I told somebody I know who knew about Reddit's API changes about Lemmy. He has a master's degree in Computer Science and works as a software engineer. But then, he told me that it's too confusing to get into, even for someone like him. This is great feedback and I hope that these issues will be fixed in the coming months.
I 100% agree with all of this. That's why I joined kbin instead of Lemmy. I went to Lemmy, was greeted with basically a wall of text, and said "Well, shit, I only have a couple minutes right now, I guess I'll have to figure this out later." When I went to kbin.social, the content was front-and-center, the "Log In" and "Register" buttons were more or less where I expected them to be, and the process took less time than it would have taken to read and absorb Lemmy's front-page documentation.
Beehaw was similar, although there was an extra text box in the registration section.
And now that I'm actually using the fediverse, it's painfully obvious that I didn't need to know anything that Lemmy was so intent on explaining to me. I log in, I see stuff, I click, I comment. I see a group I'm interested in, I click on the group name, and I click "Subscribe". Do I understand how all these places connect together? Not in the slightest. But I also don't have to. Not right now. I might want to, later, when I feel like I want to do something more advanced than post or comment on a cat picture, but for the time being, I am fully satisfied by just treating this place like "Reddit but powered by a mysterious black box."
There are some QOL things I'd like to have (like the thing about links you mentioned, and a way to force Beehaw to stop automatically scrolling my feed as more stuff gets added, and the ability to turn on "open links in a new tab" by default) and kbin, in particular, has some weird quirks (like, if you start to make a comment, have to walk away and do something else, then come back and finish the comment, if you took too long, a weird error occurs and your comment vanishes irretrievably into limbo). But other than that, I'm happy using the service without knowing the technical details of how everything is hooked up together.
Thanks for sharing your story! Anecdotes like these can help to make it more user centered.
Exactly! Those who do want to know will find ways to learn.
For me personally, it's also much easier to learn when I'm in a context where I can apply the knowledge. That is definitely long after registration.
I can imagine how this technical welcome text came to be. Hard working people spent their free time to make all this possible, and acquired all the knowledge necessary. It was probably very well intended to share this knowledge with people who join. But most of them have a different focus.
Haha, we have the same wishlist :)