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Bluesky is finally open to everyone. But will anyone come? We ask its CEO.
(www.businessinsider.nl)
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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Technology
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Most people are pointed to joinmastodon.org first and have to pick an instance. And since they're not familiar with decentralization, they don't understand what that means. It's especially weird that they can't directly join mastodon on the site called "joinmastodon" but have to go to another site.
Then once you get past that to make an account, you have to find people and discovery has always been one of the worst aspects of the fediverse. And the graph of instance blocks means a new user may not even be able to find the people they care about and they won't know why.
If you know all this, its easy to understand. But for people used to a centralized system and unaware of all the intricacies of the network, there's a lot of snags here.
Yep exactly this. I'm pretty tech oriented and even I was confused about the concept of instances at first.
How is this different than Twitter?
If you know the person's twitter handle, its simple to search for them. People coming from centralized systems, don't realize that you have to include the domain for fediverse searches to work. I couldn't just find you by searching for p03locke, I'd have to search for @[email protected].
Also, if my instance has never interacted with you, your profile probably won't show posts when I find you (though this is a choice and I don't know why implementations won't fix it.)
Again, instance blocks makes this more complicated because my instance could block yours or yours could block mine and that would prevent this search from working but the user wouldn't know that.
I literally just searched "p03locke" from mastodon.social and found them in one step.
If your instance is already aware of that user, you don't need the domain. Mastodon.social is the oldest mastodon instance and probably the biggest, so it is aware of a large majority of the fediverse.
I just logged in to two smaller instances where I have accounts, anticapitalist.party and mastodon.xyz. I found them in one step and I could see their posts and replies on both of them.
Again, both of those are older, more established instances so its more likely they are already aware of any given user.
And a lemmy user probably isn't the best test for this, because of how lemmy works. If anybody on the instances follows a lemmy community, all posts and comments in that community will make it to the instance. Which means lemmy users are probably spread around the fediverse more than users of other software.
Your point about Joinmastodon is too true. It's a terrible starting point for someone who just wants to test the waters: "I have to learn about an entirely new type of digital networking AND commit to an instance? I bet Bluesky doesn't have all these layers of obfuscation."
It would be easier if the community would just agree that there is a default instance with open enrollment—preferably the biggest and mosy popular, or at least one that's maintained by a group with staying power—and just send all the newbies there. If they want to dig deeper, nothing's stopping them, but that way their first impression isn't analysis paralysis.
To your other points:
for discovery, there are the usual methods: trending, hashtags, the search, and people sharing their usernames elsewhere.
I assume that people who are making the hard decision to leave the site where they know all the people they want to follow already are, are also prepared to accept some amount of loss to that pool. It happens all the same whether it's Threads or Mastodon