If email were invented today people would complain about how complex and annoying it is to sign up.
OMG another account?! Why can’t I just use my discord smh
In college I had to write a program to send emails. This was around 2012. Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from. There are obviously ways to sign the message and verify it and most email servers block messages that don’t have these because of how trivial it is to fake. It’s basically like putting a name tag on that says “Joe Biden” and everyone believing you’re the president.
I didn’t do anything malicious but I did mildly prank my girlfriend. I don’t remember what I did but I’m pretty sure I told her before I did it. I really didn’t want to end up getting expelled for “”“hacking”“” so I didn’t do anything remotely bad. The irony is the assignment wouldn’t have worked and been as interesting if my campus had the proper security measures to block the messages.
It could be that the web client for our email mentioned something about the sender being unverified and not to trust it but I don’t remember.
I almost got kicked out of school for this! I sent an email to my girlfriend from some girl that we didn’t like, saying something like “you’re a huge bitch, haha just kidding this is actually jballs not the chick we don’t like.”
Problem is that I wrote my girlfriend’s email address wrong, so it bounced back to the sender (the girl we didn’t like).
So I had to explain to a university dean exactly what I did and how I didn’t actually “hack into” the girl’s email account. That was fun.
Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from.
I remember realizing this and thinking it was weird too when I was reading about SMTP. Specifically, the MAIL FROM command.
Also related.
Spoofing email is hilariously easy. GPG signing really needs to be made easier
I sent my gmail address an email from obama@whitehouse.gov and it worked.
Most orgs have an internal SMTP server that will accept and send mail to other internal addresses without any special authentication or validation. It’s almost essential for automatic monitoring software and that sort of thing.
Where the barriers go up is at the border to the Internet. And thank goodness, just a couple decades ago it was sheer chaos.
I was on the school network, so maybe they accept ones from within and reject ones from outside.
GPG let’s you choose a email too. I always use fucktrump@whitehouse.gov as my email when generating GPG keys for dark net markets
deleted by creator
They probably tried to get back to you but used an internal we form that filled the from header with their email address. 💀
When it was invented, it was complex and annoying, even by today’s standards.
Still is if you’re not using a product like gmail or outlook that auto enters all of the incoming and outgoing servers.
How many of us have spent time on our ISP’s help page trying to find the damn STMP server domain?
For a small period of time I was a god that would bless people with gmail invites lol. That brings me back. I remember compuserve and Hotmail but I don’t remember them being especially complicated at all. Maybe that was before my time…? Which would be nice for once
Yeah, email existed long before GMail/Hotmail.
Tell me more about the before times oh wise one
Back in my day, we had to deliver each packet by hand! In the snow, uphill both ways!
Hotmail was already the easy-mode stuff.
Before that you’d get your email account provided by the ISP, and before that you’d have to find someone who ran an email server and ask nicely for them to make you an account.
And regarding ease of use: The reason why e.g. SMTP is human-readable is because in the early days SMTP wasn’t the protocol that your email client used to talk to the server. It was the email client.
You’d just
telnetto your server and type in the SMTP commands manually.
Using your email address as username is a common problem for a lot of users.
Some of them are even completely shocked that they can use a different password and don’t understand, that their mail is just their login credentials for this specific site.
The feature “login with Apple/Google/Facebook” exists for a reason.
I don’t get the email analogy.
People did and DO complain about setting up email. ISP email is a great example of this. People forget their IMAP and SMTP address configuration stuff all the damn time. Always have.
I used to do home IT, and I had to help people through that crap constantly.
That said, these days people have gravitated to clients like gmail or outlook. Those push the user onto a certain domain, which makes setup dead simple. This is what mastodon.social is doing now. Making it so people don’t have to think about the instance at sign up.
Yeah I agree email kinda sucks. But everyone still uses it, and (as far as I’m aware) people aren’t writing articles about how confusing email is for people and why that makes it a failure. Mastodon and Lemmy are, in comparison, much better and way less confusing but you see that said all the time about them.
When email came out the alternative product was the post office or a fax machine. Even though configuring a client was difficult for some, instant digital messaging communication was new. It was a BIG motivator for people to either figure it out, or hire someone like me to figure it out for them.
People are comparing Mastodon to Twitter, a fairly similar core product. The gap between email and mail was much wider.
Yea I’m with you here. I’ve done a good amount of things with computers and setting up email with clients and setting up printers are probably the two “what the fuck why is this so hard!” things I’ve had to do with a computer.
This is what mastodon.social is doing now. Making it so people don’t have to think about the instance at sign up.
TBH, I don’t find that all too bad. As long as users can easily move at any time, getting them set up on a popular one first where everything “just works”, they can learn the concepts and get used to the federation stuff. Then after some time, they may realize that a smaller server might fit them better and can then move there. Choosing a server without ever being registered somewhere (in the fediverse) was even hard for me.
As someone who worked in IT support at a university and later as a sys admin: I believe MOST people (including young people) can not use the internet or a computer when it goes beyond installing and using a (popular) app from the App Store.
Many people can not, for example, look up a program via search engine, go to its website, find and click the correct download link and then install the program. Many people don’t even use websites anymore, they only use applications.
Their voices are missing online simply because they are basically tech illiterate. And I think that is a huge problem.
