As a journalist who often writes about tech and has found the transition to Mastodon pretty fulfilling, let me just say that I didn't realize how much of a problem this was until a fellow writer reached out to me about how to get set up over there, I offered to help, they posted twice, didn't appear to read any of my advice on where to start or who to follow, then ... completely dunked on the network.
I am convinced that some journalists are using the wrong signals to decide whether a social network is good. It's not the onboarding, it's how the experience goes a month, or even a year, in. But tech companies are focused on building the userbase which means they're figuring out the infrastructure after the fact. Because the fediverse is open and has figured out this part, onboarding isn't as much a priority, when in reality it's the final coat of paint, the thing house flippers use to distract from the poor foundation.
That has me convinced that there needs to be folks actually writing about this space in earnest as a phenomenon, because they're not getting it from their usual sources. I'm working on this now. If anyone here has thoughts on what that should look like, I'd love to hear.
> It's not the onboarding, it's how the experience goes a month, or even a year, in.
No -- as any product or marketing manager could tell you, it is the onboarding.
Using any product is a "funnel" that starts when you open the website/app for the first time. Every piece of friction/confusion that results in lost users, well it results in lost users, period. And that's 100% the fault of the onboarding process. It's never the fault of users who won't stick it out for "a month" or "even a year" (!).
And journalists should be reporting on the experience of the average user. Sure, they should get the perspective and some quotes from die-hard fans as well, but you certainly can't expect a journalist to use a product for a year before writing an article about it that needs to be published tomorrow.
This is a product mindset that’s being applied to something that is not a product in a traditional sense. That’s kind of my point here. Mastodon represents a presentation of open protocols, and all of the work was put into making sure those protocols and the broader network provided a good experience.
Additionally, social networks are not things you use just once or twice. I would argue that social media is defined by how it functions as a mature tool much more than the initial experiences. We have not had much in the way of social networks that seem to be designed for long-time users.
We focus too much on new users in a space where people use these tools for years, decades even.
Onboarding is critical where competition is fierce and opportunities are limited, and where if you miss one chance you're unlikely to have another.
Arguably, the onboarding process for Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms is not great, but people are given so many opportunities (and quite often: coercion) to join, that they did so.
Google accomplished this for Google+ by hijacking its extant YouTube and Android registration-flow processes to create new G+ profiles. A platform with ~20m frequent users and perhaps 100--300m who'd ever participated in the platform ... boasted over 3 billion profiles. Because every person who registered a new Android device --- a necessary if not frictionless step in the chain of converting a $50 -- $1,000 brick to something remotely useful --- was captured by the network.
(Many of those devices also had pre-installed, non-removeable Facebook and Twitter apps on them.)
Critical mass, market power, and monopoly abuse also play critical roles here.
While true there is also the long-term survivability factor. And email began as super challenging to onboard before web mail. Today it's better, and not because federation was dropped. Rather email improved with better onramps to the network.
Throwing out federation because of immature onboarding is like tossing the baby with the bathwater.
> No -- as any product or marketing manager could tell you, it is the onboarding.
Agreed. Onboarding is the main control of the boundary. The boundary (whether in a cell, in a community, in a company, in a fandom, etc) it controls what is "in" and "out", self and non-self.
Onboarding is the cell membrane of community. If you fail to onboard effectively, you are a different creature :)
Maybe it makes good business sense, but it's no way to live. Living a good life takes work. It takes months to learn to drive. It takes years to learn to cook. It takes decades to learn to write.
If you aren't confused, you aren't learning. Get used to confusion or get used to stagnation. Your choice.
I have yet to be able to easily read a single link to a mastodon post. With twitter embedded links worked really well on most sites. How do you get reach without that?
You've confused a sieve for a funnel. Mastodon isn't trying to funnel up every user possible to empower come capitalist aspiring overlord. It's trying to empower the users to filter out the garbage.
You even called it a product, which it's not.
The article above was talking about you. You can't even conceive that it's different.
Onboarding is very important but I think the metaphor to reach for is maybe (bad) corporate onboarding:
People will point you in the right direction (if you ask) but everyone is busy with something else and if you don't get email or your slack account on the first day, you'll have it by the time that it matters. You're expected to figure it out because you have your own motivations rather than needing to make it easy.
I'm very interested how journalists and others bounce off the platform. I get the sense that people are looking for some "hook" or that people used to 1000s of followers enter unenthused to the task of building things up with slightly different rules and none of the recruitment/support for "influencers".
But it all seems pretty straightforward to me -- boringly so almost
I hear people talk extensively about how difficult it is to get acquainted with Mastodon and how their onboarding is a big part of that problem.
What exactly is the problem? What solution does that problem have?
It seems to me that the issue with federated instances is that the first thing you need to do when you join is to choose an instance which is a huge choice. Mastodon starts off by explaining how federates instances work and then gives you a list of popular ones to choose from. What else should they be doing to decrease the friction here? The documentation exists and I doubt making it mandatory would help. Is it possible to make onboarding easy when learning about the federated server model and choosing an instance is an inherently difficult task?
What specifically does everyone think Mastodon is doing wrong here? Is it possible for an ActivityPub/federate instance model to replace something as big as Twitter?
Mastodon starts you off by forcing users to make a decision they do not understand before they can even use the platform. That should be a very obvious limitation to getting users signed up. Painfully obvious. Want a better process? Auto-assign a server, get them using the service, and then offer the option to switch servers.
Educating users can work if it is an indispensable service that people need to understand out of necessity. Someone mentioned driving a car as an example. Mastodon is far from indispensable.
> Mastodon starts off by explaining how federated instances work
Exactly, most websites just give you a box to put an email and password in. Whereas here we are trying to get people to understand new concepts with words and ideas that many are not familiar with. And after reading it they still don't necessarily know how to sign up.
> then gives you a list of popular instances to choose from
So I've got this big list, but how do I pick which one? Since I don't know any better, I'll just pick the most popular one. Oh wait, that one isn't accepting sign ups any more.... Should I just pick the next one? Or should I just give up? Does it matter which one I pick, what if I make a wrong choice? Why are the names so random - what do they mean? Do I need to go through and read a bunch before deciding which one to sign up to?
Again, compare this to most websites where you:
- Go to the website
- Are presented with an email/password form, which lets you make an account
> Mastodon starts off by explaining how federates instances work and then gives you a list of popular ones to choose from.
This is kind of terrible.
Now instead of just putting in your emails you have to make an impactful choice that won't be terribly easy to reverse. Now you have to check which instances have sane moderation, which instances actually have funding so they won't just die on you, which instances are fast or slow, which instances have blocked which other instances, and all the other inevitable petty drama between them. And again, this is compared to just putting in your email and not thinking about it.
