Jessica

yeah that’s true currently but only because Google spent the past 20 years undercutting every other email service such that only professionals, nerds, and professional nerds ever send emails outside of their own domain, and everyone else balks if you try to end a dictated email address with something other than “at gee mail dot com”

same goes for websites, and in both cases the solution is not avoiding trying it, it’s education and access

which is not to say there aren’t dozens of other problems with federation but this isn’t the biggest of them

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in reply to @ticky's post:

Gay Eminem on 9/11 @DecayWTF11/25/2022, 6:59 PM

And like, it's not even as true as people who say that contend which is the ridiculous thing, people are just fine with eg Discord "servers"

@engineeredd11/25/2022, 7:31 PM

Tentatively agree, but I think it's also a generational thing here? Discord is a lot more niche and I think used by younger people, especially in relation to streamers (talking about "everyday people" here).

I did see a semi-viral tweet of a person saying that she's "not going to join a Mastodon 'server', whatever that is." The smartphone era + the internet becoming Google/Facebook/Twitter did a lot of damage to tech literacy.

Gay Eminem on 9/11 @DecayWTF11/25/2022, 7:45 PM

I mean there's lots of older folks I know that still have ISP email addresses, half the people my age have proton, riseup and/or company addresses, I don't really put a ton of stock in someone's clout-chasing Twitter post as a bellwether.

@engineeredd11/25/2022, 8:02 PM

In some sense I think it's less to do with somebody's age, than with when they started to really interact with computers. Of course that people who were on the internet from its early or earlyish days are very likely to be tech savvy, or at least to have a perspective on things that wouldn't make them struggle with these ideas. But there's still a generational corelation (a zoomer can't have been of Compuserve).

I agree with OP. Especially with

and in both cases the solution is not avoiding trying it, it’s education and access

I just don't think Discord servers are that good of an example?

ash @hierarchon11/26/2022, 7:37 PM

i think it says something that people believe these sorts of posts are useful for clout-chasing, if you get what i mean. there's definitely a sort of "expecting people to learn anything about computers is techbro behavior" sentiment i've seen

colin @vogon11/25/2022, 7:00 PM

yeah arguably a bigger problem than federation itself is the fact that there's a canonical instance of mastodon called mastodon.social and (presumably mostly because of practical considerations, because eugen isn't made out of domain registrations) no attempt was made to park mastodon.[every gTLD other than .social]

colin @vogon11/25/2022, 7:03 PM

I know people who are on mastodon.social, mastodon.xyz, mastodon.lol, and mstdn.social, among likely many other ma?sto?do?n.whatevers, and none of these are the same instance

@engineeredd11/25/2022, 7:26 PM

Spent half an hour trying to get a friend to understand that mastodon.social isn't (or isn't supposed to be, at least) the main or official or primary mastodon server with the others being strange offshoots, but I gave up because we were going in circles.

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