Mastodon

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

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.

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

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.

Well, In 10+ years, I've never managed to understand how Twitter works, so I guess there's nowhere to go but up?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

I made ana count on some mastodon instance. It wasnt a deliberate decision, I just picked one that seemed interesting from a list. That's what people recommended: find a small instance, don't go to the big ones. Well now I don't know what the instance was called, so I can't log back in because I don't know how to find it again.

When I went to try Lemmy I made of point of signing up for the biggest, most popular, instance, and I can use it in a straight forward way without worrying too much about federation. In general though Lemmy has been much more straightforward than Mastodon, which I gave up on after about 3 days, and then never used again because I couldn't remember where I had registered.

This is super frustrating.

bluesky literally requires an INVITE to join.

This could not be easier.

People are educated to not learn too much.

I've gotten really tired of repeating this to people. The fediverse is, to an end user, very simple. Just imagine the days of old forums, but your account for your main forum works in most other places and all the feeds are unified. Super simple.

UX needs work, but it's still miles better than traditional forums.

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

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