And this isn't even inherent to federation either! Matrix has an officially-endorsed default homeserver for people who just want to create an account (most people). You don't have to understand federation to use Matrix, it's available if you want it, but you could live without understanding any of it. This causes Matrix to have a much better on-boarding experience.
It’s not clear that mastodon can do anything better. The problem is the federated architecture. Lumping server admin together with moderation and username namespacing and making the user choose it up front results in a clunky protocol design and user experience.
Nostr is similar to mastodon, but the servers have no role beyond making posts available to clients. The role of the server has been reduced as much as is easily possible. The question of who pays for these has not been solved, but at least users can switch between servers instantly, and even use many at once, so the choice is not very important.
"It's not the onboarding, it's how the experience goes a month, or even a year, in."
As a techie person, that makes sense, but as a normal user, if the onboarding isn't simple and easy enough, users won't make it to a month or year of using the service.
If Mastadon is too complex to attract critical mass of users to achieve a competitive network effect, it will not replace Twitter.
Mastadon is not a big tent community like Twitter. It's not a tech company seeking to attract every user on the planet.
It's a toolkit for building communities. People will join because the communities they want to participate in are there (which eliminates the supposed dilemma of "which instance should I join?" - this is only a problem for people fleeing Twitter and looking for safe harbor, not for people discovering it organically). They'll stay because it's a good toolkit and they want to join more communities.
Or those things won't turn out to be true and it will fade away, nothing is guaranteed, but if you judge it based on whether it is Twitter, you're missing the value proposition.
In my view, having everyone in the same tent is one of the mistakes Twitter made; it doesn't need to be replicated. It created opportunities for messages intended for a certain community at a certain time to be taken out of that context and misinterpreted to fuel flamewars. It made it possible for there to be this spectacle of the "main character" who was ridiculed for day and then tossed aside.
My point is that Mastodon is being judged for not focusing on the easy part.
And I'm convinced that Mastodon does not need to be a Twitter replacement to be a success. That is an important distinction that we should concede. It just needs to be a vibrant network that lots of people like using to succeed.
At the risk of sounding like the snob that I am, isn't that a selling point for Mastodon? Keeping the complete morons out by making it slightly difficult or requiring a modicum of effort is a big plus, as far as I am concerned.
Think about it as a filter: the early adopters are folks who are at least smart enough to join a Mastodon server.
(And BTW that's really a low bar. A friend of mine was talking the other day about "the pain of switching from Twitter to Mastodon" and I had to stop him. You just click some buttons and type a bit. You don't even have to get out of your chair!? I am always reminded of the Jetsons arguing over who is going to push the button to make dinner. Anyway...)
> If Mastadon (sic) is too complex to attract critical mass of users to achieve a competitive network effect,
I would say it already has attracted critical mass of users, eh?
Forcing users to "choose a server" is a hard ceiling on adoption for Mastodon (as I've commented many times).
I recently joined Post and although they currently have the annoying "request access -> wait a week -> get email allowing access", the process was familiar and straightforward enough that I doubt the average Twitter user would fall out of the funnel. With Mastodon, they start by making users make a decision they neither understand nor want to make. It's an onboarding slaughterhouse.
Before you write anything, please understand what Mastodon actually is. It is one of many pieces of software which uses the ActivityPub protocol to exchange messages between servers. There is no "Mastodon network" and using that term is like calling the web "the Chrome network" or calling email "the Gmail network." - the commonly-accepted term is "the fediverse" but you can call it "the ActivityPub network" if that sounds too silly. Similarly, trying to explain the experience of "using Mastodon" should be like explaining using a web browser; it's just a piece of software which can show you almost any sort of content, so there's really no singular experience you can have.
In these regards, the OP article is yet another example of journalism from the last few weeks gushing about and/or bashing on "Mastodon" without really understanding what it is and conflating it with the underlying network, which existed before Mastodon and will probably exist after it.
I have news for you -- the public barely understands webbrowsers -- mostly not.
Yes, we could take the time to explain that "the Internet" isn't just the web -- but you'll just lose your original point.
I'd rather accept "Mastodon" as a (maybe temporary) moniker while we bootstrap familiarity.
The worst that happens is people ask if something else is "compatible with Mastodon" which may end being a good baseline anyway if Twitter or another company try an Embrace-and-extend move
> I offered to help, they posted twice, didn't appear to read any of my advice on where to start or who to follow
What is your advice on this? I signed up and mostly saw people complaining about Twitter, which I can get from pretty much every news outlet, and also from Twitter.
I specifically recommended people who I thought were interesting who had been using the service before the recent surge—as those would be the kind of people who would have something more to say than just complaining about what's happening on Twitter.
From a user’s perspective, who could be tech savvy or not, what is in front (including onboarding) is the priority.
Not realising is the time tested recipe for going DoA.
What I see going on in Mastodon world — let’s just limit it to that for the time being because terms like fediverse, activity-pub, instances confuse users even more — is likely to be a massive missed opportunity, much bigger than that of WhatsApp exodus.
So the UX and its aspects like onboarding have to change and be as welcoming as it gets.
People writing about how beautiful or pure this thing’s backend and spec are is not going to change anything except like echos for fellow enthusiasts.
I can’t get over that I posted this comment emphasizing that there needed to be more direct coverage of this space and asking what people thought they wanted that to look like and literally everyone who responded minus, like, one person, seemed to focus only on a side comment I made about onboarding.
Having users on your network is just as an important part of the product as the backend. You can have the best social networking app out there but if your friends or people you're interested in aren't there you will leave.
Mastodon onboarding has gotten much better but still could be improved, especially in third-party apps.
I loved this line, cause I hadn't looked at it from this angle before:
"For some reason, people who would never read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Procter and Gamble acquiring a new shampoo company will devour content about Microsoft acquiring a tech startup they’ve never heard of."
This is so true. I've known people who get this instant passion for an area they know nothing about, if it brushes up against an area they do know something about, and want to start analyzing it like baseball card stats or something. But they're basically reading a card that's a square kilometre in size about a sport they have never played or watched for any amount of time longer than it takes to momentarily look at, and then flip past, a PBS cricket match (if you're North American and have no British relatives).
edit: Only modification I would make to the article would be to emphasize that not only does Mastadon work in a way that is antithetical to contemporary understandings of how the internet works, it more importantly embodies the way that the Internet worked before capitalism showed up.
I gave up on slogans as a means of social change decades ago, but I would love to see "Protocols Not Platforms" get more traction in the zeitgeist.
I'd say that's because shampoo is a commodity and has next to zero side effects for most people. I'm sure there's people out there with very special needs who care about whether a given brand dies or goes multinational, but that's a very niche thing.
