People did and DO complain about setting up email. ISP email is a great example of this. People forget their IMAP and SMTP address configuration stuff all the damn time. Always have.

I used to do home IT, and I had to help people through that crap constantly.

That said, these days people have gravitated to clients like gmail or outlook. Those push the user onto a certain domain, which makes setup dead simple. This is what mastodon.social is doing now. Making it so people don’t have to think about the instance at sign up.

[–] julianh@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I agree email kinda sucks. But everyone still uses it, and (as far as I'm aware) people aren't writing articles about how confusing email is for people and why that makes it a failure. Mastodon and Lemmy are, in comparison, much better and way less confusing but you see that said all the time about them.

[–] Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

When email came out the alternative product was the post office or a fax machine. Even though configuring a client was difficult for some, instant digital messaging communication was new. It was a BIG motivator for people to either figure it out, or hire someone like me to figure it out for them.

People are comparing Mastodon to Twitter, a fairly similar core product. The gap between email and mail was much wider.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Yea I'm with you here. I've done a good amount of things with computers and setting up email with clients and setting up printers are probably the two "what the fuck why is this so hard!" things I've had to do with a computer.

[–] Misconduct@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I used my isp email address for a brief period and it was always super annoying in some way or another. Not to mention I lost it when I had to switch providers because I moved out of their area. It was a long time ago but they wanted to charge me to keep it when gmail/Hotmail etc already existed lmao bye

[–] thisfro 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is what mastodon.social is doing now. Making it so people don’t have to think about the instance at sign up.

TBH, I don't find that all too bad. As long as users can easily move at any time, getting them set up on a popular one first where everything "just works", they can learn the concepts and get used to the federation stuff. Then after some time, they may realize that a smaller server might fit them better and can then move there. Choosing a server without ever being registered somewhere (in the fediverse) was even hard for me.

[–] phil@cryptodon.lol 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, but there are very real power implications of the network of this type of centralization. A single entity already has basically full control over source code changes, if they also capture infrastructure fully, they will do what GMail did to e-mail. The spam and moderation problem will naturally make being on a small instance a worse experience than being on a large one, and this is terrible for the overall system.