The fundamental problem there is that. Finding people and following them is one click on twitter, on mastodon it’s a whole busy thing. I can’t stand it
I just read through my feed, and if I find people that look interesting I click the follow button, it’s not like it’s hard, I have a really interesting feed full of cool stuff.
My Mastodon feed is filled with complete garbage and I’m not even in a small instance. It’s all people talking about what they ate or about subjects I don’t care about, people posting in languages I don’t speak, and bot accounts for small news sites I also don’t care about. It’s very hard to find useful content there.
You can’t be following the right people then, I have tons of people speaking the 3 languages that I know well, talking about interesting and fun stuff, sharing things they learned and cool things they made. It’s all about curating your feed.
That’s the thing though, I can’t find anyone interesting to follow in the first place. I never was much of a Twitter user honestly, but I still decided to give Mastodon a shot. Maybe it’s just not for me.
I don’t know what stuff you are interested in, and yeah, it’s not a platform with algorithms that will push stuff that the site thinks that you will like on you, so you’ll have to do some work to find people you like. If you tried mastodon.social or some other humongous instance that doesn’t really have a culture itself also it makes the whole thing more difficult, joining something like mastodon.art or hachyderm.io or some other one with an a bit more focused theme will usually be a bit better for getting started since your local feed will not be so random.
I guess you’re looking at the global feed? I haven’t used that since my first few days. I’d start following people and using the Home feed. Then you’re not getting the everything-firehose.
Probably? Admittedly I’ve only used it on Tusky, the Android app, and not much on desktop. It has a single feed which it calls “Local”, which I assume is activity from the same instance I’m on. I’ll give that a try on desktop.
Sure, but I never had that experience. I just read along and then tried to sub to Charles Stross but he was on another instance and then I had to do some convoluted thing which is supposed to make sense - I never found that the thing was transparent and functional. Like I said, Lemmy works because the main thing isn’t following people. The occasional hiccup with instances is not a problem at all. But don’t get me wrong, it’s not really difficult to use mastodon, it just makes my blood boil
If I find someone from another instance in my flow I don’t need to do anything other than click on them and click follow. As long as you search from your instance, and not somewhere externally you can just follow them. Also the process when it’s not your home server it’s just a box where you enter your user name, not really convoluted. So I don’t see what you’re getting so worked up about to be honest.
Sure lemmy is easy in that way, and if you like it more by all means just use it :) Nothing stopping you from that, but you are playing up non issues as “infuriating”
I think the annoying part of this is when you stumble across an interesting account you would like to follow outside of your home instance. You have to copy the username and the instance address, search it from your home instance, and then follow them. Or, login from a popup window and then hit follow. Nothing too complicated or long, but I can see how some people see it as unnecessarily clunky. No idea how it works from mobile though, maybe it’s a little bit more complicated there too
Yeah, sure it’s a bit of a hassle, but it’s not like it’s complex or difficult, that’s what I meant compared to how often I do it it has not been an issue, after you have bootstrapped with a couple of follows, and keep an eye on the local feed it’s pretty easy to get rolling, and then just following interesting people that the people you talk with boost, or people that you enjoy discussing with. I haven’t added someone from a search in years, it’s just a bit of work in the beginning.
Well it seems a whole lot of people are playing issues up - it’s a small thing but it really matters. And I’m just saying what my experience is, no big deal - I prefer this sort of place anyway :) But I think I saw somebody made a browser extension which is supposed to solve the random instance thing, so that it always forces you back to yours or something
Not hard to understand at all. If you’ve ever used SSO to log into sites with your Facebook, Google, Apple, whatever account, it should feel kind of similar.
It doesn't matter what "instance" you sign up for with email, you'll get all mail. But just the email for YOU. If you pick federated on Mastodon you get half a billion messages a minute and none of them are for you.
But that’s how twitter works too, so the concept wouldn’t be alien if you’ve used twitter before. I actually was pretty confused by how you’re supposed to use twitter when I first used it (how do you follow a conversation between multiple people, how do you find people in a certain field, etc).
