Post #3008451
2026-03-27 07:55 UTC
Replies (6)
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@lime@feddit.nu 2026-03-27 07:58
it’s weird that, because once you’re in it’s basically seamless. it’s just that first step of picking a server based on your interests that trips people up, because aren’t you supposed to pick interests after you get in? more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.
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@Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 2026-03-27 08:00
I think we should just hide all of that complexity and just set defaults for everything that the user can decide to change if they want. You don’t have to understand how the Fediverse works to be able to use it. Most people don’t understand how email works, they just use it. BlueSky has 40+ million users, and it’s also technically decentralized like the Fediverse. aka. you can use the eurosky.social or bluesky.social server etc.
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@Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2026-03-27 08:27
Welcome to PieFed! I see you’ve got an account and you know how to post comments. What else do you need help with?
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@mrmaplebar@fedia.io 2026-03-27 09:13
I’m not sure what can really be done about that; the fediverse is, by its very nature, pretty complicated. It’s at least as complicated as http or email, and those things are widely used but probably not that well understood by the average person. I think people are accustomed to using things that they barely understand the inner workings of (car, microwave, computer, etc.) during their daily life. So, I guess my question is, to what degree do people need to know “how the fediverse works” in order to use it? If anything, we probably have to change the way we talk about the fediverse to make it more streamlined for people. For example, instead of suggesting that people “join lemmy”, it would be better to send them directly to a specific instance that we would like to see grow. Then there’s the friction of actually joining an instance. Some instances won’t let users view content without registering, and some require you to “apply” for registration, pending approval. Both of those things are reasonable and justifiable, but at the same time I think they do create a barrier of entry that we may not want if we are going to try to attract more users.
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@vogi@piefed.social 2026-03-27 10:22
What do you think about https://phtn.app/ ? Sadly the PieFed support is in Beta for quite a while now, but I do like how clean everything looks. You can also hide away a lot of the complexity but I am not sure if that is the default.
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@birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-03-27 13:03
I’d explain it like this. I hope that that works. An easy analogy View the fediverse like a few forests, linked by many wild bridges. PieFed might be one forest, Peertube and Mastodon yet other ones. These forests have a lot of different trees. An instance is like a single tree. And a community a branch. Users are leaves. You can help keep the tree alive, by giving donations as nutrition. Some parts of the fediverse allow leaves to move and join another tree. Traditional social media, on the other hand, are comparable to a single, isolated and big tree, far away from other trees. You cannot jump to other trees, and cannot easily go to a forest. More technical explanation Social media are built on ‘protocols’. Protocols tell for example social media what they can do and how to ‘talk’ to each other. The Fediverse is a group of social media that use ActivityPub, Diaspora, or AT Protocol. These three protocols allow something special that ‘traditional’ social media like Facebook and Instagram don’t: they can communicate across each other, without using a centralised server for hosting content. It’s comparable to email; you can mail to someone not using your mail provider, and vice versa. On one of these fediverse social media, people self-host or join a self-hosted group. Such a group is called an ‘instance’. Each instance functions independently and can have its own policies. Instances (and users) can decide with which other instances they allow their own content to be seen. They can also decide what instances their users can see content from. An instance that is connected to another instance is said to be ‘federated’ with the latter. If that is not the case, they are ‘defederated’. Instances are supported through donations. Within each instances, there are many communities. There’s a community for Linux, a community for cat pictures, a community for nature, and so on. Users can subscribe to many of them, receiving their content.