@kichae@catodon.social said in Explaining the fediverse is a hard problem.:

<p><span><a href="https://community.nodebb.org/user/bean%40uvix.cc">@<span>bean</span></a></span><span> </span><span><a href="//https://community.nodebb.org/user/julian">@<span>julian</span></a></span><span> </span></p><blockquote><span>And the problem is that people don't get how a Facebook post could be a Tweet. And even if they can get that, it's more confusing how a Reddit post could be an Instagram post. </span></blockquote><span>The thing that gets me is how people don't grok this. It's still weird to me that so much of the Internet has become closed off. Growing up with email, forums, and IRC, it seems only natural that the internet is modular and portable.<br /><br />And the kicker is, even people on the Fediverse have this centralized model for how it works in their mind. People behave as if everything lives in some central place, and that their chosen instance is just some kind of dumb terminal with a window. You can see it when people talk about blocking users or even other instances at the server level -- people react as if they're arbitrarily being denied access to some part of this central repository by some lording gatekeeper, rather than witnessing a website owner or community refusing to host content from actors they don't want to platform.</span><p></p>

I think the only problem here is you assume people should be able to "grok" it. Most people didn't actually grow up in those other "fields", forums IRC etc. etc.

In fact tech has moved so much that people need to think zero about how things work they just work - magic, you can thank Apple or not for that approach, this is where the tech is simply an appliance to the user, like a microwave, not hard to use, easy to understand without having a clue about magnetrons or the brith of radar, but we can tell each other the anecdote about the scientist whose mars bar melting in his pocket as the inspiration to use it to hear food (if that story is even true or a modern myth) it doesn't matter, we all stand back a fe feet form the bring microwaves until the dish is done! Just in case, we understand how the tech works better through the danger of it than anything else!

So really, I think it is actually perfectly normal for people not to get this. If we orientate around this truth then you can solve the problem you perceive.

The clue is in the title of the OP

@bean@uvix.cc said in Explaining the fediverse is a hard problem.:

And the problem is that people don't get how a Facebook post could be a Tweet. And even if they can get that, it's more confusing how a Reddit post could be an Instagram post.

This is a good observation, but Do they have to get it?

They only have to get it if they want it, if they want to do it.

Why would they want to do this?

Perhaps you are encountering this unarticulated confusion they are experiencing as you try to explain it. In their mind they are thinking, but sure wy would i need this, I have insta, all my buds are there.

Habits are powerful and once people are locked into a platform they are sticky, they leave they are usually gone fro good. It's all or nothing most of the time.

Early adoption is invariably more miss than hit and is not the preserve of the masses.

I cite Apple again, they learned this, they wait till things mature and there is a decent enough desire. Now there headset is a good example. They might be pushing their wait envelope on this but they did wait. Whereas others were out of the gates years before, in fact the idea has been around for decades.

VR is one of the harder sells, and ActivityPub may be the VR of online content creation.

Does the ordinary person even think of themselves as a "content creator" they really don't, they think of themselves as themselves (if posting under their real name or at least photo) That's the majority of people. They want to express as s there want in the moment, they get the likes and insights, feedback and they feel a positive feedback and worth and value and move on - is amplifying that across disparate platforms something they really need?

Omega, I get it that you dont like the word Federated. Are you in USA where this has more historical connotations?

I already use Mastodon as apposed to Twitter so guess thats why Im onboard.
So my interested would be further federation, if I could forget Mastodon and use my community.nodebb login in a mastodon type app, that would be great.
With whats already implemented, how far off is the principle of using my Federation nodebb account outside of this websiye @julian ?

@julian I wanted to message mastodon account and reply from there, as part of Omegas 20 word challenge.
I didnt get the message to my Mathstodon.xyz account, why might that be?

@eeeee where's the response you're looking for?

I want this message to show up in my Mastondon
@evehiclefan@mathstodon.xyz

@eeeee
Ah worked this time!

@julian it worked second time, is there anywhere I can look to see error message of why first mention didnt?

@eeeee thanks! Will record for fixing

Honestly I think that if interoperability between different types of federated platforms Just Worked people would "understand" it more intuitively, because they'd see it in action instead of it having to be explained to them as an abstract concept.

I'm a fairly tech-savvy user, and I perfectly understand what federation is and how it works on a technical level, but even I find the UI aspects often confusing or downright impossible to figure out.
For example, I saw this thread from my Mastodon client because I followed the ActivityPub topic on this forum from my Mastodon account. In my Mastodon client the posts appear as boosts, but mostly with broken HTML formatting. I clicked through to this forum to read the thread properly. I then wanted to "like" / +1 a post, so I copied the permalink into my Mastodon client like I would for a post on a different Mastodon instance, but it couldn't find anything. In the end I had to log into my local account on this forum instead.

Don't get me wrong, the UI problems are very difficult to get right. But I think they're more important than documentation. When it Just Works, people will grok it and documentation/explanation won't be needed.

@caesar that's concerning, can you link me to the posts with broken html in your Mastodon account?

@julian Here's the one I saw today: https://indieweb.social/@omega@community.nodebb.org/113101718634936122

However, I now see that the broken HTML appears in the original post on this forum, so it's not a federation problem. Apologies for the 'false alarm' on that aspect. I've definitely seen broken formatting before, but haven't clicked through to check where the issue was. I'll keep an eye out for it again.

That said, my point was mainly about the difficulty of actually working out how to interact with posts from a different instance (especially one running different software), rather than about the actual content of the federated messages.

@caesar Yep that's it in a nutshell, nailed it, when it hits the "it just works" moment, this affords intuitive mass adoption

Getting to that point is filled with blood sweat and tears.

Good points, and want to add, as credit to @julian , what he's building is complex.
Not many developers could do it.

@caesar okay, how about the permalink issue? Can you show me the link you tried to paste into Mastodon? That definitely should work. That's a fairly standard flow (which is already janky, and can be improved)

@julian it was this one: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/explaining-the-fediverse-is-a-hard-problem/4462/7
It's a Discourse post (and thus problem) rather than a NodeBB one, but it illustrates the point of the general jankiness of inter-platform interaction on the fediverse: if I copy the permalink of your post above into my Mastodon instance, it finds it and I can reply, but if I copy the permalink of a Discourse post from the same thread, it doesn't work.

@eeeee Absolutely, and @julian has my deepest respect for that. Like I mentioned, the UI for inter-platform interactions is definitely a really tricky problem to solve in an intuitive way, and I don't think any Fediverse platform has managed it yet. (I'm very interested in this because I'm starting to consider similar issues as they relate to the Fediverse implementation in Forgejo.)

@julian sorry to multi-post but I forgot to say: although I can find your post from my Mastodon account and reply to it, I still haven't worked out how I would do the reverse from here. In fact I'm not sure if I can follow a Mastodon account (or perhaps more usefully, a Discourse or Lemmy topic or even a topic or account on a different NodeBB instance) from a NodeBB account at all, is that possible yet?

@caesar the Discourse link you posted raises another issue.
Its a similar thread to this one, but it has additional posters, and any edits made in my posts arent reflected.
So these conversations arent fully federated when there are some posts in that thread missing from this one.
Out of interest @Omega, did you start your post on Discourse or on this site?