But take say, Facebook buying Oculus. Oculus revived an effectively dead technology. Facebook gave them the ability to build much better tech, sell much more of it, and then coupled it with Facebook's love for sucking in private data. It absolutely had a huge effect on that part of the industry.
No normal person cares about either of those things except insofar as it affects them. That’s the point. Facebook acquiring some startup is as relevant to the life of a heavy FB user as P&G acquiring a consumer goods company is to a heavy user of P&G products. Oh, it’s virtual reality. Who cares? If it ever becomes genuinely relevant it will show up in real life. If not reading about it is a waste of time.
Remember, most people care about friends, family, work and things that come up relevant to those, and they mostly don’t care about work.
Before capitalism? As in pre-AOL? The internet was the exclusive purview of the monied elite and the highly motivated tech nerds. The motivation was needed to spend so much money as everything was so expensive. The only way I could afford entry was by repairing old equipment. What ruined the culture for me was the Eternal September and I’ve been complaining about that ever since. The people yelling get off my lawn need to get off my lawn. Personally I’d like a BBS front end to Mastodon (does one exist? I haven’t checked) so my experience of the internet can go full circle and end up where it started.
Mastodon (and potentially other ActivityPub-based Fediverse services) has Toot (https://toot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html) which is a CLI/TUI interface that probably looks like you want?
(I know there's also at least one other project for Pleroma + forks specifically called Pleroma-CLI too...)
I find that comment funny too. Internet has only gotten more accessible.
I do miss when it seemed almost everyone you talked to was a hacker in their own way but at the end of the day... you have everyone from kids on tablets to your grandma being able to use it now.
I feels ya buddy. I just said to someone yesterday that it's kind of a Law Of The Internet that it got ruined basically a short time after the subjective "you" onboarded, and the longer you're here, the more grumpy you get about it. This is true of me and anyone I know who thinks of this place as a figurative home.
There are endless high-profile examples, such as the time that Stephen Fry, having just recently achieved some major follower milestone (million I think), got very upset about being called out on some faux pas or other - in retrospect, a minor offense and a failed attempt at cancellation, if it was even an attempt - and decided to leave the internet, with this long almost-crying essay about the internet he had gotten onto, which made it sound like some sort of Victorian fairy glade where the air was laden with cocaine and he got to make out with Oscar Wilde, vs the stinky plebian unsubtle and bestial place it had become. It was an overreaction worthy of Chris De Burgh, and one he obviously didn't follow through on in the long run. But even as I was loling at the tone of his rejection letter, I also recognized an emotional stream of my own in it.
I have a somewhat different view of AOL than you. I was firmly middle class, neither monied elite nor genuine nerd, but my family could afford to buy me a C64 and as a young adult I bought myself a 386, strictly for the fun of it. I also started out on BBSes and was a sysop on both 8-bit and 32-bit systems, but I did have an uncle who logged me into the local U's mainframe as a kid, and I found my way to the early, command line internet before the WWW was born, though I mostly just hung out on irc, I was no leet hackz0r.
But once the winsock era ramped up and that "invasion" of AOL kiddies happened, I have to say, I had a very good few years in alt.music.ween as well as some groups centred on my local community. a.m.ween had quite a few great contributors from AOL, actually, so for that group, it was a net benefit. The band also pioneered direct interaction by participating in the group, at one point doing an all-request livestream (this is maybe 2000 I'm talking about, very early, and it was awesome) which newsgroup members voted on. Deaner, the guitarist, was especially active in internet fan engagement, and would phone in from on tour using AOL as an easy onramp. Nothing salesy or memey, he'd just do your typical "tour diary" letters like any band of the time might have done for a fan club, which we more or less were.
Perhaps places with too wide a net, such as rec.pets.cats, took the brunt of it in ways that niche bands or interests didn't have to. I recall a great war between them and alt.tasteless, many casualties.
I was also put in a room once, this would be in the late 90s, to see if I could in any way help a woman who had complained some time previously to local media about porn on early usenet, and it ended with a newsgroup created by trolls called alt.sex.herlastname; mostly I had to reassure her, after looking at the content of the group, that there was no troll army keeping tabs on her movements, it was a totally dead group that someone probably created in a moment of f-you energy and never looked at again, but the internet never forgets.
Not that I could have done more than that anyways, other than maybe send emails to every usenet admin I could find begging them to blacklist the group. But that incident, which I could definitely dig up some receipts about but I don't want to revive that part of her life for her, there are some undeniable resonances with Gamergate, are there not? The truth is, this place is exactly the same place it always was, just bigger and more dangerous, and that was inevitable when people came.
That being said, I would say that there was definitely a pre-capitalist Internet, which had a certain culture and - say it with me - netiquette. I don't know, and could not begin to speculate, where the line is between the pre-capitalist internet and now. If I was going to put forward a candidate for when Capitalism "arrived" here, I think one good candidate would be, whatever day it was that Joshua Quittner handed over mcdonalds.com to the McDonalds corporation.
As Geoduck put it, PBS stands for Public Broadcasting Service, which is a publicly-funded and viewer-supported network of highbrow and foreign content that's been around for my whole life, not sure if or how much longer than that. It's also the primary way that North Americans have consumed British culture for my whole life, until the internet brought widespread, umm, "availability".
So all through my Canadian youth I would flip through channels and periodically happen upon a Dr Who episode, or a British sport like Cricket, and wonder at the strangeness of my ancestral line (I'm extremely British, genetically speaking, and my family were both heavy socialists and also kind of cryptically proud of being part of the Empire. But they never admitted that, even to themselves I think...).
It's no surprise that it was hard to key into why Dr Who - for one example of a show I came to love as an adult - is so cool. I would read about it in Starlog, here and there, and the doctor sounded like a real badass on paper, but when I came across Tom Baker for the first time, he was no Han Solo, shall we say. Which is great, cause there are aspects of Star Wars that I kinda hate now (mostly the fans), but maybe not so much when you're 8 years old and have been watching laser blasts and ships exploding and whatnot. Even godawful tripe like Jason Of Star Command was more captivating at the time.
It does really, and that's why it doesn't work as well in this current environment.
Mastadon is a DIY app/platform, which constitutes one of any number of implementations of ActivityPub, which is the underlying protocol, and can speak to any of the other implementations without limitation, save those imposed by the protocol and self-imposed by the two implementations currently speaking to each other.
There are multiple types of SMTP/POP/IMAP servers out there, but they all implement the same protocols, which means that my email client can reach your email client no matter what our clients, or the servers we connect to, look like. This is how the internet works; platforms will always be a limited subset of this fundamental reality. It's also how ActivityPub works, you can wrap whatever user interface you want around it, Mastadon or otherwise, but the protocol, not the platform, defines what is and is not an ActivityPub packet.
