Mastodon

If email were invented today people would complain about how complex and annoying it is to sign up.

I flirted with journalism before getting my degree in CS.

It's not an exaggeration to say that the faculty and many of the students were almost proudly "bad at math" and basically bad with tech too, other than learning the basics of a Macbook.

Doesn't have to be that way and many journalists are smart, great people, but there's a weird self fulfilling culture when it comes to tech. Not totally sure about how tech focused writers would be similar or different.

Edit: Just googling "journalists bad at math" and got this from the Columbia Journalism Review:

“In many cases, they got into journalism to stay away from math.” Journalists love to joke about how we suck at math.

Edit 2: I guess I was bringing up my experience to be an example of how many journalists do not have a strong grasp of technical concepts and sometimes are almost proud of that. So it doesn't surprise me that many may have struggled with Mastodon.

That being said, that attitude is far closer to the average user than, say, the user base of this platform, which is likely far more tech savvy. Streamlined user experience is not a bad thing if you desire mainstream use and is something that could be improved, though Mastodon has been making strides in that regard.

As someone who worked in IT support at a university and later as a sys admin: I believe MOST people (including young people) can not use the internet or a computer when it goes beyond installing and using a (popular) app from the App Store.

Many people can not, for example, look up a program via search engine, go to its website, find and click the correct download link and then install the program. Many people don’t even use websites anymore, they only use applications.

Their voices are missing online simply because they are basically tech illiterate. And I think that is a huge problem.

To be fair, if you want content on Mastodon, you have to actively go out, find people, and follow them. After you get past that Step 1 of signing up, your home page is empty. There's no algorithm that automatically deposits content on the main page. You have to do a little bit of work to get anything. As you say, doing this work is not that god damn hard, but sadly for about 80% of people (maybe more), this is an impassible barrier.

On the bright side, once you do get past this barrier, none of the Mastodon content that you are getting is from that bottom eighty percent.

The problem is the paradox of "it doesn't matter what server you pick" while also giving them a choice.

If choices don't matter, why have a choice?

Although I disagree that it doesn't matter

It's pretty obvious 99% of users bounce off the signup page. People who think otherwise simply are too disconnected from normie reality

Here is what happens

Let's join this thing

I have to choose a server ? Ok which one ?

Wow that's so many, is this important or cani pick at random ?

If you pick wrong, everything you write could be deleted or never seen by anyone.

Ok, well I better choose properly

Read server rules pages for 2-3 minutes

There's a distraction

Later, joins threads

It is kinda hard finding interesting people to follow. Hardly anyone I would have followed on Twitter is on Mastodon.

Both are exaggerated, but fediverse apps absolutely need better onboarding and it's a totally fixable problem, but not if the community continues to ignore it.

Every Reddit and Twitter user over the last few months: "OMG The Fediverse is so hard and complicated how can people figure this out?!?!?!!!!11eleven"

My brother(s) in data: It takes like 5 minutes to understand how it works and you're good to go (maybe 10 if you were the paint-chip-or-glue-eating-type back in school.)

Personally I thought first impressions of Mastodon (and Lemmy) were abysmal. Being told to pick a server without knowing what that means or the consequences of that choice just scares people away. Unless someone has a specific server in mind they should not even be asked to pick one. Instead a number of existing servers should volunteer as curated core servers and new users are automatically assigned to one of those. There can still be a "let me choose" link that goes to a full list of servers if they prefer to browse them all

I disagree, it's not as easy and normal as Twitter and Threads. Stop lying to yourselves. It's Dev's requirement to make it user friendly for the audience and they haven't. Otherwise this wouldn't be a thing people are saying lol. Devs and fanboys are so in their own bubble it's why nothing thrives

I opened the mastodon app. I clicked to select a server and create an account.

It gave me an error about timezones not included in the list.

Then i remember i tried it 2weeks ago and i never took the time to troubleshoot it.

I'm still unable to access mastodon

Even Lemmy has people saying they don't understand it's complexity when it's literally the same steps. it's honestly exhausting how little effort people are willing to put in basic technology.

They should try navigating Facebook

Is this a troll post? There are multiple shortfalls that make Mastodon harder to use than twitter for the average user. Here's a great Op-ed explaining them: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/op-ed-why-the-great-twittermigration-didnt-quite-pan-out/

The tl;dr is that decentralization is no selling point for the average user and if the experience using Mastodon is any worse than using Twitter, people simply won't switch. And there are numerous big issues with Mastodon's usability that make it inferior to Twitter: That there is no proper way of exploring creators, that following creators is a hot mess, that Mastodon instances can block each other and thus make it impossible for their users to interact with each other. All those drawbacks come from being decentralized, while the only positive, not being ruled by a billionaire man-child, clearly doesn't bother people as much.