I would argue that mastodon has a huge advantage over either email or twitter since it doesn’t bring any new ideas, it’s just a combination of things that people have been using for a while. It just “fixes” twitter, it shouldn’t have been centralized in the first place.
No, Twitter has an algorithm. As much as people hate them, algorithms are what make social media actually interesting. 99.99% of creators I follow on TikTok (for example) I would have never ever found if all I had was a chronological feed of messages.
Possibly an extreme take, but have you seen everything you need to see? As in, is there no need for you to discover and learn about new things, concepts, ideas, people? Sure, you can hope that something interesting pops up on your chronological page, but that’s a 1 in a million chance. You might say “just search for that new thing”, but that’s antithetical to discovery. How can I search for something I didn’t know existed? How many movies, games, books would I have missed out on without at least some algorithmic help?
For reference, I was around for the time of the forums too. It’s not the downfall of society to not have algorithmic recommendations, but it absolutely decreases discoverability of new interesting things, and conversely, the dissemination of important ideas. Sure, I knew about communism etc. before I started using TikTok. But only there did the algorithm give me great creators that explained stuff in an understandable way. Only there did I find out about coops, from an actual coop owner(?).
Going to play devil’s advocate and say this is similar to the early days of e-mail, and e-mail has since matured quite a bit. Normal users don’t need to worry about the intricacies of IMAP or POP3 or SMTP in general.
Idk, I wasn’t really around in those early days, but it’s my guess that the experience wasn’t as turnkey as it is now.
Similarly, we’re in the early days of the fediverse, and while it’s not as complicated as the aforementioned example, I do believe the experience is going to get more and more streamlined as time goes on, just as it did with email.
At the moment I’m just glad they don’t charge for use the way old email did, and in some cases, still do
Hey sorry I deleted my comment b/c I realized it was basically the same as the top comment. But since you replied, what I said was: “Anyone who claims the Fediverse is hard… just ask them if they use email. Is that hard?”.
And yea to be fair, it’s not just federation that makes it hard. There are still some missing features that could smooth over the complexities of federation.
I know it’s hard for tech literate people to understand but choosing a server is daunting. Most people chose their email because it was linked to a service they were already familiar with like Google and Microsoft. There’s no familiarity with the Lemmy or mastodon instances and there are so many of them that people who already have trouble learning new technologies get to deal with decision fatigue on top of that. People like what is familiar and having a service that mostly works the same is still very confusing for them.
That’s what bothers me about these sorts of threads. We represent a completely self-selected group of people who have not just managed to create accounts on the Fediverse, but then decided to stick around.
Of course we think it’s simple.
We do not represent “typical users” (whatever that means) of mainstream platforms, and yes, Mastodon, Lemmy etc. have a lot of work ahead of them to make themselves appealing to those users.
It doesn’t really help to talk about how simple the Fediverse is, or to shame people who find it confusing. The only thing that will actually help take it mainstream is UX work to remove the friction and make it as simple to use as we claim it is.
I agree that UX work is important but the current state that mastodon UX is in is ready for the masses. It is simple. It will just take some time for people to wrap their heads around it, just like it took time for people to adopt email, facebook, twitter, etc. UX friction isn’t the reason your grandma isn’t using mastodon right now. These things don’t happen overnight.
It’s not that simple. Twitter and email are both just as complicated yet they enjoy mass adoption. You and I run into walls because we’re not accustomed to it. When you were new to other tech I’m sure you ran into similar walls.
This meme has to die. Federated services are not some black magic.
I would have replied to this earlier, but my Lemmy instance was unexpectedly down…
Federated services are cool. They’re not black magic, but they have their own issues that still need to be handled better for there to be mass adoption.
Every day, though, these federated platforms are being developed. Different users have different thresholds for what they’re willing to put up with, and slowly but surely, more and more people are going to be within the expanding bubble of acceptability.