Platforms, FB, Twitter, Tiktok, Insta, none of these work this way, they are closed platforms that you enter through secure gates and must play according to their rules, and they will always decide who gets amplification and who does not based on what makes them money, and good luck taking anything back out to the open internet with you, even if it's 100% your work. If you put it there, don't expect to get it back easily, and forget about control. It is a fundamentally hostile user relationship that cannot be improved without removing the profit motive. There have been other recent posts on HN about User Hostile software design. It's a thing and it's a bad thing.
Mastadon is... tofu dogs. Mastadon is an attempt to feed healthy, protocol-based internet food to people who have been subsisting on bad, algorithmically-manipulated corporate internet food (the aforementioned user-hostile platforms) in a way that feels familiar to them while they get used to the idea of not consuming the internet equivalent of Twinkies and Pork Rinds and Liquor for the rest of their lives.
It doesn't taste as good as Twitter, sure. Maybe that's not the most important thing.
For me, "Mastodon" more closely resembles the BBS-with-Fidonet experience, which I suppose might be similar to UUCP/Usenet to a degree "before capitalism".
> "For some reason, people who would never read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Procter and Gamble acquiring a new shampoo company will devour content about Microsoft acquiring a tech startup they’ve never heard of."
Good point, I'll grand you that, but I'm on the other side. I don't want to hear less about Microsoft acquiring tech startups, I want to hear more about Procter and Gamble acquiring shampoo companies.
My guess is that journalists that write such articles exist, but possibly they publish in specialist journals / magazines...?
Protocols Not Platforms - like Bitcoin which is mostly traded on a few exchanges, or email which is mostly handled by a few giant services?
Mastodon will be no exception with high likelihood. Choose it over eg Twitter if you prefer where it's going _as a platform._ I actually prefer where Twitter seems to be going, but to each his own
ActivityPub is sort of the protocol though. Mastodon is just the platform incorporating it that is becoming the twitter replacement. Maybe not for everything, but programming andtechwise my mastodon feed sure is more interesting than any of my other social media feeds in the wake of Elon.
I think it's hard to say where things are heading though. We had RSS before, and that didn't stand up to American tech giants. I have my doubts this iteration of ActivityPub and the "fediverse" will, but I do think we need a decentral protocol like it if we want an interesting internet going forward. I mean, which of your centralized social media feeds are interesting in 2022? Even HN is becoming a page I visit on a weekly basis rather than on a daily basis, and this is the SoMe I use the most aside from mastodon and LinkedIn. Maybe I'm just the oddball, but at least in my circle of influence things like Facebook are now solely used to arrange things like Blood Bowl tournaments.
I noticed that every "standard tech journalism template" on his list was either tech Corporate Press Release stuff, or tech celebrity news stuff...
...vs., jumping over to Ars Technica (called out in these comments for having 80% of commenters assume that Mastodon is a for-profit Twitter competitor), and their "20 Most-read Stories of 2022" article - gosh, maybe three stories of their Top 12 fit any of those templates.
Conclusion: Article author's mental image of "tech journalist" is actually "tech gossip columnist" - for people who want to sound cool & informed, but wouldn't actually want to know anything useful about tech.
> And administrators must comply with not only their local laws, but laws that exist anywhere their server is accessible.
This is bullshit and they have to know it's bullshit. Why? Because their servers are accessible in Thailand, but nobody pretends they have to abide the lèse-majesté laws Thailand enforces. Ditto the various laws in force in other countries Ars doesn't care about.
Plus, they don't look into why Twitter complies with the GDPR: Twitter has assets in Europe that the EU could seize. A local Mastodon instance operator doesn't, so they don't have to care. Vice-versa in the converse, of course: A small European Mastodon instance operator doesn't have to care about any laws in North or South America.
And that's one of the real differences between Twitter and Mastodon. On Mastodon everything is built around interacting with peers. Sure there might be celebrities on but that's not the main thing. Twitter on the other hand is all about celebrity access.
Article seems forced and comes to their conclusions based on poorly-informed opinions. For instance, this author seems to think that Mastodon is exempt from the bots and advertising because it is decentralized. However, I think the much more obvious reason is that it’s not popular; people don’t go there with their bots and advertisements. If it suddenly became popular, the bots/advertisements/“poor comment quality” would surely follow.
(Just be clear, I don’t mean literal website ads, I mean posts that advertise products and businesses, whether it be obvious or not.)
I think you can generalize the sentence to "xxx doesnt know what to do with Mastodon" where you can insert into xxx any of the major actors of modern life, including the public sector and its still a true statement
The idea of empowering, democratic, relatively "low" tech that doesnt abuse its users has been expunged so effectively from the public consciousness (and tech journalism and others are so complicit) its not a mystery this new narrative doesnt fit
But maybe its a blessing in disguise. As the fediverse is still rather immature, too much attention from ill-wishers might turn the baby into a stillborn
"The idea of empowering, democratic, relatively "low" tech that doesnt abuse its users has been expunged so effectively from the public consciousness (and tech journalism and others are so complicit) its not a mystery this new narrative doesnt fit"
It isnt just that, its also the fact that the media's conversation around moderation is childishly underdeveloped and nuanced. Moderation IS the hard problem of social networks, you cant automate moderation away, you cant not have moderation but any moderation policy you choose is going to have edgecases and problematic instances and the distortions those cause are going to threaten to overwhelm the spirit of the moderation (which is, dont be a dick). Also, people stuck at those edgecases (someone talking about their experience as a victim of an illegal crime for example) are going to get banned or silenced in extremely harmful ways.
The reason Mastodon is the future is that it attempts to solve this moderation problem by having many different communities with different moderation policies that have unique wordings, red lines for behavior and different moderators enforcing the established policies. When different communities federate, they do so on the basis of similar philosophies about moderation. When more and more communities with similar value systems federate the edgecases of any one particular moderation policy begin to become less important as a vulnerability or exploitation point since any one particular community is small and the shared spirit of the moderation policies ("dont be a dick) becomes more important as a guiding principle in moderation disputes. Also the red line of unnaceptable behavior is different for each community which creates a fuzzy region of more and more unacceptable behavior that trolls cant exploit the way they can tip toe justtt around the edge of a singular red line.