I’ll add to this that most people don’t understand the difference between a service and a client. Yes, even though they use email, to them it’s just “my gmail” and they don’t think past that. They don’t know you can use different clients, or the web. They just don’t. It’s an app on their phone.
The reason the internet was so great in the early 2000s is that THOSE PEOPLE WERENT ON IT.
I’ve had the most confusing conversation when a relative referred to their browser (Chrome) as “Google” (which to me means the search engine or the company, not the browser). It was only when they later mentioned Firefox as an alternative to Google that I realized what they were talking about.
I’m sure it’s not lack of technical skill it’s a mental block, I’ve helped so many people set up software that is literally clicking ok a dozen times then they’re like ‘oh let me print this, hang on I need to compile a firmware update and flash it using a telegraph key…’ big brands have the shittiest software, but people feel they should be able to understand because it’s professional but something like an open source federated social network is nerd stuff so they feel the the shouldn’t be able to.
Case in point, I installed MPV on a friends laptop because VLC wouldn’t play the file without crashing, the install process is super simple but they have green on black hacker terminal output instead of a process bar and you type Y when prompted instead of clicking yes – it gave her anxiety just watching me do it, said maybe we should try uninstalling VLC and reinstalling instead… Of course mpv played the video flawlessly and used less CPU and ram doing so which warmed her to it. There’s no way she couldn’t have understood everything and done it herself but the fact it’s not as corporate as VLC would have written it off (and wow that’s a crazy thing to say, I love that there’s so much great open source software that VLC is middle of the road)
Definitely, some people have some weird kind of anxiety when it comes to this. I think in many cases they believe they aren’t intelligent enough to get it and that only really intelligent people can understand these things.
It is the same in math. It has this aura of being super out there. And, let’s be honest, it seems like some people in tech fields try to uphold that notion.
I try so hard to show people how to do things themselves when they ask me to help them with various tech…whatever, and almost universally get told “no.”
Magic rectangle take me to Facebook, if it doesn’t I need someone to make the magic rectangle take me to Facebook, and I refuse to understand it any further.
Their voices are missing online simply because they are basically tech illiterate. And I think that is a huge problem.
I’ve seen a number of polls on the age demographics on the fediverse, and they’ve all been pretty consistent … the fediverse is basically on average a Xennial place with a surprising amount of Boomer. There are younger folks, of course, more so on lemmy/kbin than mastodon it seems (which is interesting).
But generally, in line with your comment, there’s a generational filter here that attracts those who remember the value of and how to use the old internet and old computers.
Which, if you think there’s value in what the fediverse is trying to do (free our expression and ownership on the internet), is a problem. Another way of looking at it is that the failure of allowing big-private-monopoly-social platforms to dominate for so long1 will have long lasting side effects including the erasure of what the internet can be in many people’s understanding of the world.
[1]: I’d estimate 2008-2023 as the era of dominant big social, where the closing year of 2023 may be too early or even open ended. That’s 14 years. Which, if we take the web as having started in 1993, and being ~30 years old, is about half the age of the internet. So, it’s a decently objective approximation, then, to say that the web is Facebook etc, especially as the relevance of older things fades. Which only amplifies the harm we allowed to transpire.
Also … check it out … lemmy can do footnotes!! Click the
view sourcebutton to see how I did it if you’re interested.I don’t talk about age, though? As I mentioned in my post being tech illiterate is not necessarily a question of your age group.
Yes. Sorry if it seems I was distorting your message. I was just trying to draw a connection between different kinds of tech literacy and familiarity and how that might track with the demographics here and the history of mainstream tech.
Maybe a stretch, but also maybe I have a point.
No I do think you absolutely have a point!
That more young people than you would expect are missing from places like Lemmy I blame mostly on smartphones and tablets.
Over the last decades the numbers of students who own PCs/Laptops have dropped. When I first worked as a lecture assistant for computational statistics that was around 2011 almost every student had a PC or laptop and knew how to use it (to a different extent between them, of course).
The course is once a year, has about 90 students each time and, since it’s about statistics, there is a mix of students from different fields. Most are from STEM fields, a few from social science or psychology. I could basically watch tech literacy deteriorate over the years.
This years course had only a third of people in it who actually use a PC/Mac outside of the course. There was not a single person who uses Linux this year. For the university’s lecture platform or for online lectures they use their phone, tablet or a tablet computer which runs Android or iOS.
78 % of them did never write a line of code in their lifes, or so they say. The ones who did say they have programming experience often only had one of these “Learning to Code” Apps on their phones.
Most of them need extensive instruction and hand holding to install the programs we use (which is R and RStudio). You do not want to imagine how it is to teach these students basic coding in R. It is both my biggest joy and my biggest sorrow. The stories I could tell…
I highly doubt many of these students would find their way to the Fediverse. They do not think about privacy or freedom online because they are disconnected from the online world, in a way. They are simply consumers who do not feel as a part of it.
Reminds me of one time I was running a course in how to user git for uni students. Setting people up at the beginning, getting them just to install GitHub desktop, and someone puts their hand up having trouble installing the app. I get to them and see an iPad in the desk. Sighs, I explain that’s not going to work (maybe it does now?). They don’t understand why, because they can install so many other apps. I convinced them eventually. Not that I blame them, but it was interesting to see the user friendliness of a device basically block them from doing things and even understanding how that was happening.
