Mastodon @lemmy.ml

1y ago

Is not that god damn hard.

367 comments

If email were invented today people would complain about how complex and annoying it is to sign up.
- OMG another account?! Why can't I just use my discord smh
- In college I had to write a program to send emails. This was around 2012. Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from. There are obviously ways to sign the message and verify it and most email servers block messages that don't have these because of how trivial it is to fake. It's basically like putting a name tag on that says "Joe Biden" and everyone believing you're the president.
  I didn't do anything malicious but I did mildly prank my girlfriend. I don't remember what I did but I'm pretty sure I told her before I did it. I really didn't want to end up getting expelled for """hacking""" so I didn't do anything remotely bad. The irony is the assignment wouldn't have worked and been as interesting if my campus had the proper security measures to block the messages.
  It could be that the web client for our email mentioned something about the sender being unverified and not to trust it but I don't remember.
  
  Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from.
  I remember realizing this and thinking it was weird too when I was reading about SMTP. Specifically, the MAIL FROM command.
  Also related.
  
  I almost got kicked out of school for this! I sent an email to my girlfriend from some girl that we didn't like, saying something like "you're a huge removed, haha just kidding this is actually jballs not the chick we don't like."
  Problem is that I wrote my girlfriend's email address wrong, so it bounced back to the sender (the girl we didn't like).
  So I had to explain to a university dean exactly what I did and how I didn't actually "hack into" the girl's email account. That was fun.
  
  I sent my gmail address an email from obama@whitehouse.gov and it worked.
  
  Most orgs have an internal SMTP server that will accept and send mail to other internal addresses without any special authentication or validation. It's almost essential for automatic monitoring software and that sort of thing.
  Where the barriers go up is at the border to the Internet. And thank goodness, just a couple decades ago it was sheer chaos.
  
  When I was in schoola classmate set up an instance that is designed for hacking. But another classmate took it in another direction. Instead of following the clues to the answer (it's a game) they instead hacked the instance and created a folder bomb but named the folders with the Mongolian space separator character. So removing them because a task. No body got upset because well... Hacking can be fun!
  Second: hacking is the term used when you break into something to make it better.
  Cracking is the term used when you break into things for malicious intent
  
  GPG let's you choose a email too. I always use fucktrump@whitehouse.gov as my email when generating GPG keys for dark net markets
- Using your email address as username is a common problem for a lot of users.
  Some of them are even completely shocked that they can use a different password and don’t understand, that their mail is just their login credentials for this specific site.
  The feature “login with Apple/Google/Facebook” exists for a reason.
- I don’t get the email analogy.
  People did and DO complain about setting up email. ISP email is a great example of this. People forget their IMAP and SMTP address configuration stuff all the damn time. Always have.
  I used to do home IT, and I had to help people through that crap constantly.
  That said, these days people have gravitated to clients like gmail or outlook. Those push the user onto a certain domain, which makes setup dead simple. This is what mastodon.social is doing now. Making it so people don’t have to think about the instance at sign up.
  
  Yeah I agree email kinda sucks. But everyone still uses it, and (as far as I'm aware) people aren't writing articles about how confusing email is for people and why that makes it a failure. Mastodon and Lemmy are, in comparison, much better and way less confusing but you see that said all the time about them.
  
  Yea I'm with you here. I've done a good amount of things with computers and setting up email with clients and setting up printers are probably the two "what the fuck why is this so hard!" things I've had to do with a computer.
  
  I used my isp email address for a brief period and it was always super annoying in some way or another. Not to mention I lost it when I had to switch providers because I moved out of their area. It was a long time ago but they wanted to charge me to keep it when gmail/Hotmail etc already existed lmao bye
  
  This is what mastodon.social is doing now. Making it so people don’t have to think about the instance at sign up.
  TBH, I don't find that all too bad. As long as users can easily move at any time, getting them set up on a popular one first where everything "just works", they can learn the concepts and get used to the federation stuff. Then after some time, they may realize that a smaller server might fit them better and can then move there. Choosing a server without ever being registered somewhere (in the fediverse) was even hard for me.
- When it was invented, it was complex and annoying, even by today's standards.
  
  Still is if you’re not using a product like gmail or outlook that auto enters all of the incoming and outgoing servers.
  How many of us have spent time on our ISP’s help page trying to find the damn STMP server domain?
  
