101–110 of 186 posts
I got into twitter and facebook when I was a university student who gave a crap about broadcasting myself to the world. Now I'm old and don't care anymore, and I'm not deluded enough to think that anyone else cares. Is there a use case that goes beyond teenagers chatting at the lockers?
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That doesn't seem right. The API for an instance is going to be the Mastodon API, which will be the same for all instances. Each instance isn't going to be creating their own API - really, all Mastodon is is an API spec.
yes what i was saying is, i doubt you will be able to hit one mastodon API and get the tweets across all the federated instances. you will only retrieve the data of that single instance you are hitting. if that instance only has 1 user, then that will be all you are getting. but please correct me if im wrong. i havent really dived too much into it.
I think the biggest problem for the app developers is an interface that lists a lot of instances that you can search for which you identify most with (I think some use a centralised list someone has created somewhere). But that's a bad UX to jump into as a new user.
https://medium.com/@cassolotl/a-mastodon-survey-ac74948765c7
It says the main reason for not joining / abandoning is lack of friends. And also hard to use which doesn't help pulling in more people, so no friends, then a downward spiral.
Is there a way out?
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Would you say the same thing about e-mail and SMTP?
That's a good example. In a way, e-mail was the first federated social network, and nowadays there's no critical UX issue with "there's too many e-mail providers to choose from, there should be only one GMail for people to sign up to". The only difference is that e-mail is "obvious" and Mastodon is new.
When you first start out with Mastodon, you have to find a server on your own and hope it's not going to disappear on you in the distant future (pull)
The mainstream doesn't do pull. I haven't verified but I imagine sites such as Twitter didn't take off until they started pushing accounts through advertising and word of mouth suggestion (upload your contacts, invite your friends!). Facebook pushed accounts on people in by limiting who could sign up until a certain demand threshold was reached so that when the next wave of potential users look at it, they have an account pushed on them by peer pressure as their friends were already there
Leave the decentralised aspects to us nerds. To get it properly going you're gonna need a way to push accounts on people
> This is by design so that a person’s Toot is only Boosted in a way that gets the message they intended across. Seems like a bad design decision trying to force people to use the platform in an unnatural way. They will just take screenshots and add their own comments instead, making the "retoots with comments" inferior to what it could be with native comments.
Whether it's bad design or not this is one of the aspects of Mastodon that appeals to me the most. The friction is just enough to stop the context collapse that plagues Twitter
We've seen that design can shape behavior in profound ways, and we have no obligation whatsoever to follow pressure toward a lowest common denominator if we think there are better designs that consciously resist that pressure.
With the death of certain Twitter APIs coming up soon, I wonder if many Twitter client developers will start to make Mastodon apps. I would love to see "Tootbot" by the Tweetbot developers.
What Mastodon badly needs is a client that can crosspost to both Twitter and a Mastodon instance to lower the barrier to slowly switching.
> Well, finding the right one is very difficult That sounds like a rather critical UX bug. Just give me the instance I should sign up on in the "sign up" area of mastodon.social. Use what you think is the most suitable algorithm to cycle through a list of "appropriate" instances, where you-- the people with domain experience-- define "appropriate" for the potential user. Otherwise you end up with this passive-aggress…
the official one: https://joinmastodon.org/ and the alternative: https://instances.social/
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this. It doesn't matter one whit about the instance, except perhaps initially. Maybe. You choose who to read and follow and the instance doesn't matter. I already 'follow' about 80 like-minded geeks I'm interested to read each day and that's all I can keep up with. I never look at either the local timeline or the federated timeline: they are too much information; firehose. edit: and those 80-odd ppl are all over the…
> It doesn't matter one whit about the instance, except perhaps initially. Maybe. You choose who to read and follow and the instance doesn't matter. Not in my experience. Mastodon doesn't really have any (good) cross-instance discovery mechanisms aside from just watching the global fire-hose, so your initial experience is formed by the other users on your instance. And the experience varies wildly from "This instance…