No moderation system is sustainable since it will by definition have edgecases which will cause problems or be exploited by trolls. No moderation isn't an option. Mastodon/the Fediverse is the third option nobody knew we had and really I have NO idea how corporate social networks with monolithic moderation policies projected across millions of people have any capability of adapting this innovation. It is the massive elephant in the room for corporate social media companies and yet tech journalism is still stuck on "should we have no moderation or a single moderation policy?" which Mastodon is FAR past at this point onto more interesting questions like how do instance admins negotiate moderation disputes? What does that look like and how can it be improved? There have been disputes between predominantly black communities and predominantly white queer communities on the fediverse and it gets absurdly complicated and nuanced fast but there is the capacity for that conversation to happen and different people to make their own choices and part paths (defederate) that makes Mastodon undeniably a far more advanced social technology than any other corporate social media platform where it just becomes person A is right or person B is right.
Absolutely this. This comment should be required reading for anybody trying to report on that new phenomenom as it goes to the core of the real social network problem and the space of possible solutions.
Its a radical paradigm shift: from adtech to modtech. Building platforms not geared towards user addiction and "engagement" but towards effective moderation and healthy communities.
I said that the fediverse is still immature precisely because standards and tools around moderation are still missing. E.g. the celebrated activitypub protocol, while a key enabler in other ways, knows nothing about it.
Its not a wild goose chase. Frictions and strife and trying to control others are core to the human existence and so are the antidotes. We just need to make sure that our social networks are no worse than the rest of society 8-)
Average commenters on tech news sites dont know either. I went through an ars technica comment thread and 80% of the posters were assuming Mastodon is a for profit competitor to Twitter too.
I find that people being confused by federated network really telling on what it mistake it has been to let a few companies getting there hand on most of the content creation and distribution.
I don't if it's the fact of having known the prime time of IRC, BBS, Usenet, and overall the web being a network of diverse communities, but I'm much more confortable with Mastodon than Twitter.
Not having the possibility to host the service myself feels wrong. It's not that I want to, but I should be able to.
> what it mistake it has been to let a few companies getting there hand on most of the content creation and distribution
Centralized services drove massive adoption of consumer technology (see: Hotmail/Gmail for email). They paved the way… via marketing, customer support, design, infrastructure (even OSS services will probably run on AWS), etc. That all takes big investments that OSS typically can’t compete with.
So it’s a good thing they paved the roads for which OSS can take over.
All services and companies eventually stagnate or mess up, with rare exceptions. If OSS can eventually mature enough to legitimately compete in terms of UX/UI/features then there will always be opportunities in the various market to transition in that direction.
People haven’t been trained or brainwashed to hate OSS, they just saw what was offered and aren’t willing the make the various sacrifices that typically come with most services like Mastodon. At least until the gap in offerings narrows.
I'm not sure how much it actually helped.
Customer support is really poor for a big chunk of those companies (I'm thinking Google, Facebook, not Apple or Amazon).
People also got the concept of emails quite easily way before gmail existed or hotmail was popular. I don't think having a lot of providers was much of an issue. A lot of people still use providers which are not as big as google or hotmail, at least where I live.
So I wonder if centralization was really something that helped people that much or it was more of a business strategy that was efficient for quick growth and that is the reason we are in this situation.
As a software engineer, I found using Mastodon very confusing and nonintuitive.
I want it to work and be successful, but trying to think of is anything but a curiosity until it’s more user-friendly for non-techies is a pretty fair argument…
Even worse, users can signup on a random server then it can end up on one of the big server blacklists (or get shutdown) and they won’t be able to see or participate in major portions of the network.
Try explaining to your mom why she needs to sign up again on a different URL, its no walk in the park (especially if you want to keep your old ‘tweets’ via backups):
If Mastodon grows bigger and blacklists grow, it could easily Balkanize, and it will be clear it’s more of a competitor or add-on to existing niche forums/communities. Something not really in the spirit of public social networks like Twitter. Which is totally fine, just different.
…assuming they figure out the UX/UI issues to help it “cross the chasm” (which I’m skeptical will happen soon, that usually takes core leadership, good design is rarely tacked on afterwards). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm?wprov=sfti1
> Even worse, users can signup on a random server then it can end up on one of the big server blacklists (or get shutdown) and they won’t be able to see or participate in major portions of the network.
Maybe do a bit of research and don't sign up at shitty instances? The only reason I have seen for blocking instances if they're alt-right, racist, transphobic or harassing people
Readit News
I am convinced that some journalists are using the wrong signals to decide whether a social network is good. It's not the onboarding, it's how the experience goes a month, or even a year, in. But tech companies are focused on building the userbase which means they're figuring out the infrastructure after the fact. Because the fediverse is open and has figured out this part, onboarding isn't as much a priority, when in reality it's the final coat of paint, the thing house flippers use to distract from the poor foundation.
That has me convinced that there needs to be folks actually writing about this space in earnest as a phenomenon, because they're not getting it from their usual sources. I'm working on this now. If anyone here has thoughts on what that should look like, I'd love to hear.
No -- as any product or marketing manager could tell you, it is the onboarding.
Using any product is a "funnel" that starts when you open the website/app for the first time. Every piece of friction/confusion that results in lost users, well it results in lost users, period. And that's 100% the fault of the onboarding process. It's never the fault of users who won't stick it out for "a month" or "even a year" (!).
And journalists should be reporting on the experience of the average user. Sure, they should get the perspective and some quotes from die-hard fans as well, but you certainly can't expect a journalist to use a product for a year before writing an article about it that needs to be published tomorrow.
Additionally, social networks are not things you use just once or twice. I would argue that social media is defined by how it functions as a mature tool much more than the initial experiences. We have not had much in the way of social networks that seem to be designed for long-time users.
We focus too much on new users in a space where people use these tools for years, decades even.
Arguably, the onboarding process for Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms is not great, but people are given so many opportunities (and quite often: coercion) to join, that they did so.
Google accomplished this for Google+ by hijacking its extant YouTube and Android registration-flow processes to create new G+ profiles. A platform with ~20m frequent users and perhaps 100--300m who'd ever participated in the platform ... boasted over 3 billion profiles. Because every person who registered a new Android device --- a necessary if not frictionless step in the chain of converting a $50 -- $1,000 brick to something remotely useful --- was captured by the network.
(Many of those devices also had pre-installed, non-removeable Facebook and Twitter apps on them.)
Critical mass, market power, and monopoly abuse also play critical roles here.
Throwing out federation because of immature onboarding is like tossing the baby with the bathwater.
Agreed. Onboarding is the main control of the boundary. The boundary (whether in a cell, in a community, in a company, in a fandom, etc) it controls what is "in" and "out", self and non-self.
Onboarding is the cell membrane of community. If you fail to onboard effectively, you are a different creature :)
If you aren't confused, you aren't learning. Get used to confusion or get used to stagnation. Your choice.
You even called it a product, which it's not.
The article above was talking about you. You can't even conceive that it's different.
People will point you in the right direction (if you ask) but everyone is busy with something else and if you don't get email or your slack account on the first day, you'll have it by the time that it matters. You're expected to figure it out because you have your own motivations rather than needing to make it easy.
