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this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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I'd be a lot happier if Mastodon were seeing 1 million new users a day right now, but I'll take what I can get. Any dent in Twitter's user base is good. Here's hoping that experiencing "the Fediverse with training wheels" over at Bluesky will lead to people moving to Mastodon sooner rather than later.
It will not. You have to teach people what federation is while also having an enticing platform. I haven't seen anyone do that yet. Like Henry Ford said, the masses will just want a faster horse.
Let's pretend like the fediverse is a car. We're asking people who've never seen a car, and are used to horses, to select the parts and put it together with no manual. But, unless there's heavy provocation people will not switch from what they're familiar with.
This was the Reddit API changes for me and many on here. Yet due to Lemmy's adolescence at the time many didn't see a good enough platform to migrate to.
I consider myself quite literate with tech, but when I tried Mastodon years ago I couldn't even figure out how to sign up. They didn't explain what a server was, what federation is, or why I was unable to login after making an account. And they still do a terrible job at it. Your average person gets confused and gives up.
If I knew anything about development I'd throw together an app that'd walk you through the sign up process. It's such an easy thing to fix.
As someone who would have preferred Mastodon become the more popular service, I completely agree.
Look at mastodon.social and bluesky.app without logging in. Which site seems more interesting to the general public?
Now make an account. If you don't have a bunch of specific people you want to follow, which has the better new user experience for the general public?
Mastodon looks like it was made by nerds, for nerds, and is populated exclusively by nerds. It's not nearly as welcoming.
Life long nerd and CS grad. Mastodon ain’t it.
I'm going to use your car analogy, but tweak it.
People are looking to sell their car and buy a new one. One car acts like their old car; it has automatic transmission and there is a network of mechanics to take the car to in case something breaks.
The other car has a manual transmission. The car requires regular maintenance to do done by the owner like weekly tuning of the timing belt. There aren't mechanics, but car clubs where people will give you advice on how to fix your car.
The masses are fucking morons and expecting them to eventually do the right thing is a waste of synapse processing time.
I can't imagine how much you must have suffered choosing an email client. 🙄
It's been my experience that people who couldn't figure out how to join Mastodon are the same people that get so used to doing things one way, that when you introduce a different way, they fall apart. Regardless if they've done virtually the same thing with different services.
Mastodon isn't difficult to sign up for and use. FFS there are people of all ages and tech experiences who figured it out easily. I've seen grandmas who only ever used Facebook figure out Mastodon and teens who failed english figure it out. It's not rocket science. It's just not what you are used to when signing up for similar services.
I didn't suffer? I got my email in computer lab when I was a kid. I didn't have to choose the teacher showed us Gmail. You get an android you're prompted to create a Gmail. You get an iPhone you're prompted to create an iCloud.
For your second paragraph that was the entire point of my original comment.
Objectively it's not difficult in the same way starting a video game isn't difficult. However, just because some people can learn the controls quickly, doesn't mean everyone can. See: the video game journalist failing the Cuphead tutorial.
That's not the comeback you think it is.
What do you mean "comeback", this isn't twitter, we're having a discussion.
Yes. You were complaining about how absolutely awful it is to have to figure out how to choose which Mastodon server to create an account on, because this "federation" thing is soooooo damn complicated to understand.
Then, it was pointed out to you that choosing an email server is no different. Billions of people around the world have been successfully choosing an email server (and switching to different email servers when appropriate for them, or even having multiple accounts on different email servers).
The email example is often used against the"FeDeRaTiOn Is ToO cOMpLiCaTeD" complaint because, other than the specific protocol servers use to communicate with each other, they're no different. You have an account on service A, your grandmother has an account on service B, and all you need to communicate with her is her address.... EXACTLY like every ActivityPub federated service. It's not complicated.
The person responding to you quite sarcastically pointed how how awful it must have been for you to choose an email server, since you were complaining that this whole "federation" thing is soooooo complicated. And your response was that, in fact, it was very easy for you. You made their point for them and didn't even realize it.
