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Elon Musk Says Twitter Is Going To Get Rid Of The Block Feature, Enabling Greater Harassment
(www.techdirt.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Mastodon has a long way to go in the onboarding experience. Most non-technical Twitter users simply will not engage with Mastodon in its current form.
Mastodon right now reminds me of email before web-based services. It's not friendly enough to pull in the "normies". It needs a Gmail.
Pick an instance and sign up. I don't understand this take. Its literally the same as email and we all managed to figure that out when we were 9-11 years old.
Tell me you've never worked in tech support without telling me you've never worked in tech support.
@legion @TendieMaster69 Are you onboarding using the browser or using the official #Mastodon app? Onboarding online is a lot more understandable than onboarding in the app IIRC
In the browser. It's not confusing to me, but I'm a software developer. Millions of Twitter users aren't going to make it past the server selection step. And many that do are going to be confused when they click to Follow someone and get a weird popup (because that someone is on a different Mastodon instance) instead of instantly following the person.
It's nowhere close to a smooth enough experience for the lion's share of Twitter users to transition over. I think people that are used to even slightly technical things vastly overestimate what the average end user is capable of handling. These are the people that ask for help to plug in an HDMI cable.
I feel like the hurdles are kind of features. If your elderly parents can't figure out then they can't well flood it with trash. Reddit was the same way at first, oh so long ago. People weren't used to the format and users without any tech savvy were dissuaded from entry. That turned into a libertarian foundation. This time around the generations that are tech savvy aren't libertarians, they're progressives. So we're seeing a progressive foundation in the federation become established, and that's going to narrate the future culture here, just like libertarians narrated the culture of reddit for so long.
@legion Hmm. I would challenge anyone to go to mstdn.social for example and show me the onboarding friction.
Signing up for an account on a #Mastodon instance is quite easy, if you're doing so through the browser and go directly to the instance you want to join
When people say getting onto mastodon is hard I assume they must mean setting up an instance because even if soapbox and rebased are easier to use, it's still just signing up for a website.
I think people are intimidated by step 3. Don't ask me why, but for a certain type of web user, it's an absolute deal breaker for some reason.
Tbh it's capitalism. It teaches people to be afraid of choices, and to just take what the corporation is handing them. It's... disconcerting how pervasive this kind of convenience culture has become and what kind of effect it's having on people's lives
Fedi doesn't have an onboarding problem, people have a capitalism problem
that is an interesting point. when people are confronted with the choice of where to store their data, they just nope out
I don't think it's explicitly an issue with capitalism itself (although capitalism does use it to it's advantage). Decision Paralysis is well-known, and i don't see why abolishing capitalism would make it universally easier to make uninformed decisions
Yeah, having to actually choose a place to go was the main impediment for meto create a mastodon account in the first place. I kept stalling and putting it off, once I did it iwas easy enough. I think a lot of people don't realise at first you can make other fedaration accounts with the same email and how easy it is.
Except I'm I was not a big twitter user in the first place, so I probably should have started with one of the niche feds first, like star trek or the art one, those would prompt me to interact more.
The onboarding for Masterson is the best of all the fediverse sites but I still think the average internet user would get confused.
On one hand, Twitter lost 5% of its user base. It's not a ton. On the other, it's 15 million people give or take. That 5% is probably the sort I want to hang out with the most. Likewise for Reddit. 5% of Redditors are awesome and likely now Lemmy/KBin users. Those are the people I care about. It also allows for more quality connections when you have fewer people in your circle. Close connections are more valuable than more connections.
Yeah, all i want is it to be active enough. Having less users is a selling point to me. Using the internet way back in the day was the same way. You had to put effort in, and the people that are willing to put the effort in are less likely to trash the place.
undefined> Close connections are more valuable than more connections.
It depends. Close connections of subject matter experts when discussing technical topics? Sure. When doing general research or looking for alternate solutions for something, you need mass. The difficulty of onboarding users into a federated environment hinders this.
I meant from social connections not technical experts. Frankly social media isn't the place to get technical answers. It's typically not great and most of the time is a hive mind mentality. Even on Reddit or stack exchange. I've seen decades of questions in my field and the answers with the most points are the ones that match the general hive mind not actual facts. It's typically not worth it to get answers from social media.
Your experience may vary, but I found Reddit to have extremely helpful advice on a whole host of topics. Investing, home automation, and car repair/restoration just to name a few that I frequent.
It’s the ability to lose a question where thousands or hundreds of thousands of people will see and interact with your post. The answers aren’t always perfect, but you’re likely to get a wide swath of responses to review and glean info from.
I don’t need a doomscroller to keep me occupied. I want communities where people are engaged and connected. For that you need both close and a large “pool” of users.
5% of the mdau. So it's not a soft hit.
The Mastodon culture just isn't there yet. And it's a bit of work to actually use. Plus "toots" sounds even more stupid than "tweets" and I'm not sure it will ever really take off.
Toots is no longer the official term, which has been replaced by "Posts". Toots was always mostly a joke anyway
This is major news. I really hated that word.
To be honest, there was years of backlash to the "tweeting" and "googling" but both made it into the lexicon. However it's smart of Mastodon to just move to a normal terminology
This reminds me of the recent Behind the Bastards episodes where Robert reads the court filings of fired Twitter employees who continuously refer to themselves as Tweeps. At Mastadon they'd probably call themselves Tooters.
I've built up a community of folk on there, not all of whom have moved to Mastodon. They're the only people keeping me on there to be honest. I crosspost between the two for the time being
95% of the people or groups I would want to follow are not on Mastodon.
And frankly, the Fediverse isn't as user-friendly. It is a but tougher when you have to choose an instance, as well as learn how to follow from other instances.
One component of a system being "user-friendly" is that it must not sabotage or undermine the user on behalf of the system's proprietor.
Unfortunately, this means that proprietary systems rarely remain user-friendly forever, as most proprietors eventually want to sabotage the user in some way or another, and can rarely resist the temptation forever.
People dont change habbits easily