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Exploring Mastodon

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Re: Exploring Mastodon

#221

Post by alwillis »

chris_st wrote: post #12

I'm on a discord server with a lot of non-nerds, and various ones are interested in Mastodon, due to Twitter issues. It's amazing to see how much trouble they're having... "Do I have to create a log in on every Mastodon?" ("No, and it's pretty much impossible"), "Can I follow someone on another server?" ("Yes, but it's incredibly hard -- try to follow them on whatever server you're on, maybe someone else is following…

It's just not ready for prime-time, even (IMHO) among nerds, but wow, are normal folks having a hard time.

As someone who’s been on Mastodon for a few years, the front-ends and apps aren’t very good, with the UI/UX being particularly bad.

One of the few apps I would recommend for iPhone users is Metatex, which is the best mobile app I’ve seen—by far [1].

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1523996615

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#222

Post by vidarh »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #60
ethanbond wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can vouch for that, after having run first an ISP in the 90's and then a webmail provider a few years later.

The number of people I had to teach about the "@" symbol alone. And then a few years later the pain was gone. Enough people had learned that most people asked their friends and family rather than need tech support.

The tipping point comes quicker than people expect. E.g. many of the discussions on Mastodon on Twitter is already full of neophytes who had never heard about federation a week ago who are now explaining it to others.

I have no illusion this wave here and now will be the watershed for Mastodon, even with 10x-20x as many daily signups as a couple of weeks ago (currently the hourly signups are above the daily signups two weeks ago), but every wave makes the next one easier.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#223

Post by dredmorbius »

kragen wrote: post #219
dredmorbius wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Septembers happen.

Septembers demolish communities.

Some more than others, but most certainly not all.

Where this one falls for Mastodon remains to be seen. It's more AOLish than Academic, in the sense that it's the result of a capricious event on a large outside-the-destination-system network (Twitter, in this case) rather than a regular seasonal influx (as with uni students discovering Usenet). It isn't however a wholesale dumping of an entire community onto another though as was the case for AOL in 1993.

Mastodon's adoption for at least the past six years has tended to be driven by failures and frustrations with other platforms, and Twitter in particular. Those seem to be occurring in increasing waves. There's some grumbling and adjustment with each, but so far, knock wood, Mastodon's assimilated the influx fairly well.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#224

Post by giantrobot »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #104
giantrobot wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People just have lost the ability to comprehend the concept of federation because everything in the current internet is walled gardens. Non-technical users have never understood these things. They browse the web by accident and sending e-mail is incomprehensible magic. Most people don't care at all how such things work, they only care when they don't work.

Yes that type of person exists but they are not the ones looking for a twitter alternative because of Elon Musk right now. There are shades of gray between the people who understand the technical definition of federation, and people who, as you put it "browse the web by accident". The people who are looking for an alternative right now understand e-mail well enough (from an end-user perspective) to make the compariso…

The "federation" of e-mail and Mastodon are only superficially similar. It's non-intuitive to follow a user from a different instance. It's also non-intuitive to find those users to follow. Most of the time Mastodon users are found via some side channel where they advertise their presence.

Every point of friction you add for a user of a new thing is a reason for them to abandon it. Even if Mastodon isn't trying to necessarily replace Twitter, catering only to the most dedicated users is not a way to grow a healthy community.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#225

Post by giantrobot »

rchaud wrote: post #204
giantrobot wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People just have lost the ability to comprehend the concept of federation because everything in the current internet is walled gardens. Non-technical users have never understood these things. They browse the web by accident and sending e-mail is incomprehensible magic. Most people don't care at all how such things work, they only care when they don't work.

It's much worse now, partially due to the fact that young people's first computing device is a phone, instead of a family computer. Here's a story about an engineering professor lamenting that their first-year students do not understand folder structures, because they have been using Google Docs for a decade, and don't use use anything besides the search bar. https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-dir…

Let's be real though, nested directories aren't necessarily the best way to organize or find documents. In an era where systems support tagging, full text search, and other graph connections between files nested folder structures aren't necessary for everyone. They're a conceptual holdover from a different time with much more limited means to persist data.

That's not to say they're obsolete but it's not necessary for whole classes of users to use and understand them.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#226

Post by vidarh »

dredmorbius wrote: post #205
vidarh wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the added complication of relays: For smaller instances in particular, relays can fill in the federated timeline.

Right, though I'm familiar with that only in theory. Are there relay instances / pointers on how that works?

