Technology

what's difficult about mastodon

1. picking a server
2. not being spoonfed by the algorithm and having to actually think of who and what do you want to see/follow.

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.)

Indeed. Sometimes these objections of "it's too hard!" Make sense and are worth investigating improvements to the user experience, but in this case many of the complaints really seem more like excuses or a fundamental disagreement over the whole point of all this.

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

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.

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.

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.

That was the idea. Now it's pretty much a ghost town, though. It never had a real breakthrough