End users didn’t know how email or the world wide web worked once upon a time. There’s that clip of Katie Couric asking her producer “Can you explain what internet is?”

In the years since, they figured it out.

And as I pointed out recently, people figured out how to play WoW even if you have to pick a server before you can start playing. My understanding is different servers have different modes, like there might be one where PvP is enabled, etc. so there’s a clear reason expressed why you might pick one over the other. I’ve noticed Fediverse instances are really shit at that.

I signed up for Pixelfed recently, and the Join Pixelfed website’s page where you pick an instance had a bunch of tiles that read something like this:

| Pixelfed.de

|

| Pixelfed is an image sha…

Fist of all the description for the instance started out trying to explain what Pixelfed as a whole was, and then it was truncated to about a quarter of a tweet with no way to expand it right there.

I’ll take this opportunity to bang on once again about everyone wanting to make general purpose instances with no attempt at finding a niche. I’ve been saying this since joining; every instance decides it needs a c/funny or a c/linux or a c/cats or a c/games and so then there ends up being 40 of each and the one on .world or .ml ends up being the de facto one everyone uses. Then you get a page where you have to pick from lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemm.ee, lemmy.ca each one giving the first fifty characters of the definition of Lemmy as their description, yeah no one’s going to open another browser tab and end up doing something else when confronted with that, huh?