Gasp! I’m not sure you can say that around these parts. Personally I always hated Twitter. I was on there during the Arab spring, and I’m pretty quickly just stopped logging in.
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 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.
For me personally it’s the FOMO, what if the technology board on that instance is that much better than the one. Do I have to sub to 20 of the same boards? Kinda annoying tbh
It would actually be better to share / block comunities across instances instead of duping them and creating this schizophrenia.
The problem is instances were supposed to be specific enough that there wasn’t so much duplication. A gardening instance, a technology instance (even these are broad), a Red Dwarf instance. Not general purpose instances with high duplication. It needed forward planning and instances started from the beginning, even if all run by the same people.
one UX improvement is also in replies. I comment from Mastodon, and because I'm replying to you my post will be federated to feddit.uk but not to your parent comment on feddit.de or the OP on lemmy.ml :|
Do you mean the parent and OP won’t be notified of your comment? If they come back to the post it will all be visible to them, right? I personally think that’s best, but I was a forum user (phpBB, vBulletin) and rarely got notifications.
On Mastodon it tries to @ everyone so I presume that causes everyone to be notified. You can @ people on Lemmy too I think.
It’s like each server is it’s own reddit and that server can have it’s own subreddits. You can start a subreddit (community) with the same name on two different servers even.
The weirdness is, each server can talk to the other one so it doesn’t matter which one you are a member of. You can see all of them.
Until you start dealing with defederation. People on Beehaw don’t see posts from lemmy.world and lemmy.world gets no updated posts from Beehaw. You don’t really want to join a server that’s siloed off from other servers involuntary. The users then have to go out of their way to content, especially if they like to use /all
I think people are getting less tech literate not understanding instances as servers and just thinking of centralized social media just smartphone clients, and the reason of the Reddit exodus happened just because blocking third party clients.
To be honest, I’m not tech illiterate and still struggle with Mastodon. I struggle to search/find stuff to follow outside of my local server. I know it’s there and doable, but it should be obvious on how to find what I want to follow. If I struggle even a little bit with this, the average casual user, which these platforms will need for long term success, won’t even bother.
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 think this is a decent take. Maybe certain trusted servers can opt to be “default” servers and new users signing up on mastodon’s default homepage are round-robbin’d into them. This can create a large burden of moderation on servers that opt into this, but it would be well worth it to turn mastodon into a user-friendly platform
Sounds like a good way. I have to admit, signing up for mastodon was a confusing mindfuck, and I’m not anything close to tech-illiterate as a reporter, and it’s mainly because of the process. It’s seriously crippled adoption.
people -> create content -> engages (including share) -> bring people -> create
same! I’m super tech-literate and I had real trouble choosing a server. and before that I had trouble understanding exactly what it meant (though the email analogy goes a long way). And of course I ended up regretting the server I chose and am in the process of migrating 😓
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 :)
Most people outside mainstream social media such as here tend to forget that 99% of the population are normies. Normies are tech-lazy. The technologies need to work like a microwave. It’s easy, it works and users don’t care about the underlying tech.
I’ve been a developer for over a decade and I can say for sure I’m tech lazy. Not ‘normies’(wetf that means) nor anyone else should waste their time on tasks that could’ve been automated.
If you came here, it is not because you are interested in the underlying protocol, you came here since it is a social media.
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.
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.
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.
You can create Lists. They are essentially different Home Feeds. You can add any account you follow to any list. There is also a “Hide these posts from home” setting for each list, so if you have a certain account you want to follow but don’t want in your Home Feed (eg. it posts too often), you can put it in it’s own List and exclude it’s posts from the Home Feed.
Journalists are just going to go where the most people are because it’s their job to self-promote.
Then they should go to as many places as possibe. It’s a shame that there isn’t more included by/like press.coop. And easier tools to post to multiple platforms at the same time.
I like that I can follow people from my niche hobbies list+pros from the field I want to be active in. Averege users are so jaded and will complain for every network error they encounter. Don’t get me wrong, people flock where the action is, they will learn how to do stuff on the fediverse just as they learned fb or other social media. I kinda dread those times, but I refuse to just gatekeep.
I don’t know about news, I wish I could help you with that. I think there might be more news sources on Mastodon as the recent migration from centralized social medias occured, but I’m not sure. It can sound like an echo chamber, I relate to that, but feed curation is what drives your main page.
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