I'm going to very clear about this. Lots of valuable people DO need help with the Internet in general and social media specifically. They don't feel it's offensive to either ask for that help or receive it. I deal with such people all the time. Much of the arrogance I'm finding here on #Mastodon appears to be from people who never deal with such folks. That's sad. Pitiful actually. I fervently hope that this isn't widely representative of the #Mastodon culture that evolved before my arrival here a month ago. I mean that with all sincerity. -L
@lauren Strongly agree. So far I've seen a lot of helpfulness and no arrogance, but I don't get out as much as you do. Lol.
I've been observing and making notes with the idea to write a blog post containing tips, analogies, and explanations.
While computer geeks like me are way more common than we were in 1970, we're still nowhere near the mainstream. None of the people I work with, except two women, are facile with computers / smartphones. The two who are facile have zero understanding of how anything works. It's all pure magic. The rest hate their phones, cuss at their phones, and use them grudgingly because they have to in order to function in today's world.
So I see it as a big leap for people to get on social media at all and if we're lucky, and they try Mastodon, we ought to do our best to patiently walk them through it. Always bear in mind that they're not "computer geeks" so they won't make the intuitive jumps that a computer person would. I find that explanation with well-chosen analogies works well. After all, Mastodon is just a big fancy conversation between lots of people.