  For a small period of time I was a god that would bless people with gmail invites lol. That brings me back. I remember compuserve and Hotmail but I don't remember them being especially complicated at all. Maybe that was before my time...? Which would be nice for once
- Saying that times have changed doesn’t negate the fact that times have changed.
- Email has always been awful

I flirted with journalism before getting my degree in CS.
It's not an exaggeration to say that the faculty and many of the students were almost proudly "bad at math" and basically bad with tech too, other than learning the basics of a Macbook.
Doesn't have to be that way and many journalists are smart, great people, but there's a weird self fulfilling culture when it comes to tech. Not totally sure about how tech focused writers would be similar or different.
Edit: Just googling "journalists bad at math" and got this from the Columbia Journalism Review:
“In many cases, they got into journalism to stay away from math.” Journalists love to joke about how we suck at math.
Edit 2: I guess I was bringing up my experience to be an example of how many journalists do not have a strong grasp of technical concepts and sometimes are almost proud of that. So it doesn't surprise me that many may have struggled with Mastodon.
That being said, that attitude is far closer to the average user than, say, the user base of this platform, which is likely far more tech savvy. Streamlined user experience is not a bad thing if you desire mainstream use and is something that could be improved, though Mastodon has been making strides in that regard.
- It’s interesting to me how often “math skills” are conflated with “the ability to understand technology.” Like I’m passionate about HCI/social computing research, comfortable navigating the Fediverse, jailbroke my iPod as a teen, modded Civilization (DOS) as a kid — I’m also “just okay” at math lol, didn’t even take Calculus in HS. I wonder how many people (like the journalists you describe) feel discouraged from exploring technologies because of the false “math skill = tech skill” narrative, even if plenty of people who suck at math excel at understanding technologies!
  (I also wonder how many people who “suck at math” don’t actually suck at math but weren’t given a good math education during school — but that’s a rant for another thread 😂)
  
  One of those computer people that family/friends bug to do all their computer stuff here. Been the designated technology fixer person since the 90s. I'm absolutely atrocious at maths (funnily enough, given a terrible education for it in school).
  
  I'm a software engineer of 10 years. I've had a few roles during that time. Sr Engineer. Architect. Director of Engineering. Not only have I almost never used any math every time I did I copy pasted the algo to use from stack overflow or similar tech blogs. I did terrible at math in HS, never took calc struggled with trig and graduated HS with a 2.7 gpa and never went to college. Who the fuck started this meme of programming === math. The only thing close to math in programming I've done is when I learned the basics of lambda calculus when I was flirting with learning functional programming
- If you can write and have technical know-how, technical writing pays more than journalism.
- I suck at math too. But isn't the work of a journalist to at least double check? Calculators exist for a reason.
- Yeah, I went to a school with a great journalism program.
  It was still where other students went when they did poor at their first choice.
  So it's not like every journalist is bad at everything else, but it's where a lot of people end up who are bad at everything else.

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’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.
- 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'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.
- 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 long¹ 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.
  
  I don't talk about age, though? As I mentioned in my post being tech illiterate is not necessarily a question of your age group.
- 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.
  Is madness.
  
  People HATE learning. It makes them feel stupid. So they just avoid it.
- Given the number of people I've had to walk through downloading my store's loyalty program app and set up their accounts, I'd believe it.
  
  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.
- i couldnt count how many times my younger brother has asked me to delete files for him
  
  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.)

To be fair, if you want content on Mastodon, you have to actively go out, find people, and follow them. After you get past that Step 1 of signing up, your home page is empty. There's no algorithm that automatically deposits content on the main page. You have to do a little bit of work to get anything. As you say, doing this work is not that god damn hard, but sadly for about 80% of people (maybe more), this is an impassible barrier.
On the bright side, once you do get past this barrier, none of the Mastodon content that you are getting is from that bottom eighty percent.
- Also the first barrier of picking a server (how it works, the rules of every instance, checking who they federate with) and an app (the will to test multiple apps, learning that to login you have to input the server url manually since most aren't listed in the apps), to the people who read all the things it's tedious but doable, for the rest it's "Which one is the RIGHT choice?" and just stay at the door.
  Also servers with poorly written rules don't help (example: mstdn.mx says porn and politics are forbidden, but in reality they allow them as long as you tag then properly).
  These kind of posts don't help either, because it makes people feel like they are too stupid to join and rather stick to the known services, but omit all the actual process that someone has to go through.
  
