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  • But most people seem to be content to remain on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, regardless of the amount of abuse they are being subjected to. I honestly don't understand why.

    There truly are a LOT of people who don't interrogate the world around them. They don't know or care about corporations harvesting and selling their data. They don't know or care about the harms of algorithmic manipulation via social media. They don't really think about privacy. And they don't try to educate themselves.

    There are plenty of people for whom Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon are "the internet", just like the AOL desktop app was "the internet" for many non-technical users back in the day.

    I had a family member remark that they had tried to use Reddit, and it was "too busy-looking" and hard to understand, and they are in their 40s.

    • I had a family member remark that they had tried to use Reddit, and it was “too busy-looking” and hard to understand, and they are in their 40s.

      So, I remember reading something on website UI back when, where someone said that some high percentage of users basically will only allocate a relatively-low number of seconds to understanding a website, and if it doesn't make sense to them in that period of time, they won't use it. It's a big reason why you want to make the bar to initial use as low as possible.

      kagis

      This isn't what I was thinking of, but same idea:

      https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-long-do-users-stay-on-web-pages/

      It's clear from the chart that the first 10 seconds of the page visit are critical for users' decision to stay or leave. The probability of leaving is very high during these first few seconds because users are extremely skeptical, having suffered countless poorly designed web pages in the past. People know that most web pages are useless, and they behave accordingly to avoid wasting more time than absolutely necessary on bad pages.

      If the web page survives this first — extremely harsh — 10-second judgment, users will look around a bit. However, they're still highly likely to leave during the subsequent 20 seconds of their visit. Only after people have stayed on a page for about 30 seconds does the curve become relatively flat. People continue to leave every second, but at a much slower rate than during the first 30 seconds.

      So, if you can convince users to stay on your page for half a minute, there's a fair chance that they'll stay much longer — often 2 minutes or more, which is an eternity on the web.

      So, roughly speaking, there are two cases here:

      • bad pages, which get the chop in a few seconds; and
      • good pages, which might be allocated a few minutes.

      I've also seen both Lemmy and Mastodon criticized for the "select an initial home instance" decision, because the point is that that significantly increases that bar to use. Maybe it'd be better to at least provide some kind of sane default, like randomly-select among the non-special-interest top-N home instances geographically near the user.

      Reddit (at least historically, don't know if it's different now) was somewhat-unusual in that they didn't require someone to plonk in an email address to start using the thing. That'd presumably be part of the "get to bar to initial use low" bit.

  • Knowledge is power and the internet contains an absolutely monstrous amount of knowledge

    Everybody wants to rule the world

  • We can also learn about alternative networks by perusing Gopher, Gemini, and other networks.

    I think that Gopher is neat and have some nostalgia going on there, but it's not what I would recommend to random people as a first stab if they just want a less-centralized experience.

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