“regular people” whoever that is… will never use the crunchy homemade internet if they have the option of slick apps instead. You can’t hire designers, you don’t have an advertising budget, your project with its dreamy cooperative ethos is an anathema to tech media who don’t see the point in mentioning it exists.
“regular people” like pop-ups, and bots, and having their data sold to the highest bidder, they like porn spam, and scammers and discourse so broken it causes mental harm. Right?
@futurebird Sorry, if I'm missing the point, but is the '“regular people” like pop-ups, and bots, and having their data sold to the highest bidder, they like porn spam, and scammers and discourse so broken it causes mental harm.' meant seriously or was this just a ridiculousation? Are you an satire account?
@futurebird
Anything that doesn't have a multi-million $$ ad budget is going to have a hard time just getting through the constant dull roar of the advertising of everything else, even if it has amazing benefits and no downsides. It doesn't matter "what regular people like", or, for that matter, what anyone else likes, until they're convinced to try something, and try longer than just the few weeks it takes to get used to anything new.
@llewelly@futurebird I think we're kidding ourselves that people don't like recommendation algorithms. Lots of people tried Mastodon and were lonely or got bored. People that were used to algorithms picking their stuff up and showing it to a broader audience got frustrated.
I think there's got to be a future in some way of building and deploying recommendation engines that isn't, you know, evil.
@john@futurebird
1/2
for an age coal was the customary way to warm homes in winter, to provide heat for steam and electrical power, to provide heat and carbon for forging steel, and to provide many dyes and other useful chemicals. And in that age, many believed they loved coal. But they knew not, or knew little of the horrific ways in which it stole the lives of young and old alike, nor the horrible environmental damages it wrought on the world around them.
@futurebird They don't like any of that stuff but they'll put up with it if it means they don't have to go on a voyage of discovery and complete a self-taught computer science course to get a simple thing done.
A perennial problem in open source etc is that computer people enjoy the voyage of discovery, and many kind of think that attitude is the entrance fee for being fit to use a computer. But not everyone is like them.
@mattmcirvin Totally. The notion that suffering is required needs to go. We should make it as easy and as welcoming as we can with our limited resources.
@futurebird@mattmcirvin Too often (almost always) the "make it easy" ends up being "surrender control to someone untrustworthy". That's why those of us who understand reject it. This is the problem we need to solve. Not "make it easy" but "make it easy without broken power dynamics".
I'm not convinced this will ever really be possible. There's always perverse incentives for someone to betray that kind of trust.
And not much remuneration for those who want to provide a service -- which puts real pressure behind buying into those incentives.
Independent artists (a.k.a. "the good guys") struggle with this all the time -- Do I charge a subscription fee? Do I have ads on my site? Use a creepy corporate platform? Or do I just starve?
But in general, solutions involve a mix of not having anyone in a postion of control (whenever possible), building systems for evaluating trust in information that aren't based on arbitrary authorities, and technical measures that ensue violations of trust are very explicit and provably intentional.
@TerryHancock@dalias@futurebird A pattern I notice a lot with open-source projects is that the one-time installation and setup is the hardest part, and unfortunately that's the first impression people get. I think it's because the developers will tend to work on the problems that annoy them, and the things you only have to go through once are way down that list.
@futurebird They don't choose it exactly, but they think it's less bad than having to learn to do complicated things that all the corporates are telling them are soooo hard, don't bother your pretty little head about it, do it our way instead.
How much more can regular people take? They are calling Twitter the new “something awful” now. But for some reason serious academics, journalists, artists, and other sorts remain.
It’s interesting that these people are again being offered free (and mandatory) blue checks again … to get them to stay I guess.
Maybe that’s a good sign— maybe it’s a sign threads or blue sky is becoming the new walled garden.
@futurebird I think it's less a matter of people "liking" these things and more of a sense that this is just the Way Things Are and there's nothing you can really do about it. It just becomes part of the background noise that one becomes accustomed to. This is especially true if no one is really aware that an alternative reality is possible, and might even exist out there!