  to the people who read all the things it’s tedious but doable, for the rest it’s “Which one is the RIGHT choice?” and just stay at the door
  Exactly. I'm a programmer and I do server administration on a small scale, but when I went to sign up for Mastodon my first reaction was, "How the hell am I supposed to know what instance I want my account to be on?" and I left. After a couple of weeks of absorbing random bits of information about how federation works I went back and completed the account creation process, but I really doubt that the average user who just wants to sign up for a service and use it is going to get past that step.
  
  the will to test multiple apps, learning that to login you have to input the server url manually since most aren’t listed in the apps
  I don't get why everything needs to be an app. Mastodon's (and Lemmy's) web UI works perfectly well in a mobile browser.
- I think the trickiest part is finding people on other instances and needing to copy/paste their links in your home instance's search bar before you can follow or reblog, especially if you're following a link someone's shared elsewhere. It's a small nuisance, but it adds up over time, and it's already more work than most social media consumers want to bother with. For Mastodon to truly take off, that needs to be automated or hidden, because most people are going to give up before they even get an explanation.
  
  I’ve been at soo many jobs where they change something like timesheets to have an extra click when filling out and it’s always “it’s jUsT oNe cLiCk”, and then they’re inevitably sending out a company wide email three months later all mad that people aren’t filling out their timesheets.
- @seansand @vis4valentine Yeap first thing they do is say test or hello... And nothing. Then they wonder why there is no one, or why only 1 tab with news especially non English speakers are dumbfounded. I just look at live feed if in mood see someone asking for help or test explain # and how important to use them to find people or be found qnd how only # works in search bar. I don't blame them because not every top boosted post has # but a little proding, use # local language and voilà progress
- There are some ways to see some trending stuff but yes, it is slightly hidden away and still very different from the algorithmic recommendations we've become accustomed to.
- It's not that bad though, lemmy is worse but at least with relays misskey and Mastadon etc are easier to aggregate a starting list of content

It's pretty obvious 99% of users bounce off the signup page. People who think otherwise simply are too disconnected from normie reality
Here is what happens
Let's join this thing
I have to choose a server ? Ok which one ?
Wow that's so many, is this important or cani pick at random ?
If you pick wrong, everything you write could be deleted or never seen by anyone.
Ok, well I better choose properly
Read server rules pages for 2-3 minutes
There's a distraction
Later, joins threads
- I wouldn't even go that far to be honest.
  server
  "wtf is this"?
  
  "I never had to pick a server for twitter!! What are they doing wrong? This is too much, I'm off"
- And those who don't, bounce off the fact that it's not intuitive to follow someone from their user page.
  Mastodon is not as complicated as it is sometimes made out to be, but it'a disingenuous to pretend that it's simple, either.
- there should be a service that redirects registrations to random servers from the "trusted" list.
  Like nextcloud's signup page.
  
  Yes, in a world where migration is seamless and preserves your reputation and relationships on the network.
- Yep ... agreed all round.
  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.
  
  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"
  
  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.
- 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
- There are benefits to having an extremely, extremely small barrier to entry.
  
  To prevent spammers ? Yes To prevent grandma ? No
- 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.

The problem is the paradox of "it doesn't matter what server you pick" while also giving them a choice.
If choices don't matter, why have a choice?
Although I disagree that it doesn't matter
- No choice doesn't matterat all. However, the decision on which mastodon server to use for your social media is about as important as what you'll choose to eat today for dinner. Yeah, kinda important for the dinner itself and you don't want some crap, but if you do, you could just eat it anyway for now and try something else tomorrow.
  
  It does affect your experience.
  Joining a server with a small number of people vs a bunch will impact your initial experience and how fast you branch out
  It's not anything that can't be overcome but let's not pretend every user understands how to expand their network
  
  or we make a few accounts on a few different servers.
  we don't need to identify with our fediverse accounts.
- There is no functional account migration, therefore your choice matter unless you think what you write doesn't matter, in which case, why write at all ?
  It's very long standing issue, first issue was closed as completed but not complete
  https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
  
  Exactly. It just saves you the step of refollowing. Not a value-less feature, but my own posts matter to me too.
  If an instance is shutting down I can migrate and keep ally followers but I'll just be at zero again for content. Not a good situation

It is kinda hard finding interesting people to follow. Hardly anyone I would have followed on Twitter is on Mastodon.
- 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.

