Meanwhile, when you sign up for Threads your timeline is nothing but shitty influencers for the first few days, yet somehow they manage to press on through that without getting the vapors or whatever.
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Mastodon
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My account never made it through the first few days before they shut it down for community violation.
I never posted, I just want to be ready for if they ever start federating.
I just don't use Mastodon because I never cared for Twitter.
i also love the "oh noes there are nerds on there!" concern trolling, motherfucker read the wikipedia page on who first adopted and built the communities on twitter and reddit
One thing I don't get. Among the gazilion "Oh, it is sooo easy to do this better" complainers are countless developers and designers. This whole Mastodon thing is Free Software, where countless people spent some of their free time and energy to give you what there is today. Complainer devs and UX folks, are your PR's getting rejected?
So..... Someone deluded says it's super easy to sign up.
Someone points out that it's really not for a non technical person. Let's say that someone is me, and let's say I'm a developer.
Is it suddenly my problem? Is it now my responsibility to fix it? I already have enough problems and responsibilities, thank you. I'm already busy with work and life. I got my own things I'm working on.
Fuck off with that attitude.
There's no responsibility at all. There's also full freedom to complain however you wish. If you do that on someone's free work with which they try to help others, it just doesn't look very good on you. That's all.
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.
Its easy to signup & get started, just have to be awake...
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.
They tend to portray everything new, different and/or popular with geeks as bad or complicated, I see this as a rite of passage for the fediverse. Remember when they were shitting on computer gaming in the early days of the hobby because of who it was initially popular among?
I still remember the "do cell phones cause cancer?" news reports that aired on my local news when I was a kid.
If email were invented today people would complain about how complex and annoying it is to sign up.
OMG another account?! Why can't I just use my discord smh
Saying that times have changed doesn’t negate the fact that times have changed.
In college I had to write a program to send emails. This was around 2012. Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from. There are obviously ways to sign the message and verify it and most email servers block messages that don't have these because of how trivial it is to fake. It's basically like putting a name tag on that says "Joe Biden" and everyone believing you're the president.
I didn't do anything malicious but I did mildly prank my girlfriend. I don't remember what I did but I'm pretty sure I told her before I did it. I really didn't want to end up getting expelled for """hacking""" so I didn't do anything remotely bad. The irony is the assignment wouldn't have worked and been as interesting if my campus had the proper security measures to block the messages.
It could be that the web client for our email mentioned something about the sender being unverified and not to trust it but I don't remember.
Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from.
I remember realizing this and thinking it was weird too when I was reading about SMTP. Specifically, the MAIL FROM command.
Also related.
Spoofing email is hilariously easy. GPG signing really needs to be made easier
I almost got kicked out of school for this! I sent an email to my girlfriend from some girl that we didn't like, saying something like "you're a huge bitch, haha just kidding this is actually jballs not the chick we don't like."
Problem is that I wrote my girlfriend's email address wrong, so it bounced back to the sender (the girl we didn't like).
So I had to explain to a university dean exactly what I did and how I didn't actually "hack into" the girl's email account. That was fun.
I don’t get the email analogy.
People did and DO complain about setting up email. ISP email is a great example of this. People forget their IMAP and SMTP address configuration stuff all the damn time. Always have.
I used to do home IT, and I had to help people through that crap constantly.
That said, these days people have gravitated to clients like gmail or outlook. Those push the user onto a certain domain, which makes setup dead simple. This is what mastodon.social is doing now. Making it so people don’t have to think about the instance at sign up.
Yeah I agree email kinda sucks. But everyone still uses it, and (as far as I'm aware) people aren't writing articles about how confusing email is for people and why that makes it a failure. Mastodon and Lemmy are, in comparison, much better and way less confusing but you see that said all the time about them.
I still don't even know what the servers on lemmy are, each "subreddit" is a different server?
They should try navigating Facebook
Someone who hasn't used Facebook for over 6 years, I'm still trying to convince my grandfather that I don't actually know anything about the platform and that he probably knows more about Facebook than I do. cause honestly I don't recognize it anymore
yeah the new Facebooj ui is so fucking confusing.
they don't even think of their target audience lol
Facebook is a fucking nightmare for people used to having control over their browsing.