For many with laptops, the course often became a gateway to the terminal and not finding it scary any more.
Also, thanks for your response!
Which is funny because if you open the App Store and search for Mastodon you’ll find an app you can install and will prompt you to create an account and login.
Yes it will default to mastodon.social or whatever but that’s a fine default.
Folks that say it’s too hard just don’t even want to try.
I saw numbers from some study about tech and people’s relationships with it or whatever and it’s insane how many people think Facebook is the entire internet now that they’ve had that integrated browser for so long. It’s just all they ever learned of technology, magic rectangle go to Facebook.
I understand not being “tech savvy,” a “hobbyist,” whatever - but I can’t fathom not bothering to consider how something I use daily works AT ALL. I hate cars but I learned enough to understand how to tentatively diagnose a problem and handle minor maintenance myself, but some people take their car to the dealer like 4x a year instead.
Is madness.
People HATE learning. It makes them feel stupid. So they just avoid it.
Hot take though, the unvetted exe downloads of Windows is why it gets such a bad rep for viruses. We really so need more of a repository system like Linux has. Normal people can’t be trusted to install their own software
Microsoft tried, they have the Windows Store and certain programs push you to use it, but UWP is an absolute disaster both from a user and a developer perspective so nobody wants that.
Microsoft took a good idea (software repositories) and turned it into a bad idea (software repository controlled by microsoft and you’re not allowed to add/install/validate other repositories).
They could have built (hell, even USED) apt, but they built Store.
The issue IMO was its walled garden ecosystem.
Given the number of people I’ve had to walk through downloading my store’s loyalty program app and set up their accounts, I’d believe it.
I had students (at university!) who, instead of starting the program, would either go through the whole process of downloading and installing the program or at least start the installer and installing it again each time they wanted to start the program.
i couldnt count how many times my younger brother has asked me to delete files for him
My brother is a grown-up with a degree in finance and his own company and he also isn’t able to do this.
He also refuses to understand that the photos he took with his phone are actual files on his phone. When he got a new phone and transferred his phone number he didn’t understand why the photos didn’t magically appear on the new phones camera app as well. (I think he was confused because he also uses Google Drive.)
It is kinda hard finding interesting people to follow. Hardly anyone I would have followed on Twitter is on Mastodon.
The fundamental problem there is that. Finding people and following them is one click on twitter, on mastodon it’s a whole busy thing. I can’t stand it
I just read through my feed, and if I find people that look interesting I click the follow button, it’s not like it’s hard, I have a really interesting feed full of cool stuff.
Sure, but I never had that experience. I just read along and then tried to sub to Charles Stross but he was on another instance and then I had to do some convoluted thing which is supposed to make sense - I never found that the thing was transparent and functional. Like I said, Lemmy works because the main thing isn’t following people. The occasional hiccup with instances is not a problem at all. But don’t get me wrong, it’s not really difficult to use mastodon, it just makes my blood boil
If I find someone from another instance in my flow I don’t need to do anything other than click on them and click follow. As long as you search from your instance, and not somewhere externally you can just follow them. Also the process when it’s not your home server it’s just a box where you enter your user name, not really convoluted. So I don’t see what you’re getting so worked up about to be honest.
Sure lemmy is easy in that way, and if you like it more by all means just use it :) Nothing stopping you from that, but you are playing up non issues as “infuriating”
I think the annoying part of this is when you stumble across an interesting account you would like to follow outside of your home instance. You have to copy the username and the instance address, search it from your home instance, and then follow them. Or, login from a popup window and then hit follow. Nothing too complicated or long, but I can see how some people see it as unnecessarily clunky. No idea how it works from mobile though, maybe it’s a little bit more complicated there too
Yeah, sure it’s a bit of a hassle, but it’s not like it’s complex or difficult, that’s what I meant compared to how often I do it it has not been an issue, after you have bootstrapped with a couple of follows, and keep an eye on the local feed it’s pretty easy to get rolling, and then just following interesting people that the people you talk with boost, or people that you enjoy discussing with. I haven’t added someone from a search in years, it’s just a bit of work in the beginning.
Well it seems a whole lot of people are playing issues up - it’s a small thing but it really matters. And I’m just saying what my experience is, no big deal - I prefer this sort of place anyway :) But I think I saw somebody made a browser extension which is supposed to solve the random instance thing, so that it always forces you back to yours or something
@MayonnaiseArch There are extensions which make it easier to interact with remote instances, like Roam With Mastodon. https://fo.llow.social/roam
Nice! This is cool
My Mastodon feed is filled with complete garbage and I’m not even in a small instance. It’s all people talking about what they ate or about subjects I don’t care about, people posting in languages I don’t speak, and bot accounts for small news sites I also don’t care about. It’s very hard to find useful content there.
I guess you’re looking at the global feed? I haven’t used that since my first few days. I’d start following people and using the Home feed. Then you’re not getting the everything-firehose.
Probably? Admittedly I’ve only used it on Tusky, the Android app, and not much on desktop. It has a single feed which it calls “Local”, which I assume is activity from the same instance I’m on. I’ll give that a try on desktop.
