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Exploring Mastodon

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Re: Exploring Mastodon

#51

Post by falkd »

pohl wrote: post #42
bioemerl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment you're manually typing a username it's game over. It should be rare to never that you need a specific user id, let alone a specific server. You should just have to see a user and click follow.

You should just have to see a user and click follow. Which you can, regardless of what instance they're on. Moving in bulk is also easy, using something like Debirdify https://pruvisto.org/debirdify/

You can't do this on the web interface unless you're on the same instance. It's pretty clunky right now.

Correction: You can't do it if you are linked to their user page https://mastodon.social/username...that doesn't work if you're not on mastodon.social. And often I seem to find myself at these URLs and can't see if I'm following the person, and have to go through extra steps to follow them.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#52

Post by MivLives »

nimbius wrote: post #30
nr2x wrote: post #10

The fact that one has to pick from many different places to set up an account is a massive barrier to entry. Let alone the complexity of moving an account from one host to another is also woefully complex, so if you choose wrong, you’re in for more pain. I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. I’m putting my hopes on blue sky/AT which appears to solve the above pain points: https://bl…

I understand coming from Twitter --where artificial choices are manufactured in order to extract value from things like outrage and fear-- it might be overwhelming to experience real choice for the first time. We made a tool for that, so lets help find you an instance youll enjoy :) dont worry, you can shop around for the right one, your choice isnt set in stone at all. https://instances.social/

Except even that tool sucks. I can't even use the list to filter for things that are say... less then 1k users, have an uptime of 95% or higher, and have A+ grade HTTPs. Whatever A+ HTTPS that means, it's also not explained on that site. Hell you can't even filter on registrations and actually up at the same time.

Sorry for the rant, my previous instance went read only, and I had to go find a new one. I know what i want and not being bale to search for it except by rough approximations was incredibly annoying.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#53

Post by bombcar »

cmh89 wrote: post #44
bioemerl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bricked my Linux system while trying to uninstall python, on one of the most "user friendly" systems, and they had no way to restore like Windows does with system restore. I'm still using it because Windows requires accounts now and screw that, but man, Linux has tried hard to get me to go do something else. I do not understand how these projects are just so consistently bad at UX. It takes effort, but UX should be…

I've always found modern Linux systems to have a great UX. I'm mildly tech orientated but not super into customization or anything, and never had any problems after Ubuntu got the application center done. Of course trying to install drivers for a 56k modem while not having internet access was a different experience 25 years ago.

Linuxes are getting good at "the normal path, plus a bit" - Ubuntu is quite usable for basic things these days.

Where they fall off the rails is when you try to do something you're "not supposed to do" (like removing python) - then you're often better off with the weird distros like Gentoo or Mint; at least someone likely broke it the same way before.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#54

Post by notacoward »

shrikant wrote: post #21

I'm quite a bit unimpressed by (actual and armchair) UX and product experts' commentary jumping on Mastodon's rough edges -- yes, a lot of us know it's a bit clunky and the onboarding hasn't been A/B tested to death, and the UI/UX hasn't been hyper-optimised for LE EPIC ENGAGEMENT and that's perfectly fine! It's arguably not ready for full mainstream adoption right now, but hopefully that'll continue to change as the…

I'm a lot less concerned about UX/onboarding issues than about the fact that the simplistic federation model is going to fall apart long before they even reach 1/10 of Twitter's scale. Now, if you're OK with having a lot of smaller communities that only communicate sporadically, forcing people to have ten identities and ten tabs open to participate effectively in each one, that's not a problem. However, if you want to have a single identity fully participating in multiple communities, then the federation model needs to improve a lot. The current ad hoc relays are just the first step on a long road toward a network/proxy/cache layer that can reduce the unnecessary latency and load on the servers themselves, to provide a federated experience beyond the old FIDOnet level. There are lessons to be learned from IRC, Usenet, and P2P file sharing that can help with this.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#55

Post by OscarCunningham »

nr2x wrote: post #10

The fact that one has to pick from many different places to set up an account is a massive barrier to entry. Let alone the complexity of moving an account from one host to another is also woefully complex, so if you choose wrong, you’re in for more pain. I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. I’m putting my hopes on blue sky/AT which appears to solve the above pain points: https://bl…

> I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus.

