this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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I don't like it as well. People have to realize that Lemmy needs active members who are NOT part of the Nerd/tech bubble because they bring in a other type of content. I don't know enough about the feediverse protocols to know wether it's possible but what would help is if there where something like grouped communities consisting of multiple communities which are all about the same topic. Then you could search for e.g. "Cats" and it's shows you this grouped community which subscribes you to all cat content. I know that there are web based tools which already do a similar thing for a transfer from Reddit to Lemmy but those Groups would have to be integrated into Lemmy itself to be user friendly.
This seems to be a big issue with the general fediverse community attitude to me. It reminds me a lot of the Linux community 10+ years ago, constantly downplaying some pretty huge technical hurdles that new people need to climb, and then wondering why it struggle so much to gain traction.
The Linux community still does that tbh. Just because it works for some to scout the internet for jUsT tHrEe CoMmAnDs, doesn’t mean that it is easy or accessible to folks that just want a working system with working hardware acceleration (in the example of Fedora refusing to include codecs & a working MESA driver by default). Some people really enjoy making their and other’s lives harder 🙄
The lack of working hardware acceleration is mostly NVDIAs fault for not providing open sourcr drivers, and the community's effort at reverse engineering the GPUs has been nothing less than Herculean. As for codecs, Fedora is derived from Red Hat, which is an enterprize distro and does not include (proprieatry) codecs to avoid licencing issues. Every problem you have listed is a result of corporate fuckery and not of Linux.
As for tech support, with Microsoft you can click the "diagnose" button, which does nothing, or spend a lovely time with an outsorced call Center which again, does not solve the problem.
I wasn’t handing out fault certificates, but merely pointing out that the community is so quick to defend things that are broken by design just for the sake of it.
And speaking of hardware acceleration, not even Intel cards could decode videos by default in Firefox (provided all the codecs were installed) up until version 115. You had to at least flip a flag in about:config and if you didn’t want to install the codecs from RPMFusion or any third-party non-oss repo, the Flatpak was the alternative, which would need to be run in native Wayland on Wayland. For that you need to pass a variable. How is a new user supposed to figure out all of these things when Firefox works just fine without of those hacks on other platforms? Yes, other platforms have their own issues, but at least they’ve got the basics right.
So many unnecessary hurdles that make no sense. And that’s just Fedora. Other distros have other kinds of fuckeries, like Snaps & incoherent GNOME on Ubuntu, no Secure Boot or Wayland on Pop!_OS, way too strict permissions & firewall on openSUSE, heavy screen tearing on Linux Mint with no Wayland on the roadmap which would fix that issue automatically. The list goes on and for each of those, you’ll find way too many people defending the broken design.
What I’m trying to say is that Linux adoption on the desktop will never move forward with widespread attitudes like that.
I really don't understand the hostility towards nerd/tech oriented communities. Every time an online community dares to be on the nerdy side you get people loudly proclaiming how that's the worst thing ever, and that we need to expand until every Tom, Dick and Harry has a user acount.
Usually, when a site is adopted by the general public, the quality of the posted content goes down the toilet. Bots, shills and intrusive advertising follows, and the site dies a slow death. Reddit's r/all was a museum of ragebait, reposts and celebrity gossip, and I certainly don't want Lemmy to do an enshittification speedrun because some users refuse to learn how the fediverse functions.
I do not have a problem with the nerd/tech bubble being on Lemmy and I am not hostile towards them. I have a problem with them being the ONLY community able to participate because how complicated some aspects of this platform are. Why would Lemmy have to be ONLY "on the nerdy side". Different people with different interests can coexist because you can create whatever community you want and they can also decide what content they want to see or not. Who are you talking about when you say "We". It's not like you or the tech community owns the feediverse. They might host most of the servers because guess what tech savvy people know how to do that but that's just part of the problem.
I strongly disagree with the whole idea of a site going down in quality when everyone uses it. There will be more bad content but only because there will be immensely more content in general which is the major benefit that Reddit had. "Bots, shills, ads" are a side effect of a site being popular and you can't have the one without the other. Reddit did not die a "slow death". Before the whole API things millions of people browsed Reddit everyday and created interesting content. If you don't like r/all the solution is obvious: Don't go there. Only visit the parts of the site that you are interested in. That's the whole concept of the home page. It has nothing to do with users refusing to learn but rather the site making it harder that it has to be.
The "complicated aspects" are the central idea of the platform as a whole. The concept of multiple servers united by a single protocol is not that hard, and any user not being able to grasp something as elementary as that would not make a good community member. Call me a snob, elitist, whatever. Lemmy is not a commercial project and has no YoY growth projections or sharholders demaning growth at all costs, and I would like it to remain so.