Because Mastodon and the Fediverse is confusing, especially at first. I’m a techy person. I work in IT. But when I started to looking at the Fediverse back in 2023, it was confusing. Where do I go to sign-up? There are different services on the Fediverse? Which do I get access to? Do I need an account for each service? How do I know that this instance for this service (Pixelfed, Lemmy, Masto, etc.) is a decent one? What happens if my friends/people I follow are on a different server? Will we be able to interact? What does it even mean to federate/defederate?
These are all the questions I asked as I was looking to all this. And it wasn’t a quick 15min look. No, I spent a few hours looking into it.
But the average person isn’t going to ask all this and research this. They just want a place to follow famous people, post about their life, and post pictures of their food and pets. When these people (myself included) signed up for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, etc, they just went to the appropriate site and signed-up.
It’s not nearly as simple for Mastodon. Sure, Mastodon.social acts as the flagship and “gateway,” but there are still the other questions that probably need some answers. Otherwise, a user may have a bad experience (“Oh, my friends aren’t on this Mastodon server thing? And we’re not federated? I gotta make a new account there? Ugh…”). Twitter and even Bluesky don’t require those questions. Everyone is on the same instance, all the time.
The reality is that most don’t really care for options and choice. Or even security and privacy. They want ease of accessibility. Mastodon is likely a better product (in most regards; I have and use both Mastodon and Bluesky, daily; Bluesky does a few things better), but the options Mastodon provides, especially at the start, are really more roadblocks or offramps than anything.
I think beginners would find it a lot easier if “it’s like email” was closer to the start. But as it is you have to dig a bit before you get that particular bit of insight.
Where do you sign up? Wherever suits you. Posteo, Mailbox, Tuta etc; there are plenty of others. You aren’t limited to emailing those on your server, you can email anyone anywhere. You don’t need an account on all email servers to email people on those servers. It’s the same with Lemmy. You’re on beehaw.org, I’m on lemm.ee, and the next post down (on my screen) is on lemmy.ca.
What if you’re on Posteo but all your friends are on Mailbox? Well you can switch to Mailbox if you want but it’s not necessary. You can still email each other.
Defederation: if for example everyone on scammersunited.com is a scammer, the admins of your email server might decide to block email from that instance by default. Federation’s just a fancy word for people on Tuta to be able to email people on Runbox.
It’d be interesting if everyone “started” in the same place. For example, Mastodon.social. But then eventually, like maybe after 90 days, one was forced to choose a “home” instance to migrate to. Could be through a list of servers presented, or maybe a user has found one through friends, so they just type in the server and it kicks off a migration process. I’m almost thinking like an MMO starting area.
During that 90 days, the user has to (or should) learn about federation, why decentralization is important for privacy and security, what defederation means and blocking options, how and why instances are a thing, how to migrate an account, etc. Maybe even some info on how and why one could stand up their own instance.
And this doesn’t have to like a classroom/book setting. It doesn’t have to be “read this documentation.” Maybe some 1min video clips, brief tooltips, little reminders to read a brief paragraph of two on some Mastodon topic. Gamify it; let people collect badges and achievements.
During all this, users have full access to everything Mastodon users can do. They can interact with anyone on the entry server, plus any server that’s federated with it. Or maybe they’re an already experienced user and want to go straight to another instance; they can either skip all this and migrate or start straight at another instance.
Though I wonder if that’s still too much friction.
Because Mastodon works like what it is - 10,000 websites selectively cross-posting to each other - while trying to pretend it’s like a single website. Meanwhile, BlueSky is a single website with the potential to look like it’s 10,000.
The internet became 4 websites and a search engime for a reason: most people apparently prefer it that way.
Because the majority of people don’t actually know or care about what the fediverse is. They just wanted to jump ship and BlueSky was the convenient one for them.
We (generally speaking) also dropped the ball in putting a good first impression. When most of my Black friends saw that the Fedi was just as toxic-- if not more!-- than Twitter, they just stayed where they were. Because if it all sucks, what’s the point in moving?
Because Mastodon proved to be too hard for them to figure out. They couldn’t work out which instance to use. Then they couldn’t work out who to follow. Some people need to be spoon fed.
@skribe And there is no algorithmic feed. It’s way harder to “go viral” on Mastodon than it was pn Twitter. It’s also way harder to consume “exciting” viral content.
Also auto updating block lists and topic filter lists powered by crowdsourced tagging are very important features these day.
And customized feeds are nice for when you want to add an algorithm (or many different ones) rather than just the usual default list of all skeets sorted in order with no algorithm behind it.
… the billionaire proof version of Bluesky is … Mastodon.
I was really confused when everyone suddenly jumped to Blue sky after the election? Why not mastodon? Made no sense to me at all.