I am tech literate and even for me the choice of “which instance to register on” delayed my Lemmy sign up for 2 weeks. I eventually just signed up on 3 of them but now I have 3 different accounts each with their own set of subscriptions and favorites.
Aside from that, the Lemmy UI is a usability disaster and needs an overhaul. I’ve been thinking of giving that a try but I already have other projects that are taking up all my free time at the moment.
The “which instance to join” thing is the worst for me. People here are claiming at the same time that “it doesn’t matter because fediverse” and “it does matter because you need to find one that you agree with their stance/philosophy/admin-decisions”.
I was thinking that for this to work, each instance should had a mandatory landing page with the “about us”, but this is not a solution either. How do you know that the instance has competent sysadmins? I’ve seen instances with exposed logs with IPs, private info etc. Its impossible to know and its literally roulette.
I have ended up having a different account in different intsance in each of my devices, which I actually enjoy tbh but claiming “just sign up” is bullshit. I may even sign up in one that the admin decides to shut down tomorrow. If I don’t know the risks of randomly selecting an instance it is almost certain that something will happen that will piss me off.
Even Lemmy has people saying they don’t understand it’s complexity when it’s literally the same steps. it’s honestly exhausting how little effort people are willing to put in basic technology.
The perfect platform is one that has great UI, broad functionality, and is just complicated enough to keep out the low hanging fruit. I feel like keeping the barrier of entry just high enough that we don’t end up with as many debate perverts and shit talkers as Reddit is preferable.
It's not "basic technology". It's easy to find somewhere to get an email account, but you're not going to find a Lemmy instance on Facebook or in an advert or at work. And Email doesn't usually say "we don't like that instance anymore so you won't get any more messages from there, so you have to sign up to something else" (see Beehaw).
The problem is y'all are tech savvy and have no idea what it's like to not be tech savvy. Hell, my wife is a goddamn computer scientist and can't handle this stuff.
But Lemmy IS harder to use than alternatives, that’s just irrefutable. If I have a Reddit Account, I can interact with any Reddit content in any sub, directly. I don’t have to find the version of that post in my instance, DIRECT ACTION.
Sometimes I feel like a federated login (think Google OAuth style) would be far superior to just federating content.
But a central authentication authority would be antithetical to the federated platform ethos. If the central authority goes under or goes rogue, everyone on the platform is boned. The goal of federation is to avoid exactly that.
Yes, which makes the system harder to use, ergo all the comments from normies. There are obvious advantages to federation, but I wish people stopped pretending there aren’t any trade-offs.
Honestly, it could be a UX solution, that doesn’t need a fundamental change in federation. I can already post as myself to lemmy.ml, even though my account isn’t there. So a solution that transparently does exactly that, but while I’m browsing the lemmy.ml instance should be possible. Somewhat similar to how following people on Mastodon on different instances opens a popup for login, then follows them. Honestly, even just an easier/automated way to map from <Post on Lemmy.ml> to <Copy of that Post on Feddit.de> would help. Currently, it’s all instance specific IDs. If posts/comments/etc had a similarly global ID system as communities there’d be a lot less problems. Visiting that post would simply mean replacing the host part of the URL, something a browser plugin could take care of.
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
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.
While decentralisation has advantages, the fediverse will probably have to learn the hard way that from a user perspective, without a layer on top that polishes the UX experience, it’s a net negative unless you’re a nerd and interested in it for its own sake. It’s a classic case of tech people making something that works for them and not for others.
The parts of the fediverse that are truly valuable IMO …
FOSS platforms,
diversity and experimentation of platforms and UXs and communities (all of which feed on each other IMO)
Freedom for the user to chose and create spaces and interfaces in the ecosystem, which again comes from the above, but is something the fediverse is struggling with. Overall the user is a second class citizen on the fediverse and there is insufficient glue between the pieces for them to come together as a cohesive whole for the user.