Every Reddit and Twitter user over the last few months: "OMG The Fediverse is so hard and complicated how can people figure this out?!?!?!!!!11eleven"
My brother(s) in data: It takes like 5 minutes to understand how it works and you're good to go (maybe 10 if you were the paint-chip-or-glue-eating-type back in school.)
- I feel like yall are also overestimating the tech comprehension of a lot of the younger generation. Every action has been so simplified some young teenagers are as tech illiterate as some of their grandparents. If its not inmediately obvious or requires a workaround, they just give up.
  
  Yeah, especially when you imagine that they are accustomed to not having to seek out knowledge or even entertainment. When algorithms feed you everything and your attention becomes a commodity you don't need to develop the skill to actually find it, or the wherewithal to even imagine that you need to go out and find it.
  I believe those of us who were online in the 1995-2010 era remember what it was like to have an internet full of possibilities that you could explore and discover, but that was the exception.
  
  I come across this a fair bit. What it seems to be, is a complete lack of critical thinking.
  Once an end user hits any type of wall, they just freak out and ask the helpdesk.
  You can really tell who uses technology, and who grew up with technology. There does seem to be a broadening gap.
  
  Some?? In my experience ALL.
  The older generation grew up in the time that you had "to get it" on some level to do anything.
  The current gen ((my) kids 12,15) just don't use it the moment it doesn't work. Zero effort, zero will to learn. Because there's always another option which does work instantly. Fuck privacy, fuck my rights.
  
  I don't think they're tech-illiterate in general; there are certain things they don't understand because they've never really had to - filesystems, for instance - but that's no different from most Millennials not understanding CLIs.
  
  I've seen that a lot at work. If there isn't a YouTube video going over what they need to do, they are lost. They seem to get scared at basic debugging of output.
  
  Back in MY day my shiny new gadgets had about a 50% chance to work out of the box without tinkering! Plug and play? Pft naaaah. Get off my lawn!!
  
  "they just give up" - I mean, sounds like a them problem?
  
  Overestimating the tech comprehension of a lot of the younger generation
  An apt article that goes right along with what you’re saying: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/
- Even if you can figure it out, it’s still just unintuitive and a hassle. Theres a lot of friction and friction is the enemy of adoption. I’m a datacenter engineer and despite know exactly how Mastodon works it would just be too much time and effort to get the content flowing. I setup my account, figured I’d get around to it and never did. I wouldn’t blame any average person for just not feeling. Like putting in the effort.
  The only reason I’m on Lemmy because I followed specific subreddits here so I didn’t need to go looking for anything.
  
  Except facebook used to be like that, and somehow we did just fine. Shit myspace just gave you Tom when you signed up for a new account and nobody found that confusing either.
  Standards have certainly changed, but it's really not that hard to follow a few people that look slightly interesting and grow your network based on who they post.
- Honestly lemmy shouldn't take more than 2-3 minutes if you've created accounts for stuff like reddit or discord before
- Lots of bots on both of those sites….

Both are exaggerated, but fediverse apps absolutely need better onboarding and it's a totally fixable problem, but not if the community continues to ignore it.
- I agree. The issue is 100% UX

Personally I thought first impressions of Mastodon (and Lemmy) were abysmal. Being told to pick a server without knowing what that means or the consequences of that choice just scares people away. Unless someone has a specific server in mind they should not even be asked to pick one. Instead a number of existing servers should volunteer as curated core servers and new users are automatically assigned to one of those. There can still be a "let me choose" link that goes to a full list of servers if they prefer to browse them all
- Pick randomly fir a new user, and make it possible to migrate later.
  
  I think this is a decent take. Maybe certain trusted servers can opt to be "default" servers and new users signing up on mastodon's default homepage are round-robbin'd into them. This can create a large burden of moderation on servers that opt into this, but it would be well worth it to turn mastodon into a user-friendly platform
  
  It's apparently easy to migrate between mastodon instances, it's an option under the Settings page, so they already got that covered.
- After installing both of those I ended up setting them aside for a few days because of this. I'm glad I made time to work it out but yeah, Installing and signing up are not the issues.