What you might say is 'I don't think Mastodon is going to replace Twitter', but I don't think you can argue that Mastodon won't benefit from the Twitter exodus because it has already gained a million users.

Looking at the charts on https://the-federation.info/mastodon you can see that in May there was an influx of about 500 thousand new users after Musk's acquisition of twitter was announced. About 100 thousand of those stuck around. This time the number of new users is 1.1 million and still rising. So proportionally, the Twitter exodus will probably bring Mastodon at least 220 thousand new permanent users. My actual guess would be that a higher proportion will stick around this time, because of network effects.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#56

Post by radarsat1 »

The thing that surprised me a bit about federation is that it puts instances front and center. You have an account at your "home instance", and that's the first thing you see. When I first read about federation I had thought that the idea was to have one big network of independent but equal instances that just transparently share data under common topics. But instead I discovered that you are identified with your instance and can follow topics per instance, with local topics being the default, and you have to explicitly reach out to see the "rest of the world".

With Lemmy communities too. It seems that you can subscribe to a community on a given instance, but there is no such thing as cross-instance communities.

I found this disappointing because it means that for there to be a critical mass of content in a particular community so that it gains in popularity, then that particular community in that particular instance has to become popular on its own, instead of all instances contributing to one big community. Add to this that the default view is "local communities" and you've guaranteed you'll never build something as popular as reddit, sadly. Example, someone from mylemmy.eg cannot post together with someone from hislemmy.com in one big Programming forum. Instead they both have to agree to post in Programming@commonlemmy.net and not Programming@worselemmy.org which, imho, is unlikely to be a successful as there being one centralized place where everyone knows to post. If they'd just remove the domain names and pool everything I think it would have a lot more chance of success.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#57

Post by Daunk »

nr2x wrote: post #10

The fact that one has to pick from many different places to set up an account is a massive barrier to entry. Let alone the complexity of moving an account from one host to another is also woefully complex, so if you choose wrong, you’re in for more pain. I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. I’m putting my hopes on blue sky/AT which appears to solve the above pain points: https://bl…

I recently bumped into this issue and simply decided to not bother with Mastodon.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#58

Post by jonnycomputer »

nr2x wrote: post #10

The fact that one has to pick from many different places to set up an account is a massive barrier to entry. Let alone the complexity of moving an account from one host to another is also woefully complex, so if you choose wrong, you’re in for more pain. I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. I’m putting my hopes on blue sky/AT which appears to solve the above pain points: https://bl…

Kind of like picking gmail or hotmail is a barrier to entry to using email?

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#59

Post by mxuribe »

tapoxi wrote: post #33
nr2x wrote: post #10

The fact that one has to pick from many different places to set up an account is a massive barrier to entry. Let alone the complexity of moving an account from one host to another is also woefully complex, so if you choose wrong, you’re in for more pain. I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. I’m putting my hopes on blue sky/AT which appears to solve the above pain points: https://bl…

Mastodon just doubled its active user count to around one million; it's already benefited. It doesn't need to replace Twitter to succeed, just provide value to its userbase.

Mastodon instances have certainly gained tons of new users...but, wait 'til some people learn that the fediverse has been around since ~2008, and the current numbers are far higher than *only "mastodon"*. For example, i'm seeing over 6 million accounts as captured before end of October: https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse/

Of course, on the fediverse, no one cares about adoption numbers. :-)

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#60

Post by cyborgx7 »

ethanbond wrote: post #49
cyborgx7 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They understand you can send e-mails without needing to have an account with the same provider. They may not know it under the name federation, but they do understand the relevant part, for them.

Right because the UX is so good, thus the conversation

People don't understand how e-mail works because the UX is so good. They understand it because it is ubiquitous and they are used to it. They don't expect anything else to work like that, because nothing else on the internet they use works like that. There is no UX to fix this. People just have to be taught that this is an option.
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