If we ignore the notion whether it should, what would make the Fediverse or Mastodon easier to approach for the majority of people? Getting rid of tech talk around the platform? Better, world class user interface? Somehow dismantling the whole domain and server structure? Just calling it Mastodon as one service instead of a Mastodon instance with domain, obfuscating it somehow? Just focusing on mastodon.social and ignore the rest? Acting as centralized service on the outside? Making it seamless via features and improvements? Is there any silver bullet?
I am not against the current state of things, on the contrary. Just curious and trying to think outside this box… of instances and other techy stuff. Could it even be easier to comprehend, or do we just have to continue educating people on the matter?
Personally, I feel many ordinary (read non-tech) people get confused when they want to join "Mastodon", but they find out there's no such thing, it's just thousands of "instances" with weird names, and they have to choose one. Would it be possible to create a unified Mastodon User Account Creation Experience, where people feel they create a Mastodon account and maybe select some interests by which their instance would be selected automatically? Not sure.
@rolle Some way to much more quickly have an interesting feed. Following thousands of accounts manually over the course of weeks to cull later is laborious. Maybe the ability to click an interesting user and choose to follow all their follows would be a way to kickstart it?
@rolle I don't think we should hide the decentralized nature of the Fediverse. As @atomicpoet keeps saying, it's sort of the whole selling point here. It's not an inherently difficult concept to understand, as long as you don't go into the technical details. It's important that users be aware of how the federation affects their user experience and how they can take advantage of it. Explaining this, in human terms, should be a part of the onboarding process.
@rolle Get rid of all the people currently inhabiting the fediverse. Then pay Taylor Swift huge amounts of money to move to mastodon.social. Convince brands and influencers they should move there too.
That would probably make the service "popular". For a while at least.
Sort of like Meta's Threads.
Currently, most of fedi is inhabited by techbros, Linux and FOSS people.
@apkoponen@rolle
This is what I have been kind of longing for, as all algorithm is not bad. I would NOT like the kind that FB and X are pushing that basically push controversy and polarisation (as a result of emphasizing interaction and some other issues), but not going outside your own followed accounts / hashtags.
Kind of what can already be found in web interface under # Selaa / Julkaisut (Using in Finnish, so don't know what that is in English).
@rolle As per @mastodonusercount new registrations are trickling in evey day and we're currently at 14+ million users. With every decision Musk makes, more will sign up. A steady source of new users for years to come.
In the meantime, working on the targets in the official mastodon roadmap would help a lot.
As would moving things into the admin webinterface and out of direct file edits on the server, which is a barrier and for many not even an option.
@rolle I think what people want is content out of the box, which means some algorithm showing stuff. The lack of such is also what makes Mastodon good for most current users.
Mastodon is not complicated, but requires a bit of effort to show its worth. Us nerds talking about federation and ActivityPub also doesn't help.
@oranki@rolle It doesn’t have to mean an algorithm. Another option is to include an onboarding step where users select some hashtags to follow, which would immediately populate their timeline with posts.
That uses existing features and posting norms (of putting hashtags in posts), so it plays to a strength of Mastodon.
@oranki@rolle And on the topic of not using technical terms, I probably wouldn’t even use the word ‘hashtags’, I’d just say “Choose up to 5 topics to follow.” And in smaller font below it “You can follow more later, and can unfollow a topic at any time”.
The ‘topics’ would be shown with hashtags, so anybody who knows what a hashtag is would recognise what’s happening.
@Brendanjones@rolle I agree. I have to say the times I tried Twitter, there wasn't really anything interesting showing up for my initially either. Perhaps the underlying issue is really just an image problem of Mastodon? People think it requires some advanced knowledge, so they are primed to not like it? WRT Twitter, that made me quit it pretty fast too.
On a slightly more bleak perspective, a lot of users still want services to do that automagically, they're not interested in how exactly that automagic happens :)
@oranki@rolle Yes indeed wrt getting Twitter showing you content you’re actually interested in. I think Twitter is way harder to customise because it’s always pushing clickbait/outrage/drama posts. Exactly what I don’t want to see. You really have to follow the right people to get the feed you want.
