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People often talk about the barriers to entry of the fediverse and IRC

and uh - what if we called those barriers to entry "culture"
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Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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@silverwizard We can call it "challenge" too, I hear people like these!
@silverwizard
silverwizard
silverwizard  
But I just mean that people often talk about barriers to entry as technical but getting on IRC is like a 30 second process, search "IRC", click on Libera, use the WebUI

The barriers are all the choices people have made to make the community work

Those aren't arcane technical rules, those are *customs*, old internet communities have *customs and knowledge*, and if you move to another country, there's always culture shock

We have whole papers about how people start disliking them, then start to love them, then start to have them feel natural
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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@silverwizard Who then ends up talking about barriers to entry? People already inside or people outside?
@silverwizard
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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@silverwizard Twice in this conversaiont you mentioned "people often talk about barriers to entry" and I was wondering what kind of people talk about barriers to entry. Are they on the Fediverse/IRC already or are they outside?
@silverwizard
silverwizard
silverwizard  
@Hypolite Petovan Ah, understood

I tend to see it on both spaces. A lot of the time it's people who bounced off, but I see it from all sides. http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5509 this is the place that sparked the thought, and that was 100% a person who uses both.

Also! Yay! My server's decision to stop posting statuses is over!
@Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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@silverwizard This article is too long and too convoluted for me to be able to read it in full without having something better to do after a while, but it seems to me that you can talk about low barriers of entry to explain a platform's popularity while not wishing the same destructive popularity on another platform that has some modicum of barriers of entry. Cf Eternal September. I guess it does join your original point about culture.
@silverwizard
silverwizard
silverwizard  
@Hypolite Petovan Yeah - I think culture is very good - and I think that we are allowed to have subcultures. I have a bunch of Something Awful friends - but I'm never going to be a Goon.
@Hypolite Petovan
⛅ w chance of bears
⛅ w chance of bears  
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it's true. the mastodon onboarding problem had basically no technical hurdles and one big "ah shit, what room full of strangers do I walk into?"

(I still don't understand why people act like gambling on which interoperable fediverse instance to join is worse than gambling on which of several mutually incompatible services to join)
silverwizard
silverwizard  
I mean - i get that the problem is:
If I go to Post.News I am done making choices
If I go to the Fediverse, now I need to make a second choice

And I mean - from my end it's a question of wanting to give up on the model (which I've wanted to do for as long as the model has existed)

I also have a weird relationship with the "room full of strangers" question, as I started with "I want a single panel for all my social stuff which can also use the federated stuff" rather than "I want to join this network" (I already had a disused GNUSocial, and a Diaspora account)
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