I opened the mastodon app. I clicked to select a server and create an account.
It gave me an error about timezones not included in the list.
Then i remember i tried it 2weeks ago and i never took the time to troubleshoot it.
I'm still unable to access mastodon
- 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.
- Report the bug to Mastodon (from the playstore or something) and try to use Mastodon through Tusky or another client. I use Tusky and is pretty good.
  
  That's a couple more hundred thousand users that have moved on right there
  
  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.

I disagree, it's not as easy and normal as Twitter and Threads. Stop lying to yourselves. It's Dev's requirement to make it user friendly for the audience and they haven't. Otherwise this wouldn't be a thing people are saying lol. Devs and fanboys are so in their own bubble it's why nothing thrives
- What's complicated about signing up for mastodon.social on the mastodon app?
- I think the issue is that it's not as hard as they make it out to be. It's not plug and play but do they need everything handed to them ona silver platter
  
  you'd be surprised. Present someone a choice between privacy and convenience, most people will pick convenience.
  
  Yes

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.
- yeah it's basically just good old reddit but with email-like distributed servers.
- This is one of of the things that concerns me about society.
  There are plenty of people who are unwilling to put in 5 minutes to learn a new skill, such as joining lemmy, and they chalk it up to being unable to.
- 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.
  
  Your wife can't handle what? Googling "lemmy world" and signing up just like any other social media?
  
  She can't or she just don't want to? It's hard to believe that it's the first option.
- 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.

They should try navigating Facebook
- Facebook is a fucking nightmare for people used to having control over their browsing.
- yeah the new Facebooj ui is so fucking confusing.
  they don't even think of their target audience lol
  
  It's deliberate so they only see content Facebook wants them to see.
- 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

Is this a troll post? There are multiple shortfalls that make Mastodon harder to use than twitter for the average user. Here's a great Op-ed explaining them: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/op-ed-why-the-great-twittermigration-didnt-quite-pan-out/
The tl;dr is that decentralization is no selling point for the average user and if the experience using Mastodon is any worse than using Twitter, people simply won't switch. And there are numerous big issues with Mastodon's usability that make it inferior to Twitter: That there is no proper way of exploring creators, that following creators is a hot mess, that Mastodon instances can block each other and thus make it impossible for their users to interact with each other. All those drawbacks come from being decentralized, while the only positive, not being ruled by a billionaire man-child, clearly doesn't bother people as much.
- 100%. People here don't think user experience and accessibility is important. Very weird attitude.
  
  accessibility
  Case in point: Quotes look too similar to nested comments.
  
  The average user also wants to have content shoved into their face with zero effort. There is a little effort to find content on mastodon and Lemmy.

Anyone who claims the Fediverse is hard... just ask them if they use email. Is that hard?
- 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 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.
  Oh, and then there’s the bugs.
- 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.
- 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.

Sorry if this is a dumb but I legit never got into Twitter, and I only use Instagram to follow friends and bands I like.
How do I Mastadon? I'm not being sarcastic, not even a little. Like I literally have absolutely no concept of what I'm supposed to do on it or how to engage with it. Same with pixelfed tbh, like I open it, I see a milliong posts that have no comments or likes, I get confused and then I leave.
Like what do you do? How do you use it? Pretend I'm one of the idiot journalists this post is making fun of, happy to jump on that self-accepting sword!
- Mastodon:
  Pick a Mastodon instance.
  Open it in your web browser, follow the prompts to sign up.
  Search for people you want to follow, and add them. Maybe search for subject matter that interests you, and follow people who post about that.
  PixelFed:
  Pick a PixelFed instance.
  Open it in your web browser, follow the prompts to sign up.
  Search for people you want to follow, and add them. Maybe search for subject matter that interests you, and follow people who post about that.
  
