Even The Linux Foundation has a twitter

Because Linus Torvalds doesn’t care about the Free Software movement and user freedom. It’s why his kernel is still on GPL2.

Ah, I see. So you are an expert in psychology, marketing and statistics. That is truly amazing. It’s completely irrelevant to the topic of our discussion (which is about privacy and software), but very cool.

Fun fact: both facebook.com and twitter.com have a Tor site to make it harder to censor them.

Yes, there are many things that people should be taught at school. Technology is just one area. All of the things you said are also very important, but it doesn’t make what I said invalid.

Knowing marketing, for example, wouldn’t cause someone to be fooled to the point of saying something like this:

But they should know what cryptocurrencies and AI are, since those technologies are slowly becoming a part of our lives.

Fooled by what exactly? A distributed ledger or machine learning? I think it’s a simple fact that those technologies are becoming more popular.

You make it sound like the problem is technology.

The post is about privacy and software. It’s important for people to be educated in other areas as well, but they weren’t the topic of this discussion. So there was no point for me to mention them.

You’re focusing on a single channel of abuse.

I make software, so I talk about software. I’m not an expert in the other areas that you mentioned.

Yes and how is the developer supposed to earn their money when they can’t spy on people and insert ads?!!!!!!!1111

You think it was just a fake promise? I haven’t thought about it, but it’s certainly possible.

Only employees can have an account on those servers. Registration is not open to the public.

So you see no problem in living in a world where everything is recorded. That’s crazy.

Many people think they are not easily swayed, but in reality most people don’t have any training in critical thinking and often don’t know how to verify if something is fake. Things like confirmation bias make it pretty hard.

The best thing that comes to mind is to maybe have some “special” instance (or just an application, kinda like what Mastodon’s Android app does - at least with the new update) whose purpose is to guide users through sign up and choosing an instance. I think this would kill two birds with one stone. Guiding users through instance-selection, maybe briefly explaining what an instance is and eventually pointing to more user-friendly docs, could already be much more manageable for everybody, and could feel like a more seamless experience, similarly to traditional social media.

That’s a very good idea. The website https://join-lemmy.org could have something like that or we could make a new website for it.

People are already adjusting to the decentralized services, but it’s possible that they will never become popular enough for most people to have to learn how to use them.

You are right that it’s a huge field, but I’m not saying that we should be familiar with all of it. I’m saying that since we rely on software every day, there are a few concepts that every person should understand on a basic level. That knowledge would help them make better decisions and probably the world would be better if most people had it. Software developers should also understand those few concepts, but perhaps on a bit deeper level than an average person would.

A person can have privacy without knowing what SPI is, but it’s very unlikely for them have it or keep it long term if they don’t know what Free Software is. What you do requires deep knowledge of the hardware, which an average person doesn’t need to have. But they should know what cryptocurrencies and AI are, since those technologies are slowly becoming a part of our lives.

I don’t blame average people or software engineers for not knowing those things. But I think something went wrong in our society if people don’t understand very important concepts that impact our daily lives and which are mostly decades old. This proves that we can’t keep up with modern technology even on a basic level. Don’t you think that’s bad?

That is true, good point.

I see. I haven’t thought of that before, but when I look at Windows 11 file explorer, the one in GNOME seems way easier for me to understand despite it having the flaws that you mentioned. Maybe I just got used to it.

In order to be able to choose an instance or change it in the future, a user needs to know what it is first. Maybe we could choose it for them randomly (would that be ethical?), but they still need to know where their account is hosted. If their instance gets defederaded by other instances, then they also need to know what defederation is and how it affects them. Those are just basics needed to fully use the Fediverse and the freedoms it gives you. I’m not saying that people should know exactly what ActivityPub protocol is and how it works. But they need to know the basics about how federation works. This is nothing complicated, so I don’t think I’m asking for much.

In centralized platforms users don’t have freedom, so they don’t have to worry about any of this. If they aren’t willing to learn a few basic things in order to have freedom, then there is nothing we can do for them. We can and should try to educate them, but many people don’t see a problem with being abused by corporations. This is not a new problem in software. It has existed for at least 30 years since the Free Software movement was created.

Lemmy has many UI and UX problems and they certainly need to be fixed. But it’s possible that decentralized platforms will always be more complicated to use than centralized ones. If people aren’t willing to learn how to use it, that’s a problem with them, not with this technology.

It’s not based on the same 30 years old design that all popular operating systems are. So it might take some time to learn how to use it. Is that what you meant or do you think that it’s badly designed?

Here is an interesting video about this topic: https://youtu.be/GkxAp2Gh7-E

You are probably right about that. There are other UI improvements that we could and should do too, but Lemmy will probably always be more difficult to use than the centralized alternatives.

True. I feel like usually anything I say about UI is interpreted as just my opinion, which in developer’s minds is just as valid as anyone else’s opinion. It maybe kinda makes sense, since those developers don’t really know me, but there is nothing I can say to change their minds. So they remain stuck with a bad, inefficient design for no good reason.

GNOME desktop environment is a good example that having a good UI is possible.

In Lemmy’s case users are forced to take matters into their own hands: !plugins@sh.itjust.works

That’s kinda sad. I think our education is just not good enough when it comes to IT.

People need to know what an instance is. They need to know what defederating means too. They also need to know why the Fediverse is better than centralized alternatives, because otherwise they won’t care.

Sometimes I try to help, but unfortunately not everyone is willing to listen. I’ve noticed there are multiple reasons why UI might be bad in a Free Software project:

• developers are not UI experts and they don’t know better
• developers are not UI experts and they don’t listen to experts or UI is not their priority
• the UI code is so bad that changing it would require rewriting most of the application and nobody has the time to do that, so there is nothing that can be done (this probably doesn’t happen in web apps)

I believe in Lemmy’s case it’s mostly the 2nd point.