myrmepropagandist
“regular people” whoever that is… will never use the crunchy homemade internet if they have the option of slick apps instead. You can’t hire designers, you don’t have an advertising budget, your project with its dreamy cooperative ethos is an anathema to tech media who don’t see the point in mentioning it exists.
“regular people” like pop-ups, and bots, and having their data sold to the highest bidder, they like porn spam, and scammers and discourse so broken it causes mental harm. Right?
Rich Felker
@mattmcirvin @TerryHancock @futurebird It's not just that. It's that we recognize that lots of the ways of giving someone an "easy" installation are things we "shouldn't" be doing because it's asking them to let us do sketchy things to their computers without understanding what's going to happen. We'd rather not take on that role.
Matt McIrvin
@TerryHancock @dalias @futurebird A pattern I notice a lot with open-source projects is that the one-time installation and setup is the hardest part, and unfortunately that's the first impression people get. I think it's because the developers will tend to work on the problems that annoy *them*, and the things you only have to go through once are way down that list.
Space Catitude 🚀
@dalias
Yes. But those design principles invariably do introduce complexity.
For example, the Fediverse is a really well done application of these principles, and yet we still hear complaints that it is "too complicated".
I ran into similar objections to using, say, Debian Linux, which has an excellent packaging system. But it's hard to beat "pre-installed"!
I think there are certain inescable tradeoffs, and the best we can do is to be clear what the trade is.
@futurebird @mattmcirvin
Rich Felker
@TerryHancock @futurebird @mattmcirvin It's hard to address this concretely because we don't have a specific thing in mind to be "made easy".
But in general, solutions involve a mix of *not having anyone in a postion of control* (whenever possible), building systems for evaluating trust in information that aren't based on arbitrary authorities, and technical measures that ensue violations of trust are very explicit and provably intentional.
Space Catitude 🚀
@dalias @futurebird @mattmcirvin
I'm not convinced this will ever really be possible. There's always perverse incentives for someone to betray that kind of trust.
And not much remuneration for those who want to provide a service -- which puts real pressure behind buying into those incentives.
Independent artists (a.k.a. "the good guys") struggle with this all the time -- Do I charge a subscription fee? Do I have ads on my site? Use a creepy corporate platform? Or do I just starve?
Rich Felker
@futurebird @mattmcirvin Too often (almost always) the "make it easy" ends up being "surrender control to someone untrustworthy". That's why those of us who understand reject it. This is the problem we need to solve. Not "make it easy" but "make it easy without broken power dynamics".
myrmepropagandist
@mattmcirvin Totally. The notion that suffering is required needs to go. We should make it as easy and as welcoming as we can with our limited resources.
Matt McIrvin
@futurebird They don't like any of that stuff but they'll put up with it if it means they don't have to go on a voyage of discovery and complete a self-taught computer science course to get a simple thing done.
A perennial problem in open source etc is that computer people enjoy the voyage of discovery, and many kind of think that attitude is the entrance fee for being fit to use a computer. But not everyone is like them.
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