  To add on this:
  "Searching for a subject matter that interests you" in Mastodon/PixelFed is all about hashtags. If you're interested in science fiction, try #scifi. You would do well to either sign up for an instance relating to your interests (for example a dedicated scifi instance, like what startrek.website is for Lemmy), or a general purpose one (mastodon.social) where you can get a better overview. If you find an instance related to your interests later on, consider moving there.
  As you search hashtags, you'll find interesting people. Follow them. You'll see some interesting posts. Boost them. Adding a star to a post serves no practical function, but it'll make the poster happy anyway (it's the same as upvotes here).
  Mastodon is based a lot around boosts - if you see someone boosting a lot of content of the type you're interested in seeing, make sure to follow them and your feed will be populated by content curated by humans, not algorithms.
- It's just a different way to browse current topics that people are discussing. You can follow famous/not famous people, news people, musicians, artists, scientists and so on. You have to take some time to search by name or a hashtag like #music that is interesting for you and then follow those. They typically lead to more people and hashtags of interest that you can follow to build a more personal feed. It's just a different way to curate the various things that interest you.
  The thing is that it's just another option for people to interact like lemmy/reddit twitter/mastodon pixelfed/facebook etc. Obviously the less popular options have less niche interests. Journalists see that these options can't be used the same way, and need some work to figure out and navigate, so they critique the different and less polished things they see. If they don't have what you are looking for, maybe check back in 3-6 months when there are more users and activities. Like lemmy, things are changing quickly right now.
- You're doing it right now.

It is almost impossible to make mastodon similar of an experience as Twitter was. I used Mastodon and found it kinda boring so I didn't even try. But I did want to use Lemmy since I am a Reddit refugee. I had a pretty hard time trying to figure out how to choose the best instance, where to find my communities (should I join technology at beehaw or lemmy.world?). I still somewhat get confused trying to wrap my head around the fediverse AND I HAVE A FUCKING COMPUTER ENGINEERING DEGREE. If you think that the average user is gonna confidently just make a user and not get confused at all the new concepts you don't know normies.
- I get this to some extent... On the other hand, none of that matters.
  What instance to choose? Doesn't really matter.
  What community to subscribe to? Both! If later you figure out you don't like one of them, just unsub...
  But yeah, I know normies seem unable to just jump in and see how it works. They just read "fediverse" and don't know what it is so just reject everything that it's related to because "it's too complicated".
  
  For me personally it's the FOMO, what if the technology board on that instance is that much better than the one. Do I have to sub to 20 of the same boards? Kinda annoying tbh
  
  The fact you call users normies as an insult just shows how pathetic the user experience is and that you think people need any skills or whatever to access it. It SHOULD be accessible and easy for "normies" but using that term is pretty pathetic.
- The solution would be importing a discoverbility algorithm of some kind, which the service seems very adverse to.

Let’s walk though the flow a typical user would experience:
Search “join mastodon”, find joinmastodon.org
Click “create account”…
SERVERS: Mastodon is not a single website. To use it, you need to make an account with a provider—we call them servers—that lets you connect with other people across Mastodon.
95% of users will bail at this point.
Scroll down to the instance search UX.
Too many options. Do I want “all regions” or should I pick my own region? Do I want “all topics” or “general”? 95% of remaining users will bail.
Pick mastodon.social, sign up.
Confirmation email takes 12 minutes to arrive. 95% of remaining users will bail.
Confirm email, log in. Click search.
Search or paste URL
Wtf does that even mean? Try entering “William Shatner”. No results. Try “Taylor Swift”. Top result is @taylorswift13@hello.2heng.xin wtf?
Go back, click “see what’s trending”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
Go back, click “find people to follow”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
Close site, 95% of users will who get here will never return.

I can kinda get it. There are tons of servers, all with different rules, and I'm guessing some don't federate with eachother. I compared ~20 servers rules and how fast they loaded before chosing one.
Search sucks. Home feed is only chronological, so you need be careful about who you follow. I.e. if you follow someone that posts important stuff, but only weekly, it will get drowned out by following people that post every hour. Then there's the weird design issue that all replies aren't necessarily synced between servers, which is unituitive.
Mastodon needs to implement some kind of better search, and a better algorithm for the home feed, and make it the default.
Journalists are just going to go where the most people are because it's their job to self-promote.

I'm a software engineer with a decade of experience, and I'm frustrated by the experience so far. Bad UX is bad UX.
- It's open source and community-developed, send a pull request for how you want it improved.