Furthermore, you're having this discussion on Lemmy, a federated service, from your account on one of many federated servers, communicating with people on completely different Lemmy servers all over the world.
So, to beat a dead horse to a pulp....
It must have been awful for you to choose which Lemmy server to sign up for. So much unnecessary complication. Simply participating in this discussion on a federated service must be extremely taxing on your cognition. /s/s/s/s/s
Let's compare on-boarding processes for Mastodon and BlueSky
How to join Mastodon:
User: What is «instance»?
User: Ok... but what instance should I use?
User: picks random instance.
Now one of these things happen
Every thing goes well
They pick a small instance with almost nobody in it, complain that there is no-one there and leave or the instance gets shut down.
They pick an instance centered around something they are not interested because they had no info on what each instance is like other than a small description that doesn't give you a good idea of what the average post is like.
No matter which one happens, if they stick around, things like this will pop up:
Someone will send them a link to a Mastodon post. They click it, but the link they were send was on another instance as such they are logged out. Thing is, they don't know what federation is and most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn't notice they are on a completely different site. "Strange", they think, "I could have sworn I was logged in". Then they try to log in on the other instance... can't and get confused and maybe even panic. "Did I just lose my account?".
Now, with that being said, Email is still an example of a federated platform with mass adoption, and we should use it as an example when explaining the fediverse. But I would like to stress the following point: most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn't notice they are on a completely different site. Go different Email instances and they look distinct. Go to gmail.com and outlook.com and they look distinct enough so that people can intuitively understand that, although they are both email services, their Gmail account is not going to let them log into Outlook.
Mastodon instances on the other hand? They just brand themselves as "Mastodon" and that's about it. They look identical! Just LOOK:
No wonder people get confused. The big instances NEED to look distinct for this to work. Otherwise, the federation thing will be confusing.
I made a post on asklemmy asking why people were choosing BlueSky over Mastodon and not understanding federation was one of the major pain points.
I like your thoughts about having them look different from each other in someway to make them distinguishable. I think that might be a smart thing to do if you’re an instance owner.
I also think that we’re not really that far apart in what we’re both saying. When I read your example of the on boarding process for some people, it just reinforces what I said in my original reply, which was “ It's been my experience that people who couldn't figure out how to join Mastodon are the same people that get so used to doing things one way, that when you introduce a different way, they fall apart.” it’s not that ideas like “instances“ are difficult subjects to grasp, it’s that the person who is joining is expecting a different experience. Which I think causes part of their brain to kind of shut down a little. So things start to become confusing. I think this becomes obvious when you talk to people who had no issues joining. What they usually say is something along the lines of “I read it and caught on pretty quick.“ Which was my experience as well. Sure, once I got in it took me a few moments to realize what was what and get a grasp on @names but it was never something that made me say “this is too confusing“. It was just new. And I treated it like that.
Which makes me think that the people who say they don’t understand things like “Federation“ never really tried to understand them to begin with. As you noted, email is a handy comparison to use. When I’ve explained it to them like that, most people kind of smack their head and “get it” pretty quickly after that.
I’ve thought for a long time the first thing that someone should read when they try to join Mastodon is “This isn’t like any social media you’ve ever joined. We do things different, and if you read along, you’ll understand why.” Or something similar to get the person who is joining out of that frame of mind where they think they’re joining something that they’ve done before. I think that would put people in the right frame of mind right away.
But I’ve been known to be wrong before.
I agree. Usually we present Mastodon and other federated platforms as alternatives to other centralized ones and that makes them expect the exact same experience, since, after all, we told them it was just like the other one.
We need to set the expectation that these federated platforms work in a different manner and as such you need to learn a few things before using it.
I mean, it's just downloading an app and creating a account for me. I feel like you're overcooking this a bit.
No one using this platform is indicative of the average person.
But mastodon has no good algorithm or search