The fragmentation that occurs as a consequence of this decentralised way of conducting social media is probably going to be the natural state of the fediverse for years to come. By its very nature, being decentralised, federated instances are not going to amass hundreds of thousands or millions of users from all (most) walks of life, and only appeal to those with a certain type of mind with nerdy, freedom-centric, and dedicated tendencies. By its very design, it’s not going to catch on most people.
And it wouldn’t have been a problem at all if accounts, their history, content, identity, relationships and reputation were seamlessly migrateable between instance. Whatever happens, you could just migrate to your own personnal instance.
But right now, while you can copy your old bulk text, you basically lose everything from what little of a migration you could even do.
All relationships are lost and you start back at square one. And that’s what makes choosing the right server important and that’s what bounces people right off mastodon and lemmy.
And it also drives re-centralization because one way to side step the problem is “just join the biggest instance”
I mean, both Mastodon and Lemmy have picked up enough steam that I don’t miss the corporate platforms.
The question is, do we even want the normal people? Their tech illiteracy is what lead to those other platforms being privacy nightmares to begin with.
Pretty much how it has been for me for both lemmy and mastodon. I think I went to the sign up page for mastodon several times in the days that it was blowing up, and I just didn’t know what server to pick, and even when was at the point of “I will just join one” I still had issues picking one because a lot of the site names sounded untrustworthy, or like specializing in a community I am not really part of. Like the one I ended up on gave me vibes of being for people into astrophysics.
I am also not sure if people would read the rules pages, but more skim them for keypoints in maybe 30 seconds. Think went that route with lemmy that I skimmed the rule of a potential instance and saw the rules and went “nope, not for me” and was back to step 1. Though this time I was more familiar with the rodeo and have made more users on more instances
Depends on whose grandma. My own nice sweet grandma returned to life for some reason? Sure! Somebody’s deranged racist grandma who used to bring casseroles to the local neofascist meeting? No thanks!
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.
I had students (at university!) who, instead of starting the program, would either go through the whole process of downloading and installing the program or at least start the installer and installing it again each time they wanted to start the program.
My brother is a grown-up with a degree in finance and his own company and he also isn’t able to do this.
He also refuses to understand that the photos he took with his phone are actual files on his phone. When he got a new phone and transferred his phone number he didn’t understand why the photos didn’t magically appear on the new phones camera app as well. (I think he was confused because he also uses Google Drive.)
I saw numbers from some study about tech and people’s relationships with it or whatever and it’s insane how many people think Facebook is the entire internet now that they’ve had that integrated browser for so long. It’s just all they ever learned of technology, magic rectangle go to Facebook.
I understand not being “tech savvy,” a “hobbyist,” whatever - but I can’t fathom not bothering to consider how something I use daily works AT ALL. I hate cars but I learned enough to understand how to tentatively diagnose a problem and handle minor maintenance myself, but some people take their car to the dealer like 4x a year instead.
Their voices are missing online simply because they are basically tech illiterate. And I think that is a huge problem.
I’ve seen a number of polls on the age demographics on the fediverse, and they’ve all been pretty consistent … the fediverse is basically on average a Xennial place with a surprising amount of Boomer. There are younger folks, of course, more so on lemmy/kbin than mastodon it seems (which is interesting).
But generally, in line with your comment, there’s a generational filter here that attracts those who remember the value of and how to use the old internet and old computers.
Which, if you think there’s value in what the fediverse is trying to do (free our expression and ownership on the internet), is a problem. Another way of looking at it is that the failure of allowing big-private-monopoly-social platforms to dominate for so long^1^ will have long lasting side effects including the erasure of what the internet can be in many people’s understanding of the world.
[1]: I’d estimate 2008-2023 as the era of dominant big social, where the closing year of 2023 may be too early or even open ended. That’s 14 years. Which, if we take the web as having started in 1993, and being ~30 years old, is about half the age of the internet. So, it’s a decently objective approximation, then, to say that the web is Facebook etc, especially as the relevance of older things fades. Which only amplifies the harm we allowed to transpire.