You can’t be following the right people then, I have tons of people speaking the 3 languages that I know well, talking about interesting and fun stuff, sharing things they learned and cool things they made. It’s all about curating your feed.
That’s the thing though, I can’t find anyone interesting to follow in the first place. I never was much of a Twitter user honestly, but I still decided to give Mastodon a shot. Maybe it’s just not for me.
I don’t know what stuff you are interested in, and yeah, it’s not a platform with algorithms that will push stuff that the site thinks that you will like on you, so you’ll have to do some work to find people you like. If you tried mastodon.social or some other humongous instance that doesn’t really have a culture itself also it makes the whole thing more difficult, joining something like mastodon.art or hachyderm.io or some other one with an a bit more focused theme will usually be a bit better for getting started since your local feed will not be so random.
Both are exaggerated, but fediverse apps absolutely need better onboarding and it’s a totally fixable problem, but not if the community continues to ignore it.
I agree. The issue is 100% UX
Personally I thought first impressions of Mastodon (and Lemmy) were abysmal. Being told to pick a server without knowing what that means or the consequences of that choice just scares people away. Unless someone has a specific server in mind they should not even be asked to pick one. Instead a number of existing servers should volunteer as curated core servers and new users are automatically assigned to one of those. There can still be a “let me choose” link that goes to a full list of servers if they prefer to browse them all
Pick randomly fir a new user, and make it possible to migrate later.
I think this is a decent take. Maybe certain trusted servers can opt to be “default” servers and new users signing up on mastodon’s default homepage are round-robbin’d into them. This can create a large burden of moderation on servers that opt into this, but it would be well worth it to turn mastodon into a user-friendly platform
Sounds like a good way. I have to admit, signing up for mastodon was a confusing mindfuck, and I’m not anything close to tech-illiterate as a reporter, and it’s mainly because of the process. It’s seriously crippled adoption.
people -> create content -> engages (including share) -> bring people -> create
same! I’m super tech-literate and I had real trouble choosing a server. and before that I had trouble understanding exactly what it meant (though the email analogy goes a long way). And of course I ended up regretting the server I chose and am in the process of migrating 😓
It’s apparently easy to migrate between mastodon instances, it’s an option under the Settings page, so they already got that covered.
After installing both of those I ended up setting them aside for a few days because of this. I’m glad I made time to work it out but yeah, Installing and signing up are not the issues.
It’s pretty obvious 99% of users bounce off the signup page. People who think otherwise simply are too disconnected from normie reality
Here is what happens
Let’s join this thing
I have to choose a server ? Ok which one ?
Wow that’s so many, is this important or cani pick at random ?
If you pick wrong, everything you write could be deleted or never seen by anyone.
Ok, well I better choose properly
Read server rules pages for 2-3 minutes
There’s a distraction
Later, joins threads
I wouldn’t even go that far to be honest.
server
“wtf is this”?
“I never had to pick a server for twitter!! What are they doing wrong? This is too much, I’m off”
And those who don’t, bounce off the fact that it’s not intuitive to follow someone from their user page.
Mastodon is not as complicated as it is sometimes made out to be, but it’a disingenuous to pretend that it’s simple, either.
there should be a service that redirects registrations to random servers from the “trusted” list.
Like nextcloud’s signup page.Yes, in a world where migration is seamless and preserves your reputation and relationships on the network.
Yep … agreed all round.
While decentralisation has advantages, the fediverse will probably have to learn the hard way that from a user perspective, without a layer on top that polishes the UX experience, it’s a net negative unless you’re a nerd and interested in it for its own sake. It’s a classic case of tech people making something that works for them and not for others.
The parts of the fediverse that are truly valuable IMO …
- FOSS platforms,
- diversity and experimentation of platforms and UXs and communities (all of which feed on each other IMO)
- Freedom for the user to chose and create spaces and interfaces in the ecosystem, which again comes from the above, but is something the fediverse is struggling with. Overall the user is a second class citizen on the fediverse and there is insufficient glue between the pieces for them to come together as a cohesive whole for the user.
I mean, both Mastodon and Lemmy have picked up enough steam that I don’t miss the corporate platforms.
The question is, do we even want the normal people? Their tech illiteracy is what lead to those other platforms being privacy nightmares to begin with.
The fragmentation that occurs as a consequence of this decentralised way of conducting social media is probably going to be the natural state of the fediverse for years to come. By its very nature, being decentralised, federated instances are not going to amass hundreds of thousands or millions of users from all (most) walks of life, and only appeal to those with a certain type of mind with nerdy, freedom-centric, and dedicated tendencies. By its very design, it’s not going to catch on most people.
And it wouldn’t have been a problem at all if accounts, their history, content, identity, relationships and reputation were seamlessly migrateable between instance. Whatever happens, you could just migrate to your own personnal instance.
But right now, while you can copy your old bulk text, you basically lose everything from what little of a migration you could even do.
All relationships are lost and you start back at square one. And that’s what makes choosing the right server important and that’s what bounces people right off mastodon and lemmy.
And it also drives re-centralization because one way to side step the problem is “just join the biggest instance”
Pretty much how it has been for me for both lemmy and mastodon. I think I went to the sign up page for mastodon several times in the days that it was blowing up, and I just didn’t know what server to pick, and even when was at the point of “I will just join one” I still had issues picking one because a lot of the site names sounded untrustworthy, or like specializing in a community I am not really part of. Like the one I ended up on gave me vibes of being for people into astrophysics.