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
No choice doesn't matterat all. However, the decision on which mastodon server to use for your social media is about as important as what you'll choose to eat today for dinner. Yeah, kinda important for the dinner itself and you don't want some crap, but if you do, you could just eat it anyway for now and try something else tomorrow.
or we make a few accounts on a few different servers.
we don't need to identify with our fediverse accounts.
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
What's complicated about signing up for mastodon.social on the mastodon app?
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
You forgot the step where you write three paragraphs explaining why you want a server account and get denied because you didn't supply sufficient detail for them to approve your application.
And yet, my server where this is policy is thriving. If it grew any faster than it has been there would likely have been even greater technical issues, and there has never been a lack of people to talk to. It's almost like there are benefits to not letting people create hundreds of bogus accounts that outweigh the small cost to the user!
This obsession with growth is pathological. People have internalized the needs of capital and don't even understand their own needs.
Sorry if this is a dumb but I legit never got into Twitter, and I only use Instagram to follow friends and bands I like.
How do I Mastadon? I'm not being sarcastic, not even a little. Like I literally have absolutely no concept of what I'm supposed to do on it or how to engage with it. Same with pixelfed tbh, like I open it, I see a milliong posts that have no comments or likes, I get confused and then I leave.
Like what do you do? How do you use it? Pretend I'm one of the idiot journalists this post is making fun of, happy to jump on that self-accepting sword!
You're doing it right now.
It's just a different way to browse current topics that people are discussing. You can follow famous/not famous people, news people, musicians, artists, scientists and so on. You have to take some time to search by name or a hashtag like #music that is interesting for you and then follow those. They typically lead to more people and hashtags of interest that you can follow to build a more personal feed. It's just a different way to curate the various things that interest you.
The thing is that it's just another option for people to interact like lemmy/reddit twitter/mastodon pixelfed/facebook etc. Obviously the less popular options have less niche interests. Journalists see that these options can't be used the same way, and need some work to figure out and navigate, so they critique the different and less polished things they see. If they don't have what you are looking for, maybe check back in 3-6 months when there are more users and activities. Like lemmy, things are changing quickly right now.
I'm a software engineer with a decade of experience, and I'm frustrated by the experience so far. Bad UX is bad UX.
Let’s walk though the flow a typical user would experience:
- Search “join mastodon”, find joinmastodon.org
- 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.
- 95% of users will bail at this point.
- Scroll down to the instance search UX.
- 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.
- Pick mastodon.social, sign up.
- Confirmation email takes 12 minutes to arrive. 95% of remaining users will bail.
- Confirm email, log in. Click search.
Search or paste URL
- Wtf does that even mean? Try entering “William Shatner”. No results. Try “Taylor Swift”. Top result is
@taylorswift13@hello.2heng.xinwtf? - Go back, click “see what’s trending”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
- Go back, click “find people to follow”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
- Close site, 95% of users will who get here will never return.
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.
I get this to some extent... On the other hand, none of that matters.
What instance to choose? Doesn't really matter.
What community to subscribe to? Both! If later you figure out you don't like one of them, just unsub...
But yeah, I know normies seem unable to just jump in and see how it works. They just read "fediverse" and don't know what it is so just reject everything that it's related to because "it's too complicated".
The fact you call users normies as an insult just shows how pathetic the user experience is and that you think people need any skills or whatever to access it. It SHOULD be accessible and easy for "normies" but using that term is pretty pathetic.
What? It wasn't meant as an insult, I'm sorry it came off that way. I just meant people that aren't tech savvy or that aren't chronically online. And what I said is literally that people don't need any skills!! They just get scared off by terms they don't understand (fediverse, decentralized, instance...), but that in reality don't matter at all.
I'm very tech savy, it doesn't phase me, but I 100% think it's not as easy as reddit, facebook, threads, instagram, etc. etc. Lemmy, Kbin, is NOT as easy as the competitors
I haven't tried Kbin much at all, but it did seem different than anything I've ever used...
Lemmy I just made an account, followed a bunch of communities, and that's that. IDK, felt very easy. Obviously IDK the average user experience, didn't feel harder than Reddit though.
Mastodon as well, difference from Twitter was just that on Twitter I knew who to follow because it's more established, but in terms of usability it felt basically the same...
IDK, maybe I got lucky. But that has been my experience, and when I made my accounts I had no knowledge of the fediverse or anything like that.
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.
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