I’m trying to setup a forum for vaccine injured people and it seems that it is really hard to support people who aren’t good with computers. This is even more difficult because Facebook will probably nuke our Facebook groups again so we are trying to avoid Big Tech (our stuff gets taken down by FB, Vimeo, Youtube, etc.) and will probably go self-hosted so that we own our data.
Mobile Apps
So in theory, a native mobile app could make things easier. However, with Fig for Discourse, the autocomplete will suggest a home address when the app asks for “site address”. So some people get freaked out by that and don’t want to join the forum because they think it’s asking for their… home address…
For this particular community, most of the companies on the app store will likely deplatform us. The ones that don’t engage in cancel culture are all deplatformed off the app stores.
Discourse doesn’t work on older phones
This demographic is a slice of society other than children/teens (who are mostly unvaxxed and aren’t trying to take care of a vax injured person). So there’s a lot of older phones out there.
The user might get super frustrated when they are able to install the Discourse Hub mobile app but aren’t able to view a Discourse forum.
The error message suggests that the user should update the software on the phone, which is a dead end. Maybe it should suggest that the user switch to a desktop or newer phone.
Email verification
Well even this is hard because they might have trouble checking the spam folder even if you tell them to check the spam folder. But one good things about Discourse is that it supports login with Google etc. etc.
It’s easier to stick with what you know instead of learning something new
I guess some people will inherently have problems learning how to use a computer. They will often hit a snag and get stuck and then get frustrated
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I think that the injured community is pretty much shut out of a great mobile experience… mainly because a lot of normal people rely on phones using Google and Apple software.
My colleagues will probably end up setting up a non-forum website to provide information to the vaccine injured who aren’t tech savvy. The injured have been shit on by the medical community (are often denied healthcare) and it’s hard for them to get information on their condition with all the search engine censorship going around. They badly need healthcare but there are so many barriers in their way.