I'm very interested how journalists and others bounce off the platform. I get the sense that people are looking for some "hook" or that people used to 1000s of followers enter unenthused to the task of building things up with slightly different rules and none of the recruitment/support for "influencers".
But it all seems pretty straightforward to me -- boringly so almost
I hear people talk extensively about how difficult it is to get acquainted with Mastodon and how their onboarding is a big part of that problem.
What exactly is the problem? What solution does that problem have?
It seems to me that the issue with federated instances is that the first thing you need to do when you join is to choose an instance which is a huge choice. Mastodon starts off by explaining how federates instances work and then gives you a list of popular ones to choose from. What else should they be doing to decrease the friction here? The documentation exists and I doubt making it mandatory would help. Is it possible to make onboarding easy when learning about the federated server model and choosing an instance is an inherently difficult task?
What specifically does everyone think Mastodon is doing wrong here? Is it possible for an ActivityPub/federate instance model to replace something as big as Twitter?
Educating users can work if it is an indispensable service that people need to understand out of necessity. Someone mentioned driving a car as an example. Mastodon is far from indispensable.
Exactly, most websites just give you a box to put an email and password in. Whereas here we are trying to get people to understand new concepts with words and ideas that many are not familiar with. And after reading it they still don't necessarily know how to sign up.
> then gives you a list of popular instances to choose from
So I've got this big list, but how do I pick which one? Since I don't know any better, I'll just pick the most popular one. Oh wait, that one isn't accepting sign ups any more.... Should I just pick the next one? Or should I just give up? Does it matter which one I pick, what if I make a wrong choice? Why are the names so random - what do they mean? Do I need to go through and read a bunch before deciding which one to sign up to?
Again, compare this to most websites where you:
- Go to the website
- Are presented with an email/password form, which lets you make an account
This is kind of terrible.
Now instead of just putting in your emails you have to make an impactful choice that won't be terribly easy to reverse. Now you have to check which instances have sane moderation, which instances actually have funding so they won't just die on you, which instances are fast or slow, which instances have blocked which other instances, and all the other inevitable petty drama between them. And again, this is compared to just putting in your email and not thinking about it.
And this isn't even inherent to federation either! Matrix has an officially-endorsed default homeserver for people who just want to create an account (most people). You don't have to understand federation to use Matrix, it's available if you want it, but you could live without understanding any of it. This causes Matrix to have a much better on-boarding experience.
Nostr is similar to mastodon, but the servers have no role beyond making posts available to clients. The role of the server has been reduced as much as is easily possible. The question of who pays for these has not been solved, but at least users can switch between servers instantly, and even use many at once, so the choice is not very important.
As a techie person, that makes sense, but as a normal user, if the onboarding isn't simple and easy enough, users won't make it to a month or year of using the service.
If Mastadon is too complex to attract critical mass of users to achieve a competitive network effect, it will not replace Twitter.
It's a toolkit for building communities. People will join because the communities they want to participate in are there (which eliminates the supposed dilemma of "which instance should I join?" - this is only a problem for people fleeing Twitter and looking for safe harbor, not for people discovering it organically). They'll stay because it's a good toolkit and they want to join more communities.
Or those things won't turn out to be true and it will fade away, nothing is guaranteed, but if you judge it based on whether it is Twitter, you're missing the value proposition.
In my view, having everyone in the same tent is one of the mistakes Twitter made; it doesn't need to be replicated. It created opportunities for messages intended for a certain community at a certain time to be taken out of that context and misinterpreted to fuel flamewars. It made it possible for there to be this spectacle of the "main character" who was ridiculed for day and then tossed aside.
And I'm convinced that Mastodon does not need to be a Twitter replacement to be a success. That is an important distinction that we should concede. It just needs to be a vibrant network that lots of people like using to succeed.
(And BTW that's really a low bar. A friend of mine was talking the other day about "the pain of switching from Twitter to Mastodon" and I had to stop him. You just click some buttons and type a bit. You don't even have to get out of your chair!? I am always reminded of the Jetsons arguing over who is going to push the button to make dinner. Anyway...)
> If Mastadon (sic) is too complex to attract critical mass of users to achieve a competitive network effect,
I would say it already has attracted critical mass of users, eh?
> it will not replace Twitter.
Question the assumption that it should?
I recently joined Post and although they currently have the annoying "request access -> wait a week -> get email allowing access", the process was familiar and straightforward enough that I doubt the average Twitter user would fall out of the funnel. With Mastodon, they start by making users make a decision they neither understand nor want to make. It's an onboarding slaughterhouse.
In these regards, the OP article is yet another example of journalism from the last few weeks gushing about and/or bashing on "Mastodon" without really understanding what it is and conflating it with the underlying network, which existed before Mastodon and will probably exist after it.
Yes, we could take the time to explain that "the Internet" isn't just the web -- but you'll just lose your original point.
I'd rather accept "Mastodon" as a (maybe temporary) moniker while we bootstrap familiarity.
The worst that happens is people ask if something else is "compatible with Mastodon" which may end being a good baseline anyway if Twitter or another company try an Embrace-and-extend move
Maybe it's even true, but it doesn't matter.
What is your advice on this? I signed up and mostly saw people complaining about Twitter, which I can get from pretty much every news outlet, and also from Twitter.
I also offered to answer any questions they had.
Not realising is the time tested recipe for going DoA.
What I see going on in Mastodon world — let’s just limit it to that for the time being because terms like fediverse, activity-pub, instances confuse users even more — is likely to be a massive missed opportunity, much bigger than that of WhatsApp exodus.
So the UX and its aspects like onboarding have to change and be as welcoming as it gets.
People writing about how beautiful or pure this thing’s backend and spec are is not going to change anything except like echos for fellow enthusiasts.
It’s disappointing, if you ask me.
Mastodon onboarding has gotten much better but still could be improved, especially in third-party apps.
"For some reason, people who would never read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Procter and Gamble acquiring a new shampoo company will devour content about Microsoft acquiring a tech startup they’ve never heard of."
This is so true. I've known people who get this instant passion for an area they know nothing about, if it brushes up against an area they do know something about, and want to start analyzing it like baseball card stats or something. But they're basically reading a card that's a square kilometre in size about a sport they have never played or watched for any amount of time longer than it takes to momentarily look at, and then flip past, a PBS cricket match (if you're North American and have no British relatives).
edit: Only modification I would make to the article would be to emphasize that not only does Mastadon work in a way that is antithetical to contemporary understandings of how the internet works, it more importantly embodies the way that the Internet worked before capitalism showed up.
I gave up on slogans as a means of social change decades ago, but I would love to see "Protocols Not Platforms" get more traction in the zeitgeist.