This has some (very basic) info: https://joinfediverse.wiki/Fediverse_relays

As far as I understand it (and with the caveat I've only recently started digging into the protocols) the general concept is that ActivityPub basically has inboxes you post to, and outboxes containing the public feed, which you can follow (asking them to post you stuff), so a relay just needs an outbox that contains the full public feed of an instance, and a shared inbox that accepts things that doesn't have a single recipients. Now all you need is a message pump that takes things posted to its inbox and passes it on to all the subscribers of the relay.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#227

Post by dredmorbius »

vidarh wrote: post #226
dredmorbius wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, though I'm familiar with that only in theory. Are there relay instances / pointers on how that works?

This has some (very basic) info: https://joinfediverse.wiki/Fediverse_relays As far as I understand it (and with the caveat I've only recently started digging into the protocols) the general concept is that ActivityPub basically has inboxes you post to, and outboxes containing the public feed, which you can follow (asking them to post you stuff), so a relay just needs an outbox that contains the full public feed of a…

Thanks.

And yeah, that's ... very roughly ... my understanding.

Though a relay would have multiple instance's feeds, ideally.

One question I have is whether or not larger instances might serve as gating relays for smaller ones. Sort of a hub-and-spoke / leafnode (w/ reference to the Usenet utility intentional) concept.

Reading now ...

And yes, relays do of course serve multiple instances.

I find the "instances wanting to relay subscribe to the service" aspect interesting, and intelligent.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#228

Post by syntheweave »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #18
chris_st wrote: post #12

I'm on a discord server with a lot of non-nerds, and various ones are interested in Mastodon, due to Twitter issues. It's amazing to see how much trouble they're having... "Do I have to create a log in on every Mastodon?" ("No, and it's pretty much impossible"), "Can I follow someone on another server?" ("Yes, but it's incredibly hard -- try to follow them on whatever server you're on, maybe someone else is following…

People just have lost the ability to comprehend the concept of federation because everything in the current internet is walled gardens. There is nothing Mastodon can do to "fix this" without giving up on federation. But people understand how federation works. They see it happen everyday with e-mail. You just need to tell them it works like that and they'll get it.

The problem isn't that people need the right analogy. It's that they never really learned email. Right from the beginning, the commercial Internet has been trying to blackbox technology and present the "just works" button. So when email breaks because of federation issues, people shrug and say "well it worked for me (using the most centralized email systems)".

The amount of conceptual learning needed to understand the federation model is roughly similar to a complicated strategy game that needs a 15-minute tutorial. A motivated child can work it out; a stressed and distracted thirty-something will try to avoid it, or maybe mock it so as not to normalize its use.

I totally think it's possible to normalize federation since there are tons of conceptually difficult systems in daily life. Some of the burden of that rests on UX and onboarding. But far more of it is a case of, are people desperate enough to bother?

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#229

Post by stormbrew »

Kye wrote: post #164
_ph_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider myself quite a nerd, but honestly, I am struggling with exactly those questions. I do think better introductions for newcomers are needed so the explanations are understandable for people who are thinking in "twitter" terms. There should be just a page with a quick checklist/cheat sheet for twitter users.

I think nerds often have an overthinking problem with it on both the learning and explanation sides. For example: extremely normie comedian Kathy Griffin got on via a short primer in an aggressively mainstream publication and started teaching her friends how things work. Lots of recent happy users are non-tech journalists and other professionals who got it from similar publications or had a friend helping. Meanwhile,…

This is also my perception. There's a cynicism that permeates this industry about what people are capable of understanding or using if given a little time and some motivation, to the point that listening to a forum like HN you'd think no one who sits in front of a computer can even type, let alone aim a mouse at a button.

Twitter was once considered pretty obtuse compared to facebook, at any rate. Once upon a time people didn't know what a retweet was or how to "at" someone. They didn't learn because twitter was "so easy" they learned because the people they wanted to talk to were there.

Network effects always trump all on these things.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#230

Post by jayknight »

stormbrew wrote: post #123
jayknight wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine I'm on hacker news and there's someone on mastodon I think someone should follow and their mastodon handle is @cooldude@cooldude.example.com (because they are so cool they run their own instance). You definitely can't click that handle and add follow them, I could put https://cooldude.example.com/@cooldude and you could click to their profile on their instance, but there would be no way to follow them directl…

You can just put that full name in the search bar on your own instance and follow them from it. You don't have to go to their instance at all. I mean, I'm not saying that mastodon is super duper easy to use for everyone but in this particular example you seem to be going out of your way to make it more complicated than it is. If the thing you found on hn was a link to their profile your flow would make sense, but if…

I was replying in context to the comment above about typing in the handle, and I would put copy/paste in the same category.

With email addresses, you have the mailto: link, which works pretty well so you don't have to copy paste. Maybe we need a follow: url scheme that browsers know what to do with.

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