I am also not sure if people would read the rules pages, but more skim them for keypoints in maybe 30 seconds. Think went that route with lemmy that I skimmed the rule of a potential instance and saw the rules and went “nope, not for me” and was back to step 1. Though this time I was more familiar with the rodeo and have made more users on more instances
There are benefits to having an extremely, extremely small barrier to entry.
To prevent spammers ? Yes To prevent grandma ? No
Depends on whose grandma. My own nice sweet grandma returned to life for some reason? Sure! Somebody’s deranged racist grandma who used to bring casseroles to the local neofascist meeting? No thanks!
You forgot the step where you write three paragraphs explaining why you want a server account and get denied because you didn’t supply sufficient detail for them to approve your application.
And yet, my server where this is policy is thriving. If it grew any faster than it has been there would likely have been even greater technical issues, and there has never been a lack of people to talk to. It’s almost like there are benefits to not letting people create hundreds of bogus accounts that outweigh the small cost to the user!
This obsession with growth is pathological. People have internalized the needs of capital and don’t even understand their own needs.
I disagree, it’s not as easy and normal as Twitter and Threads. Stop lying to yourselves. It’s Dev’s requirement to make it user friendly for the audience and they haven’t. Otherwise this wouldn’t be a thing people are saying lol. Devs and fanboys are so in their own bubble it’s why nothing thrives
What’s complicated about signing up for mastodon.social on the mastodon app?
I think the issue is that it’s not as hard as they make it out to be. It’s not plug and play but do they need everything handed to them ona silver platter
you’d be surprised. Present someone a choice between privacy and convenience, most people will pick convenience.
This is not at all surprising.
Yes
Is this a troll post? There are multiple shortfalls that make Mastodon harder to use than twitter for the average user. Here’s a great Op-ed explaining them: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/op-ed-why-the-great-twittermigration-didnt-quite-pan-out/
The tl;dr is that decentralization is no selling point for the average user and if the experience using Mastodon is any worse than using Twitter, people simply won’t switch. And there are numerous big issues with Mastodon’s usability that make it inferior to Twitter: That there is no proper way of exploring creators, that following creators is a hot mess, that Mastodon instances can block each other and thus make it impossible for their users to interact with each other. All those drawbacks come from being decentralized, while the only positive, not being ruled by a billionaire man-child, clearly doesn’t bother people as much.
100%. People here don’t think user experience and accessibility is important. Very weird attitude.
The average user also wants to have content shoved into their face with zero effort. There is a little effort to find content on mastodon and Lemmy.
I disagree. I’m super tech savy. It takes time to understand Lemmy etc. and get what you want. I’m not against this, but let’s be realistic, it isn’t as easy as Reddit for example. This is fact not opinion…
I haven’t been using it very long but I have not noticed any significant differences with Reddit for Lemmy. It seems exactly the same. You sign up, there’s default posts and there’s your personal feed where you can add and remove subs. Content is shoved in your face with zero effort. Response notifications in the top right. What is harder about it?
accessibility
Case in point: Quotes look too similar to nested comments.
To be fair, if you want content on Mastodon, you have to actively go out, find people, and follow them. After you get past that Step 1 of signing up, your home page is empty. There’s no algorithm that automatically deposits content on the main page. You have to do a little bit of work to get anything. As you say, doing this work is not that god damn hard, but sadly for about 80% of people (maybe more), this is an impassible barrier.
On the bright side, once you do get past this barrier, none of the Mastodon content that you are getting is from that bottom eighty percent.
Also the first barrier of picking a server (how it works, the rules of every instance, checking who they federate with) and an app (the will to test multiple apps, learning that to login you have to input the server url manually since most aren’t listed in the apps), to the people who read all the things it’s tedious but doable, for the rest it’s “Which one is the RIGHT choice?” and just stay at the door.
Also servers with poorly written rules don’t help (example: mstdn.mx says porn and politics are forbidden, but in reality they allow them as long as you tag then properly).
These kind of posts don’t help either, because it makes people feel like they are too stupid to join and rather stick to the known services, but omit all the actual process that someone has to go through.
to the people who read all the things it’s tedious but doable, for the rest it’s “Which one is the RIGHT choice?” and just stay at the door
Exactly. I’m a programmer and I do server administration on a small scale, but when I went to sign up for Mastodon my first reaction was, “How the hell am I supposed to know what instance I want my account to be on?” and I left. After a couple of weeks of absorbing random bits of information about how federation works I went back and completed the account creation process, but I really doubt that the average user who just wants to sign up for a service and use it is going to get past that step.
Apps need to automatically assign users randomly to one of the non-controversial general instances, and letting them change it if they want.
Lemmy and other fediverse clients need to do this too imo
I agree. The information should be easily available if they are interested, but end users shouldn’t be required to know about the underlying mechanics of the fediverse simply in order to create an account and browse.
Hmm, maybe if an app’s creator hosted their own instance just for accounts (i.e. with no posts of its own). That way, a new user can download an app, set up an account on that app’s dedicated accounts server, and start browsing all the other instances from there.
