I’d be a lot happier if Mastodon were seeing 1 million new users a day right now, but I’ll take what I can get. Any dent in Twitter’s user base is good. Here’s hoping that experiencing “the Fediverse with training wheels” over at Bluesky will lead to people moving to Mastodon sooner rather than later.
It will not. You have to teach people what federation is while also having an enticing platform. I haven’t seen anyone do that yet. Like Henry Ford said, the masses will just want a faster horse.
Let’s pretend like the fediverse is a car. We’re asking people who’ve never seen a car, and are used to horses, to select the parts and put it together with no manual. But, unless there’s heavy provocation people will not switch from what they’re familiar with.
This was the Reddit API changes for me and many on here. Yet due to Lemmy’s adolescence at the time many didn’t see a good enough platform to migrate to.
I consider myself quite literate with tech, but when I tried Mastodon years ago I couldn’t even figure out how to sign up. They didn’t explain what a server was, what federation is, or why I was unable to login after making an account. And they still do a terrible job at it. Your average person gets confused and gives up.
If I knew anything about development I’d throw together an app that’d walk you through the sign up process. It’s such an easy thing to fix.
I mean, it’s just downloading an app and creating a account for me. I feel like you’re overcooking this a bit.
As someone who would have preferred Mastodon become the more popular service, I completely agree.
Look at mastodon.social and bluesky.app without logging in. Which site seems more interesting to the general public?
Now make an account. If you don’t have a bunch of specific people you want to follow, which has the better new user experience for the general public?
Mastodon looks like it was made by nerds, for nerds, and is populated exclusively by nerds. It’s not nearly as welcoming.
I can’t imagine how much you must have suffered choosing an email client. 🙄
It’s been my experience that people who couldn’t figure out how to join Mastodon are the same people that get so used to doing things one way, that when you introduce a different way, they fall apart. Regardless if they’ve done virtually the same thing with different services.
Mastodon isn’t difficult to sign up for and use. FFS there are people of all ages and tech experiences who figured it out easily. I’ve seen grandmas who only ever used Facebook figure out Mastodon and teens who failed english figure it out. It’s not rocket science. It’s just not what you are used to when signing up for similar services.
I didn’t suffer? I got my email in computer lab when I was a kid. I didn’t have to choose the teacher showed us Gmail. You get an android you’re prompted to create a Gmail. You get an iPhone you’re prompted to create an iCloud.
For your second paragraph that was the entire point of my original comment.
Objectively it’s not difficult in the same way starting a video game isn’t difficult. However, just because some people can learn the controls quickly, doesn’t mean everyone can. See: the video game journalist failing the Cuphead tutorial.
Let’s compare on-boarding processes for Mastodon and BlueSky
How to join Mastodon:
- First pick an instance!
User: What is «instance»?
- Lectures user for 10 min. over what federation is, comparing it to email federation
User: Ok… but what instance should I use?
- You gotta figure that out yourself!
User: picks random instance.
Now one of these things happen
-
Every thing goes well
-
They pick a small instance with almost nobody in it, complain that there is no-one there and leave or the instance gets shut down.
-
They pick an instance centered around something they are not interested because they had no info on what each instance is like other than a small description that doesn’t give you a good idea of what the average post is like.
No matter which one happens, if they stick around, things like this will pop up:
Someone will send them a link to a Mastodon post. They click it, but the link they were send was on another instance as such they are logged out. Thing is, they don’t know what federation is and most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. “Strange”, they think, “I could have sworn I was logged in”. Then they try to log in on the other instance… can’t and get confused and maybe even panic. “Did I just lose my account?”.
Now, with that being said, Email is still an example of a federated platform with mass adoption, and we should use it as an example when explaining the fediverse. But I would like to stress the following point: most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. Go different Email instances and they look distinct. Go to gmail.com and outlook.com and they look distinct enough so that people can intuitively understand that, although they are both email services, their Gmail account is not going to let them log into Outlook.
Mastodon instances on the other hand? They just brand themselves as “Mastodon” and that’s about it. They look identical! Just LOOK:
No wonder people get confused. The big instances NEED to look distinct for this to work. Otherwise, the federation thing will be confusing.
I made a post on asklemmy asking why people were choosing BlueSky over Mastodon and not understanding federation was one of the major pain points.
I’m going to use your car analogy, but tweak it.
People are looking to sell their car and buy a new one. One car acts like their old car; it has automatic transmission and there is a network of mechanics to take the car to in case something breaks.
The other car has a manual transmission. The car requires regular maintenance to do done by the owner like weekly tuning of the timing belt. There aren’t mechanics, but car clubs where people will give you advice on how to fix your car.
in other “too fucking late” news, google searches for “what is fascism” spikes after election
if denial in an individual is a hard thing to overcome, denial with mob mentality is nigh impossible. broke uneducated maga sheep will be standing in a breadline and still not admit they’d been completely fucking hoodwinked by a con man
Haha, let’s be real, there won’t be a bread line in this economy after Trump kills all the non-profits.
At this point Schadenfreude is all I’ve got so I’m going to enjoy the fuck out of it.
There sure is a suspicious push for Bluesky on Lemmy as of late. Interesting.
Why does anyone care what platform others use? They can both burn to the ground for all I care.
I think it’s because X actually does a lot of harm and people want it to fail.
Blue sky definitely seems like the best alternative for an average non technical user.
All social media provides a level of harm. Twitter is not better or worse than Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Twitter is now the most actively harmful with the widest reach, by a large margin
It is categorically worse than the Meta services because they still at least maintain a veneer of moderation.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree they all are bad. But it’s should be the priority of everyone reasonable to end the reach of Twitter ASAP given the damage it’s causing.
Bluesky represents a departure from both X/Twitter and Meta, and should be encouraged. Yes it would be great if everyone was heading to Mastodon, but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
The goal is to make Twitter irrelevant as quickly as possible
Strikes me as ironic how the butterfly logo maps right over an ‘X’.
I am totally fine with all the normies moving from Twitter to Bluesky.
From the arms of one corporation into the next, at least this one isn’t as evil.
I am very much fine with the Fediverse being a slowly growing, more niche, and thus more selective social media / internet stuff landscape.
If people were actually interested in communicating in a way that is not reliant on or generating profit for a corporation, in a way that is fundamentally more egalitarian…
… They’d either figure it out, or not.
Saves me a whole lot of time when determining who actually cares about such things, vs who doesn’t, but thinks they do.