See also every HN thread about nutrition, sleep, health, exercise.
But take say, Facebook buying Oculus. Oculus revived an effectively dead technology. Facebook gave them the ability to build much better tech, sell much more of it, and then coupled it with Facebook's love for sucking in private data. It absolutely had a huge effect on that part of the industry.
Remember, most people care about friends, family, work and things that come up relevant to those, and they mostly don’t care about work.
I do miss when it seemed almost everyone you talked to was a hacker in their own way but at the end of the day... you have everyone from kids on tablets to your grandma being able to use it now.
There are endless high-profile examples, such as the time that Stephen Fry, having just recently achieved some major follower milestone (million I think), got very upset about being called out on some faux pas or other - in retrospect, a minor offense and a failed attempt at cancellation, if it was even an attempt - and decided to leave the internet, with this long almost-crying essay about the internet he had gotten onto, which made it sound like some sort of Victorian fairy glade where the air was laden with cocaine and he got to make out with Oscar Wilde, vs the stinky plebian unsubtle and bestial place it had become. It was an overreaction worthy of Chris De Burgh, and one he obviously didn't follow through on in the long run. But even as I was loling at the tone of his rejection letter, I also recognized an emotional stream of my own in it.
I have a somewhat different view of AOL than you. I was firmly middle class, neither monied elite nor genuine nerd, but my family could afford to buy me a C64 and as a young adult I bought myself a 386, strictly for the fun of it. I also started out on BBSes and was a sysop on both 8-bit and 32-bit systems, but I did have an uncle who logged me into the local U's mainframe as a kid, and I found my way to the early, command line internet before the WWW was born, though I mostly just hung out on irc, I was no leet hackz0r.
But once the winsock era ramped up and that "invasion" of AOL kiddies happened, I have to say, I had a very good few years in alt.music.ween as well as some groups centred on my local community. a.m.ween had quite a few great contributors from AOL, actually, so for that group, it was a net benefit. The band also pioneered direct interaction by participating in the group, at one point doing an all-request livestream (this is maybe 2000 I'm talking about, very early, and it was awesome) which newsgroup members voted on. Deaner, the guitarist, was especially active in internet fan engagement, and would phone in from on tour using AOL as an easy onramp. Nothing salesy or memey, he'd just do your typical "tour diary" letters like any band of the time might have done for a fan club, which we more or less were.
Perhaps places with too wide a net, such as rec.pets.cats, took the brunt of it in ways that niche bands or interests didn't have to. I recall a great war between them and alt.tasteless, many casualties.
I was also put in a room once, this would be in the late 90s, to see if I could in any way help a woman who had complained some time previously to local media about porn on early usenet, and it ended with a newsgroup created by trolls called alt.sex.herlastname; mostly I had to reassure her, after looking at the content of the group, that there was no troll army keeping tabs on her movements, it was a totally dead group that someone probably created in a moment of f-you energy and never looked at again, but the internet never forgets.
Not that I could have done more than that anyways, other than maybe send emails to every usenet admin I could find begging them to blacklist the group. But that incident, which I could definitely dig up some receipts about but I don't want to revive that part of her life for her, there are some undeniable resonances with Gamergate, are there not? The truth is, this place is exactly the same place it always was, just bigger and more dangerous, and that was inevitable when people came.
That being said, I would say that there was definitely a pre-capitalist Internet, which had a certain culture and - say it with me - netiquette. I don't know, and could not begin to speculate, where the line is between the pre-capitalist internet and now. If I was going to put forward a candidate for when Capitalism "arrived" here, I think one good candidate would be, whatever day it was that Joshua Quittner handed over mcdonalds.com to the McDonalds corporation.
I'm guessing that is what OP ment
So all through my Canadian youth I would flip through channels and periodically happen upon a Dr Who episode, or a British sport like Cricket, and wonder at the strangeness of my ancestral line (I'm extremely British, genetically speaking, and my family were both heavy socialists and also kind of cryptically proud of being part of the Empire. But they never admitted that, even to themselves I think...).
It's no surprise that it was hard to key into why Dr Who - for one example of a show I came to love as an adult - is so cool. I would read about it in Starlog, here and there, and the doctor sounded like a real badass on paper, but when I came across Tom Baker for the first time, he was no Han Solo, shall we say. Which is great, cause there are aspects of Star Wars that I kinda hate now (mostly the fans), but maybe not so much when you're 8 years old and have been watching laser blasts and ships exploding and whatnot. Even godawful tripe like Jason Of Star Command was more captivating at the time.
Does it really? I miss the internet of the late 90s and early 2000s, but Mastadon feels like precisely none of that.
Mastadon is a DIY app/platform, which constitutes one of any number of implementations of ActivityPub, which is the underlying protocol, and can speak to any of the other implementations without limitation, save those imposed by the protocol and self-imposed by the two implementations currently speaking to each other.
There are multiple types of SMTP/POP/IMAP servers out there, but they all implement the same protocols, which means that my email client can reach your email client no matter what our clients, or the servers we connect to, look like. This is how the internet works; platforms will always be a limited subset of this fundamental reality. It's also how ActivityPub works, you can wrap whatever user interface you want around it, Mastadon or otherwise, but the protocol, not the platform, defines what is and is not an ActivityPub packet.
Platforms, FB, Twitter, Tiktok, Insta, none of these work this way, they are closed platforms that you enter through secure gates and must play according to their rules, and they will always decide who gets amplification and who does not based on what makes them money, and good luck taking anything back out to the open internet with you, even if it's 100% your work. If you put it there, don't expect to get it back easily, and forget about control. It is a fundamentally hostile user relationship that cannot be improved without removing the profit motive. There have been other recent posts on HN about User Hostile software design. It's a thing and it's a bad thing.
Mastadon is... tofu dogs. Mastadon is an attempt to feed healthy, protocol-based internet food to people who have been subsisting on bad, algorithmically-manipulated corporate internet food (the aforementioned user-hostile platforms) in a way that feels familiar to them while they get used to the idea of not consuming the internet equivalent of Twinkies and Pork Rinds and Liquor for the rest of their lives.
It doesn't taste as good as Twitter, sure. Maybe that's not the most important thing.
It's the MBAs (that HN hates) that turn "the internet" into a product that makes money- or that they can convince investors will make money some day.
Good point, I'll grand you that, but I'm on the other side. I don't want to hear less about Microsoft acquiring tech startups, I want to hear more about Procter and Gamble acquiring shampoo companies.
My guess is that journalists that write such articles exist, but possibly they publish in specialist journals / magazines...?
