Technology

I'd like to be able to easily keep in touch with friends and family members. Because many of them are less technical, they haven't adopted federated technologies like Mastodon; they either tried it and bounced off, or are so confused/intimidated by the new thing that they refuse to try it at all.

As a result, I either have to make a Facebook account to connect with them, or else be okay with only talking to them in person, SMS, or phone calls. This is not so different from a future world in which Meta is federated, and everyone else blocks them: in that world, I'd still have to make an account on the Meta instance, or else only talk to those folks offline.

So our choices then are either to a) federate and risk the rest of the network, b) defederate but make secondary accounts on their instance to talk to those less tech savvy folks in our lives, or c) cut ourselves off both technically and socially (at least as far as the internet is concerned)... and none of those feel like great choices.

I feel like the only real answer is that we need to get higher quality, more accessible, better polished Fediverse tools into the hands of those people who today only understand Facebook, and that's a really high bar. How do we make it easier for our less techy parents, friends, etc. to join smaller, more privacy-focused instances, or even have their own instances, without having to think about, frankly, much of anything at all? Because that's the proposition of Facebook for them right now: it's easy, it just works, it has all the features they need, and they don't have to think about it or put any work into it at all.

For instance: Mastodon is a good start, but so many people trip over the "pick a server" bit. One suggestion I've seen is to be able to send server invites, so I could click a button on my instance and send an email to my mom with a link inside that takes her straight to account setup on my instance and all she has to do is pick a username and password and install the app. That could still be even simpler (e.g. could there be an app install link that somehow pre-configures the app with a target instance, and sign up takes place within the appln first launch?) but at least it gets past one of the big apparent stumbling blocks of federation right up front.