I really don’t understand what’s so difficult about picking an instance you like. Find an instance- Like the content? Rules look okay to you? Boom, done.
the will to test multiple apps, learning that to login you have to input the server url manually since most aren’t listed in the apps
I don’t get why everything needs to be an app. Mastodon’s (and Lemmy’s) web UI works perfectly well in a mobile browser.
I disagree, majority of my interaction with Lemmy and Mastodon is on a app on my phone. The mobile site is just okay. Let people choose their interface on how they want their content.
sure, but they listed testing multiple apps as a step people have to take.
I find it hilarious to watch people struggling with doing things on their phone… while sitting in front of their desktop computer. My phone is for taking calls, sending texts, and playing solitaire. Anything else can wait until I have a real screen available to read it on.
I mean… That’s certainly a take. A “real” screen? What on earth lol
I just mean a screen big enough to display a decent amount of information. Trying to browse websites on a phone when you can only see a little bit of text at a time, or you have to keep swiping to see different products because they can only show one image at a time… I honestly don’t know how anyone deals with the incredible waste of time. You figure a typical computer screen is at least 2-4 times larger than a cell phone screen, and many of us are running two or more monitors on their computer, and using a cell phone screen starts to feel like looking at the world through a ten foot length of pipe.
At the laziest level an app stores my login info.
So does a mobile browser?
Maybe handling multiple accounts is easier with an app but that’s beyond basic use
Not if your browser is set to incognito and/or you close the tab.
“If I take deliberate steps to inconvenience myself, I feel inconvenienced! Grrrr I’m so angry at this thing that I used to inconvenience myself!”
If someone explaining why they use an app instead of a website (in a literal comment thread about why people would prefer an app to the mobile site) triggers you in such a way that your only response is to make up an irate strawman… it might be time to log off, step outside and practice interacting with people like an functioning adult.
I think the trickiest part is finding people on other instances and needing to copy/paste their links in your home instance’s search bar before you can follow or reblog, especially if you’re following a link someone’s shared elsewhere. It’s a small nuisance, but it adds up over time, and it’s already more work than most social media consumers want to bother with. For Mastodon to truly take off, that needs to be automated or hidden, because most people are going to give up before they even get an explanation.
I’ve been at soo many jobs where they change something like timesheets to have an extra click when filling out and it’s always “it’s jUsT oNe cLiCk”, and then they’re inevitably sending out a company wide email three months later all mad that people aren’t filling out their timesheets.
@seansand @vis4valentine Yeap first thing they do is say test or hello… And nothing. Then they wonder why there is no one, or why only 1 tab with news especially non English speakers are dumbfounded. I just look at live feed if in mood> see someone asking for help or test> explain # and how important to use them to find people or be found qnd how only # works in search bar. I don’t blame them because not every top boosted post has # but a little proding, use # local language and voilà progress
It’s not that bad though, lemmy is worse but at least with relays misskey and Mastadon etc are easier to aggregate a starting list of content
I flirted with journalism before getting my degree in CS.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the faculty and many of the students were almost proudly “bad at math” and basically bad with tech too, other than learning the basics of a Macbook.
Doesn’t have to be that way and many journalists are smart, great people, but there’s a weird self fulfilling culture when it comes to tech. Not totally sure about how tech focused writers would be similar or different.
Edit: Just googling “journalists bad at math” and got this from the Columbia Journalism Review:
“In many cases, they got into journalism to stay away from math.” Journalists love to joke about how we suck at math.
Edit 2: I guess I was bringing up my experience to be an example of how many journalists do not have a strong grasp of technical concepts and sometimes are almost proud of that. So it doesn’t surprise me that many may have struggled with Mastodon.
That being said, that attitude is far closer to the average user than, say, the user base of this platform, which is likely far more tech savvy. Streamlined user experience is not a bad thing if you desire mainstream use and is something that could be improved, though Mastodon has been making strides in that regard.
It’s interesting to me how often “math skills” are conflated with “the ability to understand technology.” Like I’m passionate about HCI/social computing research, comfortable navigating the Fediverse, jailbroke my iPod as a teen, modded Civilization (DOS) as a kid — I’m also “just okay” at math lol, didn’t even take Calculus in HS. I wonder how many people (like the journalists you describe) feel discouraged from exploring technologies because of the false “math skill = tech skill” narrative, even if plenty of people who suck at math excel at understanding technologies!
(I also wonder how many people who “suck at math” don’t actually suck at math but weren’t given a good math education during school — but that’s a rant for another thread 😂)
I’m a software engineer of 10 years. I’ve had a few roles during that time. Sr Engineer. Architect. Director of Engineering. Not only have I almost never used any math every time I did I copy pasted the algo to use from stack overflow or similar tech blogs. I did terrible at math in HS, never took calc struggled with trig and graduated HS with a 2.7 gpa and never went to college. Who the fuck started this meme of programming === math. The only thing close to math in programming I’ve done is when I learned the basics of lambda calculus when I was flirting with learning functional programming
it’s because computer science is essentially a branch of math. it’s just that you don’t actually need to understand computer science to use a computer
One of those computer people that family/friends bug to do all their computer stuff here. Been the designated technology fixer person since the 90s. I’m absolutely atrocious at maths (funnily enough, given a terrible education for it in school).