Because Mastodon and the Fediverse is confusing, especially at first. I’m a techy person. I work in IT. But when I started to looking at the Fediverse back in 2023, it was confusing. Where do I go to sign-up? There are different services on the Fediverse? Which do I get access to? Do I need an account for each service? How do I know that this instance for this service (Pixelfed, Lemmy, Masto, etc.) is a decent one? What happens if my friends/people I follow are on a different server? Will we be able to interact? What does it even mean to federate/defederate?
These are all the questions I asked as I was looking to all this. And it wasn’t a quick 15min look. No, I spent a few hours looking into it.
But the average person isn’t going to ask all this and research this. They just want a place to follow famous people, post about their life, and post pictures of their food and pets. When these people (myself included) signed up for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, etc, they just went to the appropriate site and signed-up.
It’s not nearly as simple for Mastodon. Sure, Mastodon.social acts as the flagship and “gateway,” but there are still the other questions that probably need some answers. Otherwise, a user may have a bad experience (“Oh, my friends aren’t on this Mastodon server thing? And we’re not federated? I gotta make a new account there? Ugh…”). Twitter and even Bluesky don’t require those questions. Everyone is on the same instance, all the time.
The reality is that most don’t really care for options and choice. Or even security and privacy. They want ease of accessibility. Mastodon is likely a better product (in most regards; I have and use both Mastodon and Bluesky, daily; Bluesky does a few things better), but the options Mastodon provides, especially at the start, are really more roadblocks or offramps than anything.
I think beginners would find it a lot easier if “it’s like email” was closer to the start. But as it is you have to dig a bit before you get that particular bit of insight.
Where do you sign up? Wherever suits you. Posteo, Mailbox, Tuta etc; there are plenty of others. You aren’t limited to emailing those on your server, you can email anyone anywhere. You don’t need an account on all email servers to email people on those servers. It’s the same with Lemmy. You’re on beehaw.org, I’m on lemm.ee, and the next post down (on my screen) is on lemmy.ca.
What if you’re on Posteo but all your friends are on Mailbox? Well you can switch to Mailbox if you want but it’s not necessary. You can still email each other.
Defederation: if for example everyone on scammersunited.com is a scammer, the admins of your email server might decide to block email from that instance by default. Federation’s just a fancy word for people on Tuta to be able to email people on Runbox.
It’d be interesting if everyone “started” in the same place. For example, Mastodon.social. But then eventually, like maybe after 90 days, one was forced to choose a “home” instance to migrate to. Could be through a list of servers presented, or maybe a user has found one through friends, so they just type in the server and it kicks off a migration process. I’m almost thinking like an MMO starting area.
During that 90 days, the user has to (or should) learn about federation, why decentralization is important for privacy and security, what defederation means and blocking options, how and why instances are a thing, how to migrate an account, etc. Maybe even some info on how and why one could stand up their own instance.
And this doesn’t have to like a classroom/book setting. It doesn’t have to be “read this documentation.” Maybe some 1min video clips, brief tooltips, little reminders to read a brief paragraph of two on some Mastodon topic. Gamify it; let people collect badges and achievements.
During all this, users have full access to everything Mastodon users can do. They can interact with anyone on the entry server, plus any server that’s federated with it. Or maybe they’re an already experienced user and want to go straight to another instance; they can either skip all this and migrate or start straight at another instance.
Though I wonder if that’s still too much friction.
Because Mastodon works like what it is - 10,000 websites selectively cross-posting to each other - while trying to pretend it’s like a single website. Meanwhile, BlueSky is a single website with the potential to look like it’s 10,000.
The internet became 4 websites and a search engime for a reason: most people apparently prefer it that way.
Once again, the problem can be traced back to DNS 😜
As usual, it’s computers’ fault.
Because the majority of people don’t actually know or care about what the fediverse is. They just wanted to jump ship and BlueSky was the convenient one for them.
I guess so.
In my sphere of things it seemed like people had already moved to Master don so it just seemed baffling to me
We (generally speaking) also dropped the ball in putting a good first impression. When most of my Black friends saw that the Fedi was just as toxic-- if not more!-- than Twitter, they just stayed where they were. Because if it all sucks, what’s the point in moving?
Because Mastodon proved to be too hard for them to figure out. They couldn’t work out which instance to use. Then they couldn’t work out who to follow. Some people need to be spoon fed.
And the name is fucking stupid, let’s face it
@skribe And there is no algorithmic feed. It’s way harder to “go viral” on Mastodon than it was pn Twitter. It’s also way harder to consume “exciting” viral content.
That’s a feature, but sadly many don’t realize that
Also way harder to propagate mis/disinformation to push an agenda. I personally see that as a benefit and not something I want to see changed.
People want to doomscroll though
Because it’s easier to migrate from Twitter to BlueSky.
Extras:
Overall, it gets a boost from a faster increase in network effect.
Also auto updating block lists and topic filter lists powered by crowdsourced tagging are very important features these day.
And customized feeds are nice for when you want to add an algorithm (or many different ones) rather than just the usual default list of all skeets sorted in order with no algorithm behind it.