopted and built the communities on twitter and reddit
They tend to portray everything new, different and/or popular with geeks as bad or complicated, I see this as a rite of passage for the fediverse. Remember when they were shitting on computer gaming in the early days of the hobby because of who it was initially popular among?
I still remember the “do cell phones cause cancer?” news reports that aired on my local news when I was a kid.
The problem is the paradox of “it doesn’t matter what server you pick” while also giving them a choice.
If choices don’t matter, why have a choice?
Although I disagree that it doesn’t matter
No choice doesn’t matterat all. However, the decision on which mastodon server to use for your social media is about as important as what you’ll choose to eat today for dinner. Yeah, kinda important for the dinner itself and you don’t want some crap, but if you do, you could just eat it anyway for now and try something else tomorrow.
or we make a few accounts on a few different servers.
we don’t need to identify with our fediverse accounts.
