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Reddit - Shoots itself in the foot while decapitating the other because reasons
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Twitter - Shoots itself in the foot and decapitates itself
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Facebook/Instagram/Threads - Huge identity Crisis
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Telegram - Sells itself out
What a world.
https://archive.is/LQsdz Non-paywalled link.
I don’t even understand what’s difficult about mastodon or lemmy. Just pick a server forget about it and enjoy the better communities
So, I don’t use Mastodon for the same reason I never used Twitter (I don’t need a microblog and I’d rather read other people’s regular-sized blogs), but point 2 sounds like a problem. How do you decide who to follow, when you’re working from a blank slate? I presume you need to see several of someone’s posts before you can know if you’d like to follow them, so if Mastodon doesn’t show you any posts by default how do you get started?
@noodlejetski @qooqie https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt I read article and can say I understand many problems listed there. If you join Biggest instance then sure you won’t encounter some of the listed problems, but federation isn’t about joining biggest. Not intuitive UI also big factor, why greeting message don’t tell Use #Hello #Привет or other language for first message? People don’t understand/know about search being specific to # add to that bombardment with tips… Fediverse is bad for newcomer.
I think it’s an “analysis paralysis” problem. I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out what instance to join while worrying about what was “right” (of course an incorrect question), what “fit” my inclinations/preferences, will it be around in X time, who are the mods, don’t want to centralize on just one instance, until I just bit the bullet.
I’m reminded of how Job’s late-90’s mass simplification of the Apple product line made it easier for consumers to just pick something. (general or pro user? laptop or desktop? boom, done.)
Comes to mind that mastodon.social is open to everyone, it doesn’t get more obvious than that.
Seems like people are more stumped by the idea of having to pick than with what that actually entails. Even as far as following people goes, it’s as simple as an email address, and mastodon searches usernames in other instances.
I believe if more people avoided bringing up instances and just said "make an account on mastodon.social ", most of these complaints of how complicated it is would disappear.
In the early nineties the term “droolproof” was, well, if not popular then at least existant. “Droolproof” instructions would be something like “do not expose your laser printer to open fire or flame”.
Mastodon needs droolproof instructions. A private company like Twitter creates a series of gates for users to jump through and rigs things on the back end to make it so that people are unable to screw up too much. It’s like a Fisher-Price chainsaw versus the actual chainsaw of Mastodon.
It’s easy to forget how many people are active on social media who have never read a manual or a FAQ or who even know how to google very well, or at all. It’s a huge proportion. Twitter serves them all by being, well, what it is. People give up their privacy and data patterns in exchange for a corporation making the experience droolproof.
There needs to be a youtube of some photogenic person happily showing how to use it. Srs. If we want to kill Elmos Fascist Tea Party we need that.
What’s difficult?
So I’m on both and I work in tech. I’m technically capable, e.g. I verified my Mastodon account with my website. Neither Mastodon not Lemmy is anywhere near ready for non technical users.
Mastodon
Hell of a job picking an instance. Confusing to log in because I have to remember the instance not the service. Instance is all local stuff, global stuff is by default garbage.
I signed up to Mastodon a few months back. Most of the people I followed on Twitter didn’t. Not surprising really given how confusing and complicated it is. I chose a server because someone I followed recommended it. I found most people posting less and less frequently, apart from the instance admin, they seemed to post books worth every singled day and I had to mute them. Then it got really quiet and I saw something about the server admin stepping down. At which point I learned that due to some ridiculous drama involving something the admin of my mastodon instance apparently said that some other instance admin didn’t like, the whole instance/domain was ‘silenced’. In other words ‘the hell with you’ to me because of something I wasn’t even aware of, let alone involved with. Absolutely childish that something like that can even happen, and even better, it seems people often can’t figure out how to make it 'un-happen’.
None of this covers mobile app issues
At this point mastodon has failed as an alternative to Twitter for me. There’s about 3 non-twitter-repost-bot posters left in my feed, all either second rate or also posting the same on twitter.
Lemmy
A bit better than Mastodon but comparable issues with picking an instance. Dscoverability is slightly better because I can search for topics. I’ve had to create a login on a second instance because my first pick, and then my second pick, both:
- De-Federated a number of other instances
- Were de-federated but a number of other instances
- Have been suffering repeated uptime issues due to DDOS
So now I’m on my 3rd Lemmy login and I spent half an hour yesterday using someone’s python script to back up my subs and resubscribe with my next account…
None of this covers mobile app issues
Overall
It’s close, really close, and it could work but it’s tough on Lemmy and missing on Mastodon
Because it’s hard for non techie users to even understand what the word instance means. It’s not a concept you encounter in everyday life.
And then without a broad algorithm that curate your feed, most users get confused on how to manage their communities across the fediverse.
Because it’s hard for non techie users to even understand what the word instance means. It’s not a concept you encounter in everyday life.
I think you encounter the concept pretty often in your life: every time you go to Walmart (or every other chain shop) you basically are ecountering an instance of the company, for example
People are just not thinking about it
Mostly “Mastodon is too hard” is an excuse people make because they just don’t like it and/or dislike the Fediverse in general and don’t want people to move there.
I ‘interrogated’ a bunch of people complaining about Mastodon and it was pretty obvious that a lot of them either didn’t like the idea of Twitter replacements and/or were Elon Musk fanboys.
Post.news is where all the twitter journalists went. The folks who are really into journalism seem to love it. Also at first there was plan for micro-transactions because this was going to be the social media that saved newspapers or something. I don’t know if that got implemented fully or not.
The site has always been much smaller than Facebook, and it only mattered because politicians, journalists, and those who currently pass for public intellectuals were using it. Whether you read The New York Times or watched Fox News, you would encounter content that began its life on Twitter.
This article is a big long hot take. Which is fine, it’s kind of entertaining. But yeah if you care what the NYT and Fox News are printing on a daily basis you might feel a little untethered at the moment. Understanding that the two are linked is so close to understanding . . . something.
I hope this keeps up. Nothing would be better than corpo-owned social media dying out.
Very bad for some people like artists in the short term, specially if they haven’t made an account somewhere else yet, but a centralized platform’s eventual decline and death is inevitable to begin with, really. Twitter’s is just happening much faster than expected.
Mastodon really needs to step up its ease-of-use though. For one, the apps should auto-assign users to instances based on their selected interests (letting them change it of course). It also has lots of minor inconveniences like the reply and like counts only showing interactions from your own instance, unlike Lemmy. Both Lemmy and Mastodon also have major discoverability issues right now.
Firefish looks great though, and I hope Bluesky’s protocol makes itself compatible with ActivityPub, even if with a bridge between the two.