I suck at math too. But isn’t the work of a journalist to at least double check? Calculators exist for a reason.
Let’s walk though the flow a typical user would experience:
- Search “join mastodon”, find joinmastodon.org
- Click “create account”…
SERVERS: Mastodon is not a single website. To use it, you need to make an account with a provider—we call them servers—that lets you connect with other people across Mastodon.
- 95% of users will bail at this point.
- Scroll down to the instance search UX.
- Too many options. Do I want “all regions” or should I pick my own region? Do I want “all topics” or “general”? 95% of remaining users will bail.
- Pick mastodon.social, sign up.
- Confirmation email takes 12 minutes to arrive. 95% of remaining users will bail.
- Confirm email, log in. Click search.
Search or paste URL
- Wtf does that even mean? Try entering “William Shatner”. No results. Try “Taylor Swift”. Top result is
@taylorswift13@hello.2heng.xinwtf? - Go back, click “see what’s trending”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
- Go back, click “find people to follow”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
- Close site, 95% of users will who get here will never return.
It is almost impossible to make mastodon similar of an experience as Twitter was. I used Mastodon and found it kinda boring so I didn’t even try. But I did want to use Lemmy since I am a Reddit refugee. I had a pretty hard time trying to figure out how to choose the best instance, where to find my communities (should I join technology at beehaw or lemmy.world?). I still somewhat get confused trying to wrap my head around the fediverse AND I HAVE A FUCKING COMPUTER ENGINEERING DEGREE. If you think that the average user is gonna confidently just make a user and not get confused at all the new concepts you don’t know normies.
I get this to some extent… On the other hand, none of that matters.
What instance to choose? Doesn’t really matter.
What community to subscribe to? Both! If later you figure out you don’t like one of them, just unsub…But yeah, I know normies seem unable to just jump in and see how it works. They just read “fediverse” and don’t know what it is so just reject everything that it’s related to because “it’s too complicated”.
For me personally it’s the FOMO, what if the technology board on that instance is that much better than the one. Do I have to sub to 20 of the same boards? Kinda annoying tbh
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It would actually be better to share / block comunities across instances instead of duping them and creating this schizophrenia.
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The fact you call users normies as an insult just shows how pathetic the user experience is and that you think people need any skills or whatever to access it. It SHOULD be accessible and easy for “normies” but using that term is pretty pathetic.
What? It wasn’t meant as an insult, I’m sorry it came off that way. I just meant people that aren’t tech savvy or that aren’t chronically online. And what I said is literally that people don’t need any skills!! They just get scared off by terms they don’t understand (fediverse, decentralized, instance…), but that in reality don’t matter at all.
I’m very tech savy, it doesn’t phase me, but I 100% think it’s not as easy as reddit, facebook, threads, instagram, etc. etc. Lemmy, Kbin, is NOT as easy as the competitors
I haven’t tried Kbin much at all, but it did seem different than anything I’ve ever used…
Lemmy I just made an account, followed a bunch of communities, and that’s that. IDK, felt very easy. Obviously IDK the average user experience, didn’t feel harder than Reddit though.
Mastodon as well, difference from Twitter was just that on Twitter I knew who to follow because it’s more established, but in terms of usability it felt basically the same…
IDK, maybe I got lucky. But that has been my experience, and when I made my accounts I had no knowledge of the fediverse or anything like that.
The solution would be importing a discoverbility algorithm of some kind, which the service seems very adverse to.
Anyone who claims the Fediverse is hard… just ask them if they use email. Is that hard?
I know it’s hard for tech literate people to understand but choosing a server is daunting. Most people chose their email because it was linked to a service they were already familiar with like Google and Microsoft. There’s no familiarity with the Lemmy or mastodon instances and there are so many of them that people who already have trouble learning new technologies get to deal with decision fatigue on top of that. People like what is familiar and having a service that mostly works the same is still very confusing for them.
That’s what bothers me about these sorts of threads. We represent a completely self-selected group of people who have not just managed to create accounts on the Fediverse, but then decided to stick around.
Of course we think it’s simple.
We do not represent “typical users” (whatever that means) of mainstream platforms, and yes, Mastodon, Lemmy etc. have a lot of work ahead of them to make themselves appealing to those users.
It doesn’t really help to talk about how simple the Fediverse is, or to shame people who find it confusing. The only thing that will actually help take it mainstream is UX work to remove the friction and make it as simple to use as we claim it is.
I agree that UX work is important but the current state that mastodon UX is in is ready for the masses. It is simple. It will just take some time for people to wrap their heads around it, just like it took time for people to adopt email, facebook, twitter, etc. UX friction isn’t the reason your grandma isn’t using mastodon right now. These things don’t happen overnight.
If users need to “take some time […] to wrap their heads around it”, the UX is not ready for mass adoption. It’s that simple.
I consider myself relatively savvy in this area, and I still regularly run into walls with random federation-related issues.
It’s not that simple. Twitter and email are both just as complicated yet they enjoy mass adoption. You and I run into walls because we’re not accustomed to it. When you were new to other tech I’m sure you ran into similar walls.
This meme has to die. Federated services are not some black magic.