First post on Lemmy, would love to share a few thoughts with you all :)
At a basic level, I believe the cycle of a social network has this basic structure:
people -> create content -> engages (including share) -> bring people -> create content -> etc
IMO the main reason behind the success of Twitter or Reddit is the width and depth of the content they have: if you login now it's extremely easy to find content about virtually anything you might want. This provides an immediate benefit to the new user, who's motivated to stay, learn the platform and eventually engage with it.
Behind the content, there are people. The other magic of social networking is that the users, basically, become the creators / curators of the content themselves. It seems so obvious when we think about it, and has powerful networking effects, one of which is the engagement between users.
This is what makes the step of "user onboarding" critical for the life of a social network, and reducing it to "people that are tech illiterate don't belong to the fediverse" is a dangerous and counterproductive argument for the health of the system (and a narrative that I think we, as the "early adopters", should try to avoid as much as possible).
I believe that the success of the fediverse (as a system / protocol, not just as a social network) depends on having width and depth in its communities to avoid collapsing into a "walled garden approach" - and this depends in large part in the contribution of people with many interests and experiences, in order to "build the content" over time - regardless of the instance / server.
A few examples of topics that I loved to follow on Reddit where the user base is not "traditionally techie", but worked really hard to produce excellent content:
coffee / espresso
askHistorians
daddit
parenting
curly hair
skincare (european skincare, too)
interior design
Because of this, and because I'd love to see project like Lemmy succeed over time, I think that improving the User Experience is the real priority for us as a community to build and strengthen the fediverse.
There's a lot of UX best practices that could be lifted by best-in-class apps and services so we don't have to start from zero and I don't think there would be any real downsides - but I'd love to hear from others as well on what they think :)

I think it's a mix of the way journalism works in the age of overstimulation (everything is the best/worst anyone has ever witnessed) and old(er) people being unfathomably tech-illiterate.
And I don't even mean that negatively. I often really am unable to fathom how disorienting even the slightest change in a software they're used to is to them.
If my mother were to use the birdsite, and they'd change their theme from blue to red one day, she would literally be unable to use it, because "it's all different now"
Also, mastodon does have some usability problems, though they are not that big imo.

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.
  
  What do you mean that Mastodon promotes the discussion of complete ideas with room for context and citations?
  I'm just here to be force fed hyperbole at a rate slightly slower than would pop a blood vessel in my brain.
  
  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!
  
  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.
  
  Can confirm am a Twitter slave trying to use glue to get high and it ain't working 😔
- My account never made it through the first few days before they shut it down for community violation.
  I never posted, I just want to be ready for if they ever start federating.

I like that I can follow people from my niche hobbies list+pros from the field I want to be active in. Averege users are so jaded and will complain for every network error they encounter. Don't get me wrong, people flock where the action is, they will learn how to do stuff on the fediverse just as they learned fb or other social media. I kinda dread those times, but I refuse to just gatekeep.
- To me though, that is not what twitter was for. It was for getting news about events from various places, not from a narrow echo chamber.
  I looked at Mastodon maybe a year and a half ago, and was like "wait, it's all just for one subject, it's like discord, but somehow worse"
  
  I don't know about news, I wish I could help you with that. I think there might be more news sources on Mastodon as the recent migration from centralized social medias occured, but I'm not sure. It can sound like an echo chamber, I relate to that, but feed curation is what drives your main page.

I just don't use Mastodon because I never cared for Twitter.

They tend to portray everything new, different and/or popular with geeks as bad or complicated, I see this as a rite of passage for the fediverse. Remember when they were shitting on computer gaming in the early days of the hobby because of who it was initially popular among?
- I still remember the "do cell phones cause cancer?" news reports that aired on my local news when I was a kid.

Well, In 10+ years, I've never managed to understand how Twitter works, so I guess there's nowhere to go but up?

Honestly, how hard is it to understand the 'multiple websites working together to sync their contents' part?
- 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.

I still don't even know what the servers on lemmy are, each "subreddit" is a different server?

To be honest, I'm not tech illiterate and still struggle with Mastodon. I struggle to search/find stuff to follow outside of my local server. I know it's there and doable, but it should be obvious on how to find what I want to follow. If I struggle even a little bit with this, the average casual user, which these platforms will need for long term success, won't even bother.
- Every minor obstacle is a "quit moment" where you can lose people. A bit more hand holding would probably benefit the platform.

I haven’t even used Twitter yet. Turns out i don’t have friends. I just like to scroll Reddit.
- Wanna be friends?
  
  Omg my first femmy? 😱

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. 😊👍

Its easy to signup & get started, just have to be awake...