But Twitter is what people are used to, so if a service doesn’t work like that it’s “difficult”.
@rolle I’m pretty sure quite a large portion of people actually want to be marketed to, and Mastodon will never offer a satisfactory experience to them.
@rolle identify the audience more specifically than majority of people. Then you can ask what they find valuable and then see what gaps are for them and what their value proposition is for the platform and audience and then decide on features that make sense. Categorically, I'd say supporting administrative and moderation tools before they are needed is a good way to retain users when they come. Also, thanks for all you do.
@rolle at first I did think that inspiration could be taken from the IRC network architecture, but after spending a bit of time here looking at some of the "discussions" between instance admins I've come to the conclusion that it would only work for individual server scalability rather than at a larger scale on the fediverse, so you end up circling back around to centralization.
That said, I suspect the fediverse may effectively take on that appearance, but with more pronounced fracture lines.
@rolle Good questions and thoughts, Roni. Why limit tech talk? That would be one of many topics people discuss here. I talk tech here sometimes, but also photography, environment, design, politics, and human rights. My personal preference is to only limit hateful, racist, and bigoted speech. Let’s show others how to behave as a civilized society. We can agree and disagree - but make Mastodon zero tolerance for voicing racism, bigotry, and hate. That’s my dream, anyway.
@KatM I meant to ask should we just tone the tech talk down around the platform when it comes to new users. I mean all about the federation and servers and that… people get easily confused.
@rolle Hmmm, well, if there’s anything I’ve learned about bridging the gap between devs/ engineers and users, it’s to simplify to key points. I’m sure there’s a good way to explain Mastodon and the Fediverse more simply for new users who don’t grok techspeak. But then there should be a developer instance, like there is for news/media, and maybe one for infosec so professionals in those fields can easily share info among themselves without having to ‘dumb it down’ for out-of-industry users.
@KatM@rolle so we need @georgetakei do an audio clip explaining how a post ends up on another instance just like mail to another city while some animator/graphic designer @davidrevoy explains it as pictures.
Key punchline it's simple it's on the background and you don't have to care about it it just happens like email.
Ok, now @Gargron what would it take? I'm serious, not maybe that serious but something should be done.
@rolle Improving the official instance UI and app UX would probably help a lot, as well as improving the performance of the official instance.
I remember when I first tried to get into the fediverse I joined the official server and was a bit put off by the performance, and the old style.
Also, the way to interact with stuff from remote instances is probably too confusing for an average user (think "why is it asking me for an instance? what even is that? im on mastodon!").
@rolle just my take, but i think with new users, there’re new winds of eagerness to address issues with the fediverse to make it more welcoming & appealing to get people to migrate from corporate social media, but the more i think about it, as our collective conditions' deterioration accelerates and our situations become increasingly dire—approaching what’s better described as survival rather than living—i’m more inclined to encourage everyone thinking about or working on improvements to consider applying that effort to the people local to us.
these technologies could be made useful to help connect people when there’s limited power or cell towers are shut down, and i think it’s up to the people that have this experience & technical aptitude to help get them prepared for when disaster strikes.
@rolle If I were in charge, I'd have new accounts created on a default server that was read-only - that is, you can follow people and read, and perhaps even "like", but you can't post until you move to a "real" server.
That way new users can get started without friction and get a sense of what instances there are and what they're like before they have to commit to one. Obviously this would also require an improved migration experience.
@rolle I haven't gone thru all the replies so hopefully this isn't duplicative. I joined after trying once and giving up, bc a tweet I saw said, "It doesn't matter which instance, and anyway you can change that after you get started. And, get a mobile app that does the UI for you." So then I made the jump, and as you can see I'm still on ~.social but I do plan to move. I also use Ivory almost exclusively to interact; I do occasionally log in directly via browser.
@rolle Then change it, people can't find toots unless the poster remembered to set it up (which is not a straightforward interface for the average user) and then they complain and go back to Birdsite or move to Bluesky.
@chris@rolle It requires multiple screens to navigate. Please have some concern for UI and think why Bluesky's daily signups are a multiple of the entire Fediverse's at this point.