Anyone who claims the Fediverse is hard... just ask them if they use email. Is that hard?

It is almost impossible to make mastodon similar of an experience as Twitter was. I used Mastodon and found it kinda boring so I didn't even try. But I did want to use Lemmy since I am a Reddit refugee. I had a pretty hard time trying to figure out how to choose the best instance, where to find my communities (should I join technology at beehaw or lemmy.world?). I still somewhat get confused trying to wrap my head around the fediverse AND I HAVE A FUCKING COMPUTER ENGINEERING DEGREE. If you think that the average user is gonna confidently just make a user and not get confused at all the new concepts you don't know normies.

Let’s walk though the flow a typical user would experience:

1. Search “join mastodon”, find joinmastodon.org
2. Click “create account”…

SERVERS: Mastodon is not a single website. To use it, you need to make an account with a provider—we call them servers—that lets you connect with other people across Mastodon.

3. 95% of users will bail at this point.
4. Scroll down to the instance search UX.
5. Too many options. Do I want “all regions” or should I pick my own region? Do I want “all topics” or “general”? 95% of remaining users will bail.
6. Pick mastodon.social, sign up.
7. Confirmation email takes 12 minutes to arrive. 95% of remaining users will bail.
8. Confirm email, log in. Click search.

Search or paste URL

9. Wtf does that even mean? Try entering “William Shatner”. No results. Try “Taylor Swift”. Top result is @[email protected] wtf?
10. Go back, click “see what’s trending”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
11. Go back, click “find people to follow”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
12. Close site, 95% of users will who get here will never return.

I can kinda get it. There are tons of servers, all with different rules, and I'm guessing some don't federate with eachother. I compared ~20 servers rules and how fast they loaded before chosing one.

Search sucks. Home feed is only chronological, so you need be careful about who you follow. I.e. if you follow someone that posts important stuff, but only weekly, it will get drowned out by following people that post every hour. Then there's the weird design issue that all replies aren't necessarily synced between servers, which is unituitive.

Mastodon needs to implement some kind of better search, and a better algorithm for the home feed, and make it the default.

Journalists are just going to go where the most people are because it's their job to self-promote.

First post on Lemmy, would love to share a few thoughts with you all :)

At a basic level, I believe the cycle of a social network has this basic structure:

people -> create content -> engages (including share) -> bring people -> create content -> etc

IMO the main reason behind the success of Twitter or Reddit is the width and depth of the content they have: if you login now it's extremely easy to find content about virtually anything you might want. This provides an immediate benefit to the new user, who's motivated to stay, learn the platform and eventually engage with it.

Behind the content, there are people. The other magic of social networking is that the users, basically, become the creators / curators of the content themselves. It seems so obvious when we think about it, and has powerful networking effects, one of which is the engagement between users.

This is what makes the step of "user onboarding" critical for the life of a social network, and reducing it to "people that are tech illiterate don't belong to the fediverse" is a dangerous and counterproductive argument for the health of the system (and a narrative that I think we, as the "early adopters", should try to avoid as much as possible).

I believe that the success of the fediverse (as a system / protocol, not just as a social network) depends on having width and depth in its communities to avoid collapsing into a "walled garden approach" - and this depends in large part in the contribution of people with many interests and experiences, in order to "build the content" over time - regardless of the instance / server.

A few examples of topics that I loved to follow on Reddit where the user base is not "traditionally techie", but worked really hard to produce excellent content:

• coffee / espresso
• askHistorians
• daddit
• parenting
• curly hair
• skincare (european skincare, too)
• interior design

Because of this, and because I'd love to see project like Lemmy succeed over time, I think that improving the User Experience is the real priority for us as a community to build and strengthen the fediverse.

There's a lot of UX best practices that could be lifted by best-in-class apps and services so we don't have to start from zero and I don't think there would be any real downsides - but I'd love to hear from others as well on what they think :)

I'm a software engineer with a decade of experience, and I'm frustrated by the experience so far. Bad UX is bad UX.

I think it's a mix of the way journalism works in the age of overstimulation (everything is the best/worst anyone has ever witnessed) and old(er) people being unfathomably tech-illiterate.

And I don't even mean that negatively. I often really am unable to fathom how disorienting even the slightest change in a software they're used to is to them.

If my mother were to use the birdsite, and they'd change their theme from blue to red one day, she would literally be unable to use it, because "it's all different now"

Also, mastodon does have some usability problems, though they are not that big imo.