Also … check it out … lemmy can do footnotes!! Click the view source button to see how I did it if you’re interested.
Yes. Sorry if it seems I was distorting your message. I was just trying to draw a connection between different kinds of tech literacy and familiarity and how that might track with the demographics here and the history of mainstream tech.
That more young people than you would expect are missing from places like Lemmy I blame mostly on smartphones and tablets.
Over the last decades the numbers of students who own PCs/Laptops have dropped. When I first worked as a lecture assistant for computational statistics that was around 2011 almost every student had a PC or laptop and knew how to use it (to a different extent between them, of course).
The course is once a year, has about 90 students each time and, since it’s about statistics, there is a mix of students from different fields. Most are from STEM fields, a few from social science or psychology. I could basically watch tech literacy deteriorate over the years.
This years course had only a third of people in it who actually use a PC/Mac outside of the course. There was not a single person who uses Linux this year. For the university’s lecture platform or for online lectures they use their phone, tablet or a tablet computer which runs Android or iOS.
78 % of them did never write a line of code in their lifes, or so they say. The ones who did say they have programming experience often only had one of these “Learning to Code” Apps on their phones.
Most of them need extensive instruction and hand holding to install the programs we use (which is R and RStudio). You do not want to imagine how it is to teach these students basic coding in R. It is both my biggest joy and my biggest sorrow. The stories I could tell…
I highly doubt many of these students would find their way to the Fediverse. They do not think about privacy or freedom online because they are disconnected from the online world, in a way. They are simply consumers who do not feel as a part of it.
Reminds me of one time I was running a course in how to user git for uni students. Setting people up at the beginning, getting them just to install GitHub desktop, and someone puts their hand up having trouble installing the app. I get to them and see an iPad in the desk. Sighs, I explain that’s not going to work (maybe it does now?). They don’t understand why, because they can install so many other apps. I convinced them eventually. Not that I blame them, but it was interesting to see the user friendliness of a device basically block them from doing things and even understanding how that was happening.
For many with laptops, the course often became a gateway to the terminal and not finding it scary any more.
Hot take though, the unvetted exe downloads of Windows is why it gets such a bad rep for viruses. We really so need more of a repository system like Linux has. Normal people can’t be trusted to install their own software
Microsoft tried, they have the Windows Store and certain programs push you to use it, but UWP is an absolute disaster both from a user and a developer perspective so nobody wants that.
Microsoft took a good idea (software repositories) and turned it into a bad idea (software repository controlled by microsoft and you’re not allowed to add/install/validate other repositories).
They could have built (hell, even USED) apt, but they built Store.
I’m sure it’s not lack of technical skill it’s a mental block, I’ve helped so many people set up software that is literally clicking ok a dozen times then they’re like ‘oh let me print this, hang on I need to compile a firmware update and flash it using a telegraph key…’ big brands have the shittiest software, but people feel they should be able to understand because it’s professional but something like an open source federated social network is nerd stuff so they feel the the shouldn’t be able to.
Case in point, I installed MPV on a friends laptop because VLC wouldn’t play the file without crashing, the install process is super simple but they have green on black hacker terminal output instead of a process bar and you type Y when prompted instead of clicking yes – it gave her anxiety just watching me do it, said maybe we should try uninstalling VLC and reinstalling instead… Of course mpv played the video flawlessly and used less CPU and ram doing so which warmed her to it. There’s no way she couldn’t have understood everything and done it herself but the fact it’s not as corporate as VLC would have written it off (and wow that’s a crazy thing to say, I love that there’s so much great open source software that VLC is middle of the road)
Definitely, some people have some weird kind of anxiety when it comes to this. I think in many cases they believe they aren’t intelligent enough to get it and that only really intelligent people can understand these things.
It is the same in math. It has this aura of being super out there. And, let’s be honest, it seems like some people in tech fields try to uphold that notion.
I try so hard to show people how to do things themselves when they ask me to help them with various tech…whatever, and almost universally get told “no.”