I would have replied to this earlier, but my Lemmy instance was unexpectedly down…
Federated services are cool. They’re not black magic, but they have their own issues that still need to be handled better for there to be mass adoption.
Every day, though, these federated platforms are being developed. Different users have different thresholds for what they’re willing to put up with, and slowly but surely, more and more people are going to be within the expanding bubble of acceptability.
This meme has to die. Federated services are not some black magic.
Same goes for UX. Mass adopters don’t care about “technological superiority” if it does not directly benefit the user experience.
I am tech literate and even for me the choice of “which instance to register on” delayed my Lemmy sign up for 2 weeks. I eventually just signed up on 3 of them but now I have 3 different accounts each with their own set of subscriptions and favorites.
Aside from that, the Lemmy UI is a usability disaster and needs an overhaul. I’ve been thinking of giving that a try but I already have other projects that are taking up all my free time at the moment.
Oh, and then there’s the bugs.
The “which instance to join” thing is the worst for me. People here are claiming at the same time that “it doesn’t matter because fediverse” and “it does matter because you need to find one that you agree with their stance/philosophy/admin-decisions”.
I was thinking that for this to work, each instance should had a mandatory landing page with the “about us”, but this is not a solution either. How do you know that the instance has competent sysadmins? I’ve seen instances with exposed logs with IPs, private info etc. Its impossible to know and its literally roulette.
I have ended up having a different account in different intsance in each of my devices, which I actually enjoy tbh but claiming “just sign up” is bullshit. I may even sign up in one that the admin decides to shut down tomorrow. If I don’t know the risks of randomly selecting an instance it is almost certain that something will happen that will piss me off.
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It doesn’t matter what “instance” you sign up for with email, you’ll get all mail. But just the email for YOU. If you pick federated on Mastodon you get half a billion messages a minute and none of them are for you.
But that’s how twitter works too, so the concept wouldn’t be alien if you’ve used twitter before. I actually was pretty confused by how you’re supposed to use twitter when I first used it (how do you follow a conversation between multiple people, how do you find people in a certain field, etc).
I would argue that mastodon has a huge advantage over either email or twitter since it doesn’t bring any new ideas, it’s just a combination of things that people have been using for a while. It just “fixes” twitter, it shouldn’t have been centralized in the first place.
No, Twitter has an algorithm. As much as people hate them, algorithms are what make social media actually interesting. 99.99% of creators I follow on TikTok (for example) I would have never ever found if all I had was a chronological feed of messages.
@r1veRRR I was on social media both before and after algorithmic curation, and I find it no more interesting now (less if anything). YMMV.
Possibly an extreme take, but have you seen everything you need to see? As in, is there no need for you to discover and learn about new things, concepts, ideas, people? Sure, you can hope that something interesting pops up on your chronological page, but that’s a 1 in a million chance. You might say “just search for that new thing”, but that’s antithetical to discovery. How can I search for something I didn’t know existed? How many movies, games, books would I have missed out on without at least some algorithmic help?
For reference, I was around for the time of the forums too. It’s not the downfall of society to not have algorithmic recommendations, but it absolutely decreases discoverability of new interesting things, and conversely, the dissemination of important ideas. Sure, I knew about communism etc. before I started using TikTok. But only there did the algorithm give me great creators that explained stuff in an understandable way. Only there did I find out about coops, from an actual coop owner(?).
Going to play devil’s advocate and say this is similar to the early days of e-mail, and e-mail has since matured quite a bit. Normal users don’t need to worry about the intricacies of IMAP or POP3 or SMTP in general.
Idk, I wasn’t really around in those early days, but it’s my guess that the experience wasn’t as turnkey as it is now.
Similarly, we’re in the early days of the fediverse, and while it’s not as complicated as the aforementioned example, I do believe the experience is going to get more and more streamlined as time goes on, just as it did with email.
At the moment I’m just glad they don’t charge for use the way old email did, and in some cases, still do
Hey sorry I deleted my comment b/c I realized it was basically the same as the top comment. But since you replied, what I said was: “Anyone who claims the Fediverse is hard… just ask them if they use email. Is that hard?”.
And yea to be fair, it’s not just federation that makes it hard. There are still some missing features that could smooth over the complexities of federation.
I can kinda get it. There are tons of servers, all with different rules, and I’m guessing some don’t federate with eachother. I compared ~20 servers rules and how fast they loaded before chosing one.
Search sucks. Home feed is only chronological, so you need be careful about who you follow. I.e. if you follow someone that posts important stuff, but only weekly, it will get drowned out by following people that post every hour. Then there’s the weird design issue that all replies aren’t necessarily synced between servers, which is unituitive.
Mastodon needs to implement some kind of better search, and a better algorithm for the home feed, and make it the default.
Journalists are just going to go where the most people are because it’s their job to self-promote.
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Thanks didn’t realize that.
I’m a software engineer with a decade of experience, and I’m frustrated by the experience so far. Bad UX is bad UX.
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Yeah I tried Mastodon a while back and while I absolutely could have finished figuring it out, I didn’t encounter anything interesting enough in my time poking around to encourage me to stay there. While the general concepts behind navigating a federated community are still kinda foreign to me, I was able to get up and running on Lemmy with much more ease and quickly start finding content that was interesting to me.
It’s open source and community-developed, send a pull request for how you want it improved.
