The problem a lot of people have with it is in Steps 1 and 2.
Step 1: download an app. There are so many now, it’s hard to tell them apart and decide which one is better or worse. The official mobile one is OK for most, but there are half a dozen others and no easy way to pick one over the other.
Step 2: Create an account. Turns out that decision is where people get stuck the most. Which server should they choose? One based on their interests, their location, where other exiles from their previous social network went, or go for a big one like mastodon.social? And since you can create more than one on a different server, should you create more than one before you get going? So many decisions.
Finally, let’s say you’ve gone through both steps and are finally on. How do you get followers, or decide who to follow?
Itt’s all good once you’ve jumped in, gone through a week of confusion, missed all the people you used to follow because they’re too scared to leave and FOMO. Then you realize following a hashtag is a good thing, but it brings in a lot of people spamming it (try following #press to get news) so now you have to start muting accounts.
Now put yourself in the shoes of an old auntie fed up with the crap on other sites and how they can navigate all this.
Until the onboarding experience – from zero to where you’re enjoying the experience and not feeling like every step is a potential cowpie – is streamlined, people will keep saying it’s hard.
I’m a big fan, btw, and have pretty much cut out all other social networks, but I don’t think my auntie would enjoy it quite as much.
That’s the thing
Every new user should by default download the official Mastodon app and make a mastodon.social account.
Any other choice should be under an expandable Advanced or Custom Account Creation.
Techies claiming to have to idea what the problem is are really revealing a serious lack of intelligence.
People are primates. Chimps with language.
You’ve seen the video of the chimp browsing Instagram. That’s what the user is like. That’s how easy you need to make the UX.
Largely, they’re clueless with simple motivations. They don’t care about helping the fediverse be a viable and growing competitor to corporate social media. They don’t share your goal, they don’t care, they won’t suffer through even the slightest inconvenience for this.
So make the decision for them. Don’t present them with the list of choices unless they specifically ask for it.
Put horse blinders on them.
They need it.
I could’ve sworn Mastodon’s official app signs you up to m.s as the default instance now? I remember there being a massive roar on their GitHub when they started pushing the change.
Did it get rolled back?
No, it does. Sign up is extremely straightforward now. All things involving federation are essentially optional on the official app.
Yes my thoughts exactly. When email was too confusing ISPs included it pre-configured as a perk initially and Gmail came later.
My feelings in regards to social media are stop the bleeding first, remove society’s dependence on X, Meta, and other for-profit platforms. Then we can worry about educating “normal” people on Federation, ActivityPub, etc.
ISPs included email because almost everyone was a modem user (and hence only connected sporadically) and email servers need constant uptime or they lose messages.
They also ran news servers and hosted user web pages for basically the same reason.
Only freaks and weirdos (like me) ran servers from home.
If you need a guide, it’s too complicated for most
You didn’t read it did you😉
it doesn’t matter if they read it or not. the average non-techy person is turned off if a site/app doesn’t let them log in with one of their existing accounts (Google Facebook etc). Having them read a guide to understand isn’t beyond most people but most definitely do not have the attention span.
This is getting posted a lot which is too bad because it’s worse than useless.
Do people not understand how technically useless 80% of users are? They CAN NOT REMEMBER THEIR PASSWORDS. (No, they didn’t write them down. Password management software? lol.)
I’m saying the height of their technical ability is to remember their password. And we want them to switch platforms, away from a fascist right-wing brainwashing troll factory to- what is it called again?
Yeah. It needs a guide with this title, but actually useful. Well-written, with the context that people reading it are already well above and beyond in making an effort.
Why are so many people still on Xitter? I have a fucking idea.
The question is … do we care about THAT 80 % of the people. I would be more then happy if we can have that 20 % of more technical-oriented audience :-)
That 80% is important. We need non-techies, because they remind us that there’s more to life than just computers.
Yes, because I want my friends (who aren’t tech orientated) and interest groups (which aren’t tech orientated) to be on the Fediverse.
They’re always complaining about this, that, and the other about the big platforms but they have so many hang ups regarding Fedi software, so they don’t use them.
A lot of it is perception, but you have to try and make it so people don’t have those perceptions or break them.
Why do people say it’s too confusing to catch on?
I have no fucking idea.
This just seems to highlight a problem. People are saying they’re confused by it. But if you’re either unaware why or acting like you’re unaware why, that’s a problem. Even if there are ways to approach using Mastodon that makes it easy, there’s clearly something making many users pause.
Everyone says subscribe to hashtags to get content. I have no idea how to do that on the official Mastodon Android app. If it’s that obtuse, it’s not going to catch on easily.
Microblogging was never my preference and as it wasn’t easy enough to figure out in the app itself, being a casual user, I never looked it up in a guide/video.
I use fedilabs. Works very well. Allows hashtag-following following the public feed of a remote instance multi-account with cross-account actions
This is a pretty good example tbh. consider:
make a twitter account, you can see what’s popular and tweet insults at celebrities
vs
make a mastodon account, you can use fedilabs to allow hashtag-following following the public feed of a remote instance multi-account with cross-account actions
pretty clear which option would be more appealing to most potential users
Hi Kux,
The problem I see here, is that you then also need to explain why following a remote instance might be interesting, . which means that you need to explain how the fediverse has led to the existance of specialised instances. (which means that you also need explain that the fediverse is more community driven).
"even though you can be on one instance (as you really like the community overthere, and it the posts have a good signal-over-noise ratio), the ability to follow remote instances does still allow you to follow other instances (read: other communities) … after all … most people do are interested in several things, no? "
interesting article.
I understand the fact that you do not want to make it to.complicated, but there qte soms other things you might try to squeze in:
- other microblogging software besides mastodon (miskey, pleroma, gotosocial. ) who are also the fediverse I understand that you are mainly addressing people who come from twitter/X. A lot of people equate micro blogging with twitter … and twitter with microblogging. It is interesting to note that micro blogging is just a service, and twitter and mastodon are just two examples (be it the biggest ones). But there is other microblogging software out there! And, due to the fediverse, you are free to use anyone you like.
You can mention that these othersoftwarei offer other perspectives to the same service. Eg. a service like hubzilla has a more privacy-oriented approach.
- You mention mastodon pixelfed and Lemmy as the fediverse replacement for X, Instagram and reddit (services people know). You canalsoo mention services like friendica (which has a more FB like interface), or peertube, librecast, (videos and videostreaming) , funkwhale (audio),/ WordPress (for macroblogging) … or less know services that do not have ‘big name’ tech behind it (eg bookwyrm for books, agenda-sharing services, … or even activitypub based chess).
I understand that listing all of this would be to much. It is however interesting to make people understand that social media is a lot more then ‘the big three names they know’, both in the variety in the types of services social media offers and the choice of software inside each segment)
Kr.
Sorry, but as soon as a website starts throwing pop-ups at me I close it. Why people tolerate that nonsense is beyond me.
