this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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That's what bothers me about these sorts of threads. We represent a completely self-selected group of people who have not just managed to create accounts on the Fediverse, but then decided to stick around.
Of course we think it's simple.
We do not represent "typical users" (whatever that means) of mainstream platforms, and yes, Mastodon, Lemmy etc. have a lot of work ahead of them to make themselves appealing to those users.
It doesn't really help to talk about how simple the Fediverse is, or to shame people who find it confusing. The only thing that will actually help take it mainstream is UX work to remove the friction and make it as simple to use as we claim it is.
I agree that UX work is important but the current state that mastodon UX is in is ready for the masses. It is simple. It will just take some time for people to wrap their heads around it, just like it took time for people to adopt email, facebook, twitter, etc. UX friction isn't the reason your grandma isn't using mastodon right now. These things don't happen overnight.
If users need to "take some time [...] to wrap their heads around it", the UX is not ready for mass adoption. It's that simple.
I consider myself relatively savvy in this area, and I still regularly run into walls with random federation-related issues.
It's not that simple. Twitter and email are both just as complicated yet they enjoy mass adoption. You and I run into walls because we're not accustomed to it. When you were new to other tech I'm sure you ran into similar walls.
This meme has to die. Federated services are not some black magic.
I would have replied to this earlier, but my Lemmy instance was unexpectedly down...
Federated services are cool. They're not black magic, but they have their own issues that still need to be handled better for there to be mass adoption.
Every day, though, these federated platforms are being developed. Different users have different thresholds for what they're willing to put up with, and slowly but surely, more and more people are going to be within the expanding bubble of acceptability.
Same goes for UX. Mass adopters don't care about "technological superiority" if it does not directly benefit the user experience.