Literally

It’s not about protecting the children nor has it ever been

This is a very short sighted view of the situation at hand.

The banning of books and literal re-writing of history in certain states should be concerning for anyone who realizes what a dark road we’re headed down.

The explainer may be sincere; however, it is clear that privacy and an open web are not in Google’s interests. They contradict that sentiment in the explainer entirely. There’s 0 reason for any one to give them the benefit of the doubt.

My advice is follow hashtags for topics you like or are interested in. They will then show up in your feed. It’s wonderfully personalized and I’ve found lots of great people that way with similar interests

Believing that certain folks don’t deserve basic rights because of their identity, sexual orientation, skin color, etc. is not an opinion that’s acceptable. No one with a brain wants to hear any of that non-sense thankfully!

My senior neighbor watches YouTube a ton and uses it to listen to music on his laptop. His old laptop recently died and I helped him order a new one and put FireFox with the whole works of adguard, ublock origin, sponsorblock, etc. on it for him and its changed his life! He loves not seeing these dumb ads now!

Ublock origin Adguard Aguard Extra Bitwarden Privacy badger Tampermonkey Dark reader Sponsorblock

I agree with you fully that it’s not hard or difficult necessarily–I think it can just be frustrating for some users, even more web/tech-literate folks.

I just think improving the UX/UI in general and providing more explanation/resources especially to newer users would go a long way with encouraging elieving some of the frustrations. Easier said than done obviously!

I love mastadon and highly recommend it! I’ve had nothing but a great experience thus far

As far as I understand that’s correct. I’ve got a solid junior level understand of programming LOL but ActivityPub acts as an interface basically where instead of the content being walled off to Instagram specifically this new Threads app should be accessible by the outside world (Mastadon, Lemmy, whatever else) through ActivityPub. Those apps would get the content through requests to the interface. So you could theoretically migrate your content just like you can on other Fediverse apps.

I’m right there hoping with you and I think this very well could be a big turning point as they’ll be the first major player, to my knowledge, to incorporate anything Fediverse into their ecosystem.

My other big hope is that the process of signing up for sites like Lemmy, Mastadon, and other Fediverse apps is improved so that more people can navigate it easily. As you said, right now the UX is pretty bad and can be frustrating even for veteran users of the internet. My biggest frustration, like many, when signing up for Mastadon was trying to choose a server and the way the Servers page is structured made it ten times more difficult I felt like because it’s just a giant list of servers that are sorted by category.

I think with a really great UX and simplified UI for the sign-up process that would go a long way to not turning people away. I imagine a literal walk through of the whole process, step by step, with lots of hand holding and tool-tips pointing to things in case someone gets confused.

I love the aspect of it being tied to ActivityPub and I do still utilize Instagram primarily as a way to communicate with friends and family, so I’m willing to give it a try. However, I don’t think it will replace the love I have for Mastadon or be able to match the aspects of Mastadon that I really enjoy: the positive communities, personalization, no algorithm, etc.

I’d highly recommend Mastadon, I love it and joined it before I ever discovered Lemmy. I love how personalized it is. I follow hashtags for things that interest me and follow cool people that I’ve randomly found on there. It’s a nice, quaint, and positive community it seems. At least thus far.

I feel your pain 1000%

I tried for the longest time to get my wife, other friends, family, etc. to use Signal to no avail. Trying to explain Lemmy or Mastadon to them is like trying to explain the concept of fire to cavemen. (Not that they’re dumb or even tech illiterate necessarily, I just don’t think most folks care enough to bother with it sadly right now).