My mom is afraid of computers, but she understands email just fine.
Really? Then please come over here and try to explain the same to my mom. Cuz I’ve tried it a million times, she doesn’t understand the concept and she doesn’t like to understand at this point, all she knows is, it works, like a phone number, it just works. She doesn’t understand why calling her brother abroad without the country’s calling code doesn’t work, I had to type the number in her phone with the country’s code because she didn’t think that was important and just left the code out… cell operators were also a PITA to explain to her, and I don’t think she got that either, cuz she still asks me what the first 3 numbers in front of the cell are and sometimes I give her bogus codes just to see if she’ll go “don’t screw with me”, but she writes them down and never asks me why is this code different from all of the rest that are in use here… not ever.
So please, don’t tell me everyone understands email, cuz they don’t. I’ll bet you whatever you want that, if you do a street questionare and ask people to explain the concept of email as plainly as possible, over 70% with either get it completely wrong or just shrug and tell they have no idea how it works.
I assume you’re talking about TOR, and not Thor. I consider myself a techie, I’m a patent attorney with a degree in computer science. I’ve read about how TOR works a few times, and probably once new whatever it is you’re getting at, but I couldn’t tell you how the fuck TOR works now. And I couldn’t care less. And I don’t need to understand it to sign up for the fediverse or upload a photo to kbin or upload a photo to imgur.
Yeah, Tor, sorry. Had a nick on a game, Thorazine, everyone called me Thor there, so now it just slips sometimes.
You don’t need to understand any of that, apparently you have a logic streak in you since you have degree in computer science. One, not everyone has that gift, two, even if they did, they might not have developed it, and three, you went to uni. Please tell me the world statistic (percentage) of people that actually went and graduated. I haven’t seen the statistic either, but I bet it’s no more than 15% on a global scale, which about sums my estimate of over 80% of the population not being able to understand simple things (yes, they are simple IMO) like email or federation. It’s not that it’s complicated, it’s the attention span problem. Uni teaches to have long studying session, weeks, months at a time. People that never did that, they just can’t force their brain to concentrate on one single thing for more than 5 minutes at a time, especially not if they’re not getting paid for it and none of their friends use that thing that you’re trying to explain. The very concept of freedom and having the choice to do things your way or how you’d like to be run, escapes them. They just don’t care. They use whatever their friends, coworkers, family use. Why? Cuz why not. Everyone else uses it, it’s simple, you just type in your phone, reset you password (cuz none of them actually remember it, they’re not used to remembering stuff) and off you go to using that app on your new device.
You don’t need to be a software engineer with experience in every field of technology to click a link, sign up for an account, and leave a comment. My mom could do it (if she wanted to, although she’s probably get angry at me if I suggested it and talked to her about it for more than 20 seconds).
You proved my point with the last sentence in brackets. People usually don’t care about techie stuff. Techies do, they love it, but regular people… no. Why would I bother explaining something like the fediverse or email to anyone that doesn’t even wanna hear about that. Has anyone ever asked you (out of the blue) “hey man, you know how that mastodon thing works?”. No… and no one ever will… not unless you start explaining first. No one cares dude, because they’re perfectly OK not knowing about that and just living their lives with coproeate social media. It’s a means to and end for them, they don’t actually care about freedom, they don’t even understand why this is free and the other one isn’t, lol 😂, they’re both free to them, except this one is a hell of a lot more complicated for signing up. “Now I gotta chech my email for a confirmation link, great 😒… shit, can’t remember my password 🤦… aaah, fuck this shit.” See how easy it is for normies to give up. Make the sign up process with a phone number and sign ups will skyrocket, I guarantee you that. But… wait, that’s info that I would rather not share with a social network. Yes, for people like you and me, yes, for normies, it’s just easier 🤷.
You’re just being an elitist misanthrope here. This has nothing to do with the issues facing the fediverse.