Magic rectangle take me to Facebook, if it doesn’t I need someone to make the magic rectangle take me to Facebook, and I refuse to understand it any further.
Which is funny because if you open the App Store and search for Mastodon you’ll find an app you can install and will prompt you to create an account and login.
Yes it will default to mastodon.social or whatever but that’s a fine default.
Folks that say it’s too hard just don’t even want to try.
I’ll add to this that most people don’t understand the difference between a service and a client. Yes, even though they use email, to them it’s just “my gmail” and they don’t think past that. They don’t know you can use different clients, or the web. They just don’t. It’s an app on their phone.
The reason the internet was so great in the early 2000s is that THOSE PEOPLE WERENT ON IT.
I’ve had the most confusing conversation when a relative referred to their browser (Chrome) as “Google” (which to me means the search engine or the company, not the browser). It was only when they later mentioned Firefox as an alternative to Google that I realized what they were talking about.
Same thing when people complain about how difficult it is to sign up for a Lemmy instance. You click sign up and fill out the form, if that’s difficult for you I’m sorry you’ve never used your brain before. It’s like Neo waking up from the Matrix.
Congratulations, you have just chosen the “wrong” instance. What does “wrong” mean? We won’t tell you, and you have no way of knowing until Bad Stuff happens to you.
That is still enough friction to prevent people from signing up. I didn’t sign up for a long time because trying to choose a server felt overwhelming. It wasn’t until they allowed more sign ups at mastodon.social that I gave it another try.
Therein lies the problem. A lot of people already get decision fatigue trying to choose a server and don’t get past the sign up. Assuming that they are still willing to try and use a third party app, you get to layer finding a good app that works reliably on top of that and learning how to use the app which will be significantly different from the website. There comes a point where it’s not tech illiteracy but a lack of time and interest spending hours how to use a service that is much harder to get into than its competitors.
It seems to be an error with sign-ups through the app, I had the same issue with several different servers, but was able to create an account on their website and then log in through the app.
Even without it, the server navigation and selection (and no option to migrate your userdata) makes the sign up process a problem not worth solving for many… A lot of people will just off-hand decide they don’t really care, and leave. (This kind of onboarding is not sustainable of we want this fediverse to become a long-term fully fledged Reddit alternative, and not just another Voat with a lower percentage of racists.)
P.P.S: Also, apparently Mastodon was mostly Mark Ruffalo tweets (toots? the logo is an elephant, I think?), which are fine but uninteresting.
I had to get used to it, but then again, I never really used Twitter. I'm not a big fan of Mastodon (the format) but I really do like kbin. I was a reddit user, and this is much more familiar. Nice that it's all really just the same thing just presented in different ways and of course, no single entity controls the whole thing. 😊👍
Not everybody uses social media the same way and some people need instant exposure to the community to get a better start. It doesn't help that these types of posts just make people feel like they're stupid.
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.
Social media is not social media any more. It's a one way stream of thinly coated commercials and political propaganda, behind a veil of interaction so that people feel some false sense of agency over the whole thing. In the ideal scenario, everything is perfectly tailored to targeted groups so that the whole experience feels very "engaging".
When people say the fediverse is hard, what I suspect they mean is that they don't manage to make it addictive in the same way.
People leaving Twitter are slaves looking for a new master or junkies looking for a new high. Using Mastodon as a Twitter replacement is hard in the same way it's hard to use commercial-grade glue as a substitute for heroin.
Hey I find Lemmy and Mastodon addictive enough. Then again I still use mainstream platforms too. Mainly because their are things I want to look at and people I folloe that haven’t or won’t move over.
I don't use mainstream platforms much (other than direct messaging), and was pretty fine with Mastodon. I'm finding Kbin a bit too addictive though, maybe especially because I never really used Reddit in the first place.
I find it quite funny that so many people came from Twitter, didn’t have content instantly fed to them and were like “what do I do???” you mean I have to find things myself? the horror!
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