That visualization shows exactly why the whole thing here is overwhelming for the average user. I feel that the federated aspect should be less focused on when talking about the fediverse. It makes sense to explain it, but many explanations on how to switch to lemmy/kbin/whatever put the whole federation thing on top of the list. I think this is a big turnoff for casual users/lurkers. They do not understand that they don’t need to understand the structure of the fediverse to join, enjoy content and engage with others, so they don’t even start.
I’m sure a visualization could help with that, but having a bunch of boxes and circles with arrows all over the place isn’t exactly something that will mitigate the feeling of being overloaded with information. I’m not saying you didn’t do a great job. “Arrows all over the place” is not meant to devaluate your work, on the contrary, it perfectly captures the feeling i have about the fediverse, but I would not use that image as an ad for it.
true. I am literate in internet/computer yet the idea in general is still confusing. Navigating is also abit jarring, and I dont understand some buttons and features like “boost”. It would be great for beginners to include a tutorial for navigating the UI and a short introduction of the fediverse in #teachmelikeim5 level
Boost is a repost as far as I know :)
Boost is a repost or retweet on mastodon, and in the microblog sections of kbin.
On thread comments, a boost pushes the top level comments to the top of the stack. It means “this is the shit, everyone’s gotta read this first.”
On the threads view, a boost pushes a thread up the list but not all the way to the top, so it’s practically an upvote.
In all cases, if you have followers, it pushes the threads and microblog posts you boosted into their feed.
AFAIK, boosts are only used to rank posts on kbin. Lemmy uses upvotes for that.
Boosts are necessary because they re-publish content to the group, and that pushes it out to people who subscribed to the group after the content was originally posted
I think this illustrates why this isn’t a replacement for reddit for many people. The point of reddit is it brought community and discussion to one site. It’s what killed decentralized forums, and sadly, I don’t think the average user is going to go back to that.
I’m more of a visual learner and none of the explanations of the Fediverse included a detailed map of all the different entities involved. By all means, please make corrections, I’m sure there is at least one misunderstanding in there somewhere. Also not sure how Mastodon fits in, seems like the format would be incompatible with kbin and/or Lemmy. Thanks.
The part I’m getting tripped up revolves around accessing the content in another part of the fediverse. e.g., if I go to a lemmy instnace, it will ask for a log-in specfic to it (i.e. it doesn’t recognize my kbin log-in). So what’s the mechanism by which travel between platforms happens? If I understood correctly, some stuff will show up here that’s been ‘retweeted’. But what if I’m searching for content that lives in Lemmy or Mastodon instances?
Am I sort of making sense?
You are making sense, just remember your login does not travel between kbin and lemmy. When you are on kbin, you can search for communities on the server you joined or across the fediverse. The way to do that is [email protected]
For example, say if I found out the beehaw.org server had an awesome gaming community, well I can just type [email protected] into the search box and then subscribe to it. It will then federated into the server (the server will start pulling in new posts - but not old posts) that means others can now see it too. That’s why if you see the message that it’s not fully federated and you might see more on the original instance.
Your login is just a place to reside but with the fediverse, you can pull in content to view. Which helps as you don’t need multiple log ins for multiple services. I’ve seen a few people ask about people with the same username as theirs on other instances and that will happen but remember that your username is like email. You have [email protected], so whilst someone might share the same username, they’ll never be on the same instance. That’s how you tell others apart.
Hopefully that helps make sense!
