this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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Discussion of language about Lemmy. (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I feel like a much talked about criticism of getting started with Lemmy is that the 'average person' doesn't understand it. I see a lot of technical people, myself included, use words that the 'average person' shies away from. Mentioning concepts like servers and Fediverse requires some background knowledge. I propose we start using 'providers' instead of servers, as it helps understand the function of it instead of the implementation. There might be more words that could be confusing, so let's have a conversation about them. Are there any you recognize as being able to be simplified, or is this a non issue?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think it's a matter of habit.

I mean, all this new stuff is certainly confusing, overwhelming even, I still don't get how all these different instances can "talk" to each other like there were one, and several other things I don't get yet.

But I was very confused about reddit terminology as well when I joined reddit 8 years ago, then I learned and it became second language to me.

I believe this is the same, I believe we shouldn't try to understand everything in a day, just learn a bit at a time, ask questions, ask for help if we're stuck or feel frustrated, and in time it will become so natural that we'll stop thinking about it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Agreed - so much of the internet in the last decade has been about platforms merging or simplifying or imitating others, so people have become much less use to having to learn new things.

Lemmy is like taking a step backwards to when everything wasn't quite so slickly tailored to friction-free user experience, and having to trust oneself to make the odd step into the unknown.

But that's ok, because that's how we learn. One step at a time.