@Alon@rolle Two clicks isn't that much, seems on par with configuration of lots of software. And these days people are pretty drilled to review privacy settings. As for the number of users comparison, as the risk of walking into a "that's what she said" joke it's not the size of the network, it's how interesting it is that matters.
@chris@rolle I don't find this almost entirely American and European space interesting. Neither do global human rights activists elsewhere, who are mostly staying on Twitter; the one I've been following for years tried it here and just moved to Bluesky. They, and I, don't find endless FOSS conversations interesting.
@Alon@rolle Did they leave due to abuse (which should never be tolerated) or because the system just didn’t work out for them? The latter may be unfortunate but does every system need to appeal to every possible user or use case?
@chris@rolle They left because they found the place unwelcoming. It's rarely actual abuse, more like finding the FOSS culture and the "put your experience of other people being racist to you behind a CW" behavior unwelcoming. And you absolutely need to appeal to many use cases, because social networks thrive on scale, and Fedi has abandoned scale and prefers elitist lines like "our users are better" (no you're not) or "our content is better" (at this point, Bluesky > Fedi in Israel analysis).
@Alon@rolle While perhaps not actual abuse I find that behavior pretty rude at best. I've been fortunate enough not to encounter it personally although I've certainly heard of it happening.
As for the scale, I've been coming to the conclusion the "network effect" isn't that critical for non-commercial social networks. I've got close to the same number of followers and followees(?) here as I did on twitter, but I interact with people far more here than I ever did there.
@chris@rolle Yeah, it happens to people who are not white male tech analysts at MIT. The farther away people are from your particular situation, the likelier they are to find this place hostile for all its unspoken rules of conduct (CWs are especially bad). Global human rights activists want to be read by as many people as possible, and are not here; try working on that instead of saying "two clicks isn't that much."
@rolle I honestly do not understand the problem, it is probably about habits of Twitter and Co. I have never used social media before, neither Facebook nor Twitter or anything else and had no idea how it all works with hashtags and co and got along very well with Mastodon within a few days.
Shortly after that I opened my own instance.
Therefore, I think it is more about habits that need to be discarded.
@Tealk@rolle I invite you to consider the fact that given you are capable of setting up your own instance, you have more technical knowledge than 99% of people. Try imagining the Mastodon experience with zero technical knowledge.
@Brendanjones
But the handling has nothing to do with technical knowledge, these are just buttons that you can click and as mentioned before I had no contact with social media at all, so everything was completely new to me.
@rolle What confuses people the most are the instances. There shouldn't be too much talk about them, and people shouldn't bump into quirky phenomenons when using Mastodon because the content they are interacting with is on another instance. For example replies, likes and such should be backfilled to federated posts. And clicking a link to another post shouldn't take you to another website.
And the official UI should be updated, currently it isn't very appealing.
@rolle
Email was hard to understand, people eventually learned how to use it.
I don't see the difference here.
If you rush people into the fediverse they will leave.
We stay because it's our time and we feel the community growing slowly. Make it fast and watch it die.
@rolle UX/UI needs some improvements out the box for sure, but what we also need IMO is for people to STFU about activitypub and decentralization.
Normal people DO NOT CARE lmao. They just want to use a platform.
I have avoided these topics as I introduce people to the platform and tell them "it just works"
We don't explain our entire financial infrastructure when introducing people to a debit card, idk why online guides keep trying to teach activitypub using SMTP as an example ugh lmao
@rolle This is possibly an unhelpful answer, but I think that some of the concepts surrounding Mastodon and the Fediverse just need time to embed themselves in the public mind
It's easy to forget after using it for years, but Twitter is extremely confusing as a new user. Eg. if you're reading a conversation with a retweet you read inside to outside then top to bottom and if you're deep in a comment chain, you should remove unnecessary @s
People are willing to learn if there's a good reason
@rolle I don't think we should be limiting tech talk; but I would encourage the use of hashtags - and educate all users on how to filter things to make #Mastodon easier for them.
For example, I have zero interest in organized sports like hockey, football (either type), baseball, etc, so I have filtered out all those so I never see them and don't waste my time reading them. I can do that because so many people use the hashtags (and it's greatly appreciated).
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