Mastodon will be no exception with high likelihood. Choose it over eg Twitter if you prefer where it's going _as a platform._ I actually prefer where Twitter seems to be going, but to each his own
I think it's hard to say where things are heading though. We had RSS before, and that didn't stand up to American tech giants. I have my doubts this iteration of ActivityPub and the "fediverse" will, but I do think we need a decentral protocol like it if we want an interesting internet going forward. I mean, which of your centralized social media feeds are interesting in 2022? Even HN is becoming a page I visit on a weekly basis rather than on a daily basis, and this is the SoMe I use the most aside from mastodon and LinkedIn. Maybe I'm just the oddball, but at least in my circle of influence things like Facebook are now solely used to arrange things like Blood Bowl tournaments.
...vs., jumping over to Ars Technica (called out in these comments for having 80% of commenters assume that Mastodon is a for-profit Twitter competitor), and their "20 Most-read Stories of 2022" article - gosh, maybe three stories of their Top 12 fit any of those templates.
Conclusion: Article author's mental image of "tech journalist" is actually "tech gossip columnist" - for people who want to sound cool & informed, but wouldn't actually want to know anything useful about tech.
But then the article was syndicated from somewhere and not at the normal Ars level either.
Linky to article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/mastodon-is-hurt...
> And administrators must comply with not only their local laws, but laws that exist anywhere their server is accessible.
This is bullshit and they have to know it's bullshit. Why? Because their servers are accessible in Thailand, but nobody pretends they have to abide the lèse-majesté laws Thailand enforces. Ditto the various laws in force in other countries Ars doesn't care about.
Plus, they don't look into why Twitter complies with the GDPR: Twitter has assets in Europe that the EU could seize. A local Mastodon instance operator doesn't, so they don't have to care. Vice-versa in the converse, of course: A small European Mastodon instance operator doesn't have to care about any laws in North or South America.
(Just be clear, I don’t mean literal website ads, I mean posts that advertise products and businesses, whether it be obvious or not.)
The idea of empowering, democratic, relatively "low" tech that doesnt abuse its users has been expunged so effectively from the public consciousness (and tech journalism and others are so complicit) its not a mystery this new narrative doesnt fit
But maybe its a blessing in disguise. As the fediverse is still rather immature, too much attention from ill-wishers might turn the baby into a stillborn
It’s a UX problem not a conspiracy
It isnt just that, its also the fact that the media's conversation around moderation is childishly underdeveloped and nuanced. Moderation IS the hard problem of social networks, you cant automate moderation away, you cant not have moderation but any moderation policy you choose is going to have edgecases and problematic instances and the distortions those cause are going to threaten to overwhelm the spirit of the moderation (which is, dont be a dick). Also, people stuck at those edgecases (someone talking about their experience as a victim of an illegal crime for example) are going to get banned or silenced in extremely harmful ways.
The reason Mastodon is the future is that it attempts to solve this moderation problem by having many different communities with different moderation policies that have unique wordings, red lines for behavior and different moderators enforcing the established policies. When different communities federate, they do so on the basis of similar philosophies about moderation. When more and more communities with similar value systems federate the edgecases of any one particular moderation policy begin to become less important as a vulnerability or exploitation point since any one particular community is small and the shared spirit of the moderation policies ("dont be a dick) becomes more important as a guiding principle in moderation disputes. Also the red line of unnaceptable behavior is different for each community which creates a fuzzy region of more and more unacceptable behavior that trolls cant exploit the way they can tip toe justtt around the edge of a singular red line.
No moderation system is sustainable since it will by definition have edgecases which will cause problems or be exploited by trolls. No moderation isn't an option. Mastodon/the Fediverse is the third option nobody knew we had and really I have NO idea how corporate social networks with monolithic moderation policies projected across millions of people have any capability of adapting this innovation. It is the massive elephant in the room for corporate social media companies and yet tech journalism is still stuck on "should we have no moderation or a single moderation policy?" which Mastodon is FAR past at this point onto more interesting questions like how do instance admins negotiate moderation disputes? What does that look like and how can it be improved? There have been disputes between predominantly black communities and predominantly white queer communities on the fediverse and it gets absurdly complicated and nuanced fast but there is the capacity for that conversation to happen and different people to make their own choices and part paths (defederate) that makes Mastodon undeniably a far more advanced social technology than any other corporate social media platform where it just becomes person A is right or person B is right.
Its a radical paradigm shift: from adtech to modtech. Building platforms not geared towards user addiction and "engagement" but towards effective moderation and healthy communities.
I said that the fediverse is still immature precisely because standards and tools around moderation are still missing. E.g. the celebrated activitypub protocol, while a key enabler in other ways, knows nothing about it.
Its not a wild goose chase. Frictions and strife and trying to control others are core to the human existence and so are the antidotes. We just need to make sure that our social networks are no worse than the rest of society 8-)
Centralized services drove massive adoption of consumer technology (see: Hotmail/Gmail for email). They paved the way… via marketing, customer support, design, infrastructure (even OSS services will probably run on AWS), etc. That all takes big investments that OSS typically can’t compete with.
So it’s a good thing they paved the roads for which OSS can take over.
All services and companies eventually stagnate or mess up, with rare exceptions. If OSS can eventually mature enough to legitimately compete in terms of UX/UI/features then there will always be opportunities in the various market to transition in that direction.
People haven’t been trained or brainwashed to hate OSS, they just saw what was offered and aren’t willing the make the various sacrifices that typically come with most services like Mastodon. At least until the gap in offerings narrows.
People also got the concept of emails quite easily way before gmail existed or hotmail was popular. I don't think having a lot of providers was much of an issue. A lot of people still use providers which are not as big as google or hotmail, at least where I live.
So I wonder if centralization was really something that helped people that much or it was more of a business strategy that was efficient for quick growth and that is the reason we are in this situation.
I want it to work and be successful, but trying to think of is anything but a curiosity until it’s more user-friendly for non-techies is a pretty fair argument…
Try explaining to your mom why she needs to sign up again on a different URL, its no walk in the park (especially if you want to keep your old ‘tweets’ via backups):
https://nerdschalk.com/how-to-switch-servers-on-mastodon-eve...
If Mastodon grows bigger and blacklists grow, it could easily Balkanize, and it will be clear it’s more of a competitor or add-on to existing niche forums/communities. Something not really in the spirit of public social networks like Twitter. Which is totally fine, just different.
…assuming they figure out the UX/UI issues to help it “cross the chasm” (which I’m skeptical will happen soon, that usually takes core leadership, good design is rarely tacked on afterwards). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm?wprov=sfti1
Maybe do a bit of research and don't sign up at shitty instances? The only reason I have seen for blocking instances if they're alt-right, racist, transphobic or harassing people
How different is this from explaining switching from AOL to GMail?