After Trump's 2024 victory, millions of users abandoned Musk's X (formerly Twitter), seeking alternatives like Jack Dorsey's Bluesky. The migration highlights growing dissatisfaction with X's platform, driving a surge in Bluesky's popularity.
I can’t imagine how much you must have suffered choosing an email client. 🙄
It’s been my experience that people who couldn’t figure out how to join Mastodon are the same people that get so used to doing things one way, that when you introduce a different way, they fall apart. Regardless if they’ve done virtually the same thing with different services.
Mastodon isn’t difficult to sign up for and use. FFS there are people of all ages and tech experiences who figured it out easily. I’ve seen grandmas who only ever used Facebook figure out Mastodon and teens who failed english figure it out. It’s not rocket science. It’s just not what you are used to when signing up for similar services.
Let’s compare on-boarding processes for Mastodon and BlueSky
How to join Mastodon:
First pick an instance!
User: What is «instance»?
Lectures user for 10 min. over what federation is, comparing it to email federation
User: Ok… but what instance should I use?
You gotta figure that out yourself!
User: picks random instance.
Now one of these things happen
Every thing goes well
They pick a small instance with almost nobody in it, complain that there is no-one there and leave or the instance gets shut down.
They pick an instance centered around something they are not interested because they had no info on what each instance is like other than a small description that doesn’t give you a good idea of what the average post is like.
No matter which one happens, if they stick around, things like this will pop up:
Someone will send them a link to a Mastodon post. They click it, but the link they were send was on another instance as such they are logged out. Thing is, they don’t know what federation is and most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. “Strange”, they think, “I could have sworn I was logged in”. Then they try to log in on the other instance… can’t and get confused and maybe even panic. “Did I just lose my account?”.
Now, with that being said, Email is still an example of a federated platform with mass adoption, and we should use it as an example when explaining the fediverse. But I would like to stress the following point: most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. Go different Email instances and they look distinct. Go to gmail.com and outlook.com and they look distinct enough so that people can intuitively understand that, although they are both email services, their Gmail account is not going to let them log into Outlook.
Mastodon instances on the other hand? They just brand themselves as “Mastodon” and that’s about it. They look identical! Just LOOK:
No wonder people get confused. The big instances NEED to look distinct for this to work. Otherwise, the federation thing will be confusing.
I made a post on asklemmy asking why people were choosing BlueSky over Mastodon and not understanding federation was one of the major pain points.
I didn’t suffer? I got my email in computer lab when I was a kid. I didn’t have to choose the teacher showed us Gmail. You get an android you’re prompted to create a Gmail. You get an iPhone you’re prompted to create an iCloud.
For your second paragraph that was the entire point of my original comment.
Objectively it’s not difficult in the same way starting a video game isn’t difficult. However, just because some people can learn the controls quickly, doesn’t mean everyone can. See: the video game journalist failing the Cuphead tutorial.
I can’t imagine how much you must have suffered choosing an email client. 🙄
It’s been my experience that people who couldn’t figure out how to join Mastodon are the same people that get so used to doing things one way, that when you introduce a different way, they fall apart. Regardless if they’ve done virtually the same thing with different services.
Mastodon isn’t difficult to sign up for and use. FFS there are people of all ages and tech experiences who figured it out easily. I’ve seen grandmas who only ever used Facebook figure out Mastodon and teens who failed english figure it out. It’s not rocket science. It’s just not what you are used to when signing up for similar services.
Let’s compare on-boarding processes for Mastodon and BlueSky
How to join Mastodon:
User: What is «instance»?
User: Ok… but what instance should I use?
User: picks random instance.
Now one of these things happen
Every thing goes well
They pick a small instance with almost nobody in it, complain that there is no-one there and leave or the instance gets shut down.
They pick an instance centered around something they are not interested because they had no info on what each instance is like other than a small description that doesn’t give you a good idea of what the average post is like.
No matter which one happens, if they stick around, things like this will pop up:
Someone will send them a link to a Mastodon post. They click it, but the link they were send was on another instance as such they are logged out. Thing is, they don’t know what federation is and most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. “Strange”, they think, “I could have sworn I was logged in”. Then they try to log in on the other instance… can’t and get confused and maybe even panic. “Did I just lose my account?”.
Now, with that being said, Email is still an example of a federated platform with mass adoption, and we should use it as an example when explaining the fediverse. But I would like to stress the following point: most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. Go different Email instances and they look distinct. Go to gmail.com and outlook.com and they look distinct enough so that people can intuitively understand that, although they are both email services, their Gmail account is not going to let them log into Outlook.
Mastodon instances on the other hand? They just brand themselves as “Mastodon” and that’s about it. They look identical! Just LOOK:
No wonder people get confused. The big instances NEED to look distinct for this to work. Otherwise, the federation thing will be confusing.
I made a post on asklemmy asking why people were choosing BlueSky over Mastodon and not understanding federation was one of the major pain points.
I didn’t suffer? I got my email in computer lab when I was a kid. I didn’t have to choose the teacher showed us Gmail. You get an android you’re prompted to create a Gmail. You get an iPhone you’re prompted to create an iCloud.
For your second paragraph that was the entire point of my original comment.
Objectively it’s not difficult in the same way starting a video game isn’t difficult. However, just because some people can learn the controls quickly, doesn’t mean everyone can. See: the video game journalist failing the Cuphead tutorial.
That’s not the comeback you think it is.
What do you mean “comeback”, this isn’t twitter, we’re having a discussion.