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.

i also love the "oh noes there are nerds on there!" concern trolling, motherfucker read the wikipedia page on who first adopted and built the communities on twitter and reddit

Right? It was significantly easier than usual for me, because there's no giant wall of legalese to read.

I made ana count on some mastodon instance. It wasnt a deliberate decision, I just picked one that seemed interesting from a list. That's what people recommended: find a small instance, don't go to the big ones. Well now I don't know what the instance was called, so I can't log back in because I don't know how to find it again.
When I went to try Lemmy I made of point of signing up for the biggest, most popular, instance, and I can use it in a straight forward way without worrying too much about federation. In general though Lemmy has been much more straightforward than Mastodon, which I gave up on after about 3 days, and then never used again because I couldn't remember where I had registered.
- Use a password manager and store the url with the username/password.
  
  I know the username and password, I forgot the instance. I registered through an app so the login details were saved on my keychain but the keychain points to the app, not the instance.
  I'm not saying I can't figure it out and do it better next time, but on Twitter if you forget your password you just push a button and then reset it. On mastodon if you forget your instance you're SOL. With Lemmy I know I'm on the big main instance and it's not a concern anymore.

One thing I don't get. Among the gazilion "Oh, it is sooo easy to do this better" complainers are countless developers and designers. This whole Mastodon thing is Free Software, where countless people spent some of their free time and energy to give you what there is today. Complainer devs and UX folks, are your PR's getting rejected?
- Not much point in writing a PR if the idea has already been rejected (or is still hotly contested) in the issues. Most of the suggestions aren't just write-some-code solutions, they're design decisions, and if the project owner doesn't agree with that decision? Well, you can fork it like glitch-soc or hometown, or you can use another project that already does what you want (but doesn't have as much traction), or you can keep trying to convince the people running the project to accept your idea. Even quote posts, which they're finally coming around to grudgingly accept as a possible feature, involve a lot of decisions on which posts can be quoted, who gets notified, etc.
- So..... Someone deluded says it's super easy to sign up.
  Someone points out that it's really not for a non technical person. Let's say that someone is me, and let's say I'm a developer.
  Is it suddenly my problem? Is it now my responsibility to fix it? I already have enough problems and responsibilities, thank you. I'm already busy with work and life. I got my own things I'm working on.
  Fuck off with that attitude.
  
  There's no responsibility at all. There's also full freedom to complain however you wish. If you do that on someone's free work with which they try to help others, it just doesn't look very good on you. That's all.

This is super frustrating.
bluesky literally requires an INVITE to join.
This could not be easier.

People are educated to not learn too much.

So effing true.

I've gotten really tired of repeating this to people. The fediverse is, to an end user, very simple. Just imagine the days of old forums, but your account for your main forum works in most other places and all the feeds are unified. Super simple.
UX needs work, but it's still miles better than traditional forums.

It's quite obvious they don't want people to join networks without gatekeepers.

I think people are getting less tech literate not understanding instances as servers and just thinking of centralized social media just smartphone clients, and the reason of the Reddit exodus happened just because blocking third party clients.

Most people outside mainstream social media such as here tend to forget that 99% of the population are normies. Normies are tech-lazy. The technologies need to work like a microwave. It’s easy, it works and users don’t care about the underlying tech.
- I've been a developer for over a decade and I can say for sure I'm tech lazy. Not 'normies'(wetf that means) nor anyone else should waste their time on tasks that could've been automated.
  If you came here, it is not because you are interested in the underlying protocol, you came here since it is a social media.

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.

I would love to switch to it but I honestly find no reason to do so, I'm happy with Twitter
- Gasp! I'm not sure you can say that around these parts. Personally I always hated Twitter. I was on there during the Arab spring, and I'm pretty quickly just stopped logging in.
  
  Well, I never faced any issues with it except for one accidental account suspension, I use the Android app almost exclusively and thanks to TwiFucker the app experience is still good. I'm only there for the tweets from the accounts I follow so I almost exclusively use only the following feed and avoid toxic interactions, I don't engage in unnecessary arguments and I'm not looking for likes and retweets and on top, I have very few followers, all of this explains why I'm happy with it and why I don't hate the platform and now I'm hoping TwiFucker devs can add an option to remove the For You feed

Downvoted. Please don't post just screenshots of toots.
Please post the text contents in the description for blind folks and a link to the toot for credibility.
Mods, can we please remove this post?

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