CynAq

Growing pains are a separate issue than the problems associated with "non tech minded people putting up with learning a new service".

The first is a timing issue. Give it some time and the issues will resolve themselves as far as the average user is concerned. The second one implies inherent difficulties arising from the "tech mindedness" of the users and its interaction with the service experience. I'm saying that the average internet user today is "techi minded" enough, even if they don't consciously know it, to understand how to use fediverse services intuitively, unless we overthink the introduction and scare people away.

spez can go suck a bag of musk dicks.

I literally don't understand what is there to learn that everyone isn't already used to in one form or another.

Kbin, lemmy, pixelfed, mastodon, beehaw are all pretty intuitive to start using right away. The account creation process is no different than what is available on mainstream sites.

The federation system sounds a bit intimidating but in reality, it takes about one hour of using your selected service to get used to.

As long as we direct people to instances with a stable stream of content from a large enough number of regular users, they should be absolutely fine.

Great comment. I agree with everything you said.

As you mentioned, every common type of community forum has it's own "quirks" (I didn't want to say pros and cons or something like that) which make it suitable for a certain type of interaction.

Some are better for very large discussions joined by thousands of people, others are good for small groups talking about very specialized topics. Every style naturally promotes one type of interaction over the others.

Which is why I really like the federation system.

It allows people to create very different interfaces with different strengths and user experiences which still can share content between each other, even if the features of one interface isn't fully compatible with the content of another.

Overall, I feel like the experience on the fediverse, while familiar enough and easy to settle into, is very different than whatever systems everyone have been used to for decades. I think the reason for this is, as I said in the previous paragraph, that it gives developers a platform with already available content through other instances to test their interactive website ideas on, and provide the users with a whole lot of user experiences to choose from, while essentially keeping track of the same communities through it all.

I personally know I don't want any server by itself to become deddit or twatter popular but I hope the fediverse at least attracts similar numbers of good people.

I believe there's a substantial number of people who found large platforms banal and toxic, so they might have been refraining from participating.

I know I was avoiding Instagram but now I'm interested in trying out pixelfed for example.

You guys seem to be correct about the timing of the deletion. I purged them before the blackout, on the day of the AMA in fact, and everything still seems to be gone.

Yeah, but the problem is, they'll simply restore them after the month is over and you won't be able to do anything about it.

People gotta admit, as things are standing now, there's jack shit we can do about it other than somehow get governments involved.

We are absolutely powerless against this as individual users, or even large groups of users unless we have a way of wielding the power of international law to work for us.

Does it use the API? If so, following the end of this month, it'll stop working.

Another user said they restore edited content too. They blanket restore anyone's content which looks like it's deleted by a script.

I can't go on and manually delete twelve years of comments, I don't think anyone can.

This will only be resolved if enough people take them to court and reddit is forced to add a complete data deletion option for all users.

I'm sorry to say this but, they probably restored all of your posts too. It will just say "deleted" as your username but the posts and comments will be in their old place.

That's beyond fucked up.

But also very predictable.

I think it's safe to say this fiasco isn't going anywhere without a class action lawsuit or something.

The issue is the mindset of profitability.

For a platform like reddit, the mindset for sustainability must be based on efficiency and utility, not profitability.

These platforms are called platforms rather than websites or simply "companies" for a reason. They act like a public utility rather than a for profit service of convenience. Public utilities also suck ass when operated as for profit businesses.