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.
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”?
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.
Removed by mod
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.
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.
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 couldnt count how many times my younger brother has asked me to delete files for him
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.
If email were invented today people would complain about how complex and annoying it is to sign up.
Saying that times have changed doesn’t negate the fact that times have changed.
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 sent my gmail address an email from obama@whitehouse.gov and it worked.
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 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.
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.
They tend to portray everything new, different and/or popular with geeks as bad or complicated, I see this as a rite of passage for the fediverse. Remember when they were shitting on computer gaming in the early days of the hobby because of who it was initially popular among?
I still remember the “do cell phones cause cancer?” news reports that aired on my local news when I was a kid.
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?
They should try navigating Facebook
yeah the new Facebooj ui is so fucking confusing.
they don’t even think of their target audience lolFacebook is a fucking nightmare for people used to having control over their browsing.
Someone who hasn’t used Facebook for over 6 years, I’m still trying to convince my grandfather that I don’t actually know anything about the platform and that he probably knows more about Facebook than I do. cause honestly I don’t recognize it anymore
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.
Downvoted. Please don’t post just screenshots of toots.
Please post the text contents in the description for blind folks and a link to the toot for credibility.
Mods, can we please remove this post?
The problem is the paradox of “it doesn’t matter what server you pick” while also giving them a choice.
If choices don’t matter, why have a choice?
Although I disagree that it doesn’t matter
No choice doesn’t matterat all. However, the decision on which mastodon server to use for your social media is about as important as what you’ll choose to eat today for dinner. Yeah, kinda important for the dinner itself and you don’t want some crap, but if you do, you could just eat it anyway for now and try something else tomorrow.
or we make a few accounts on a few different servers.
we don’t need to identify with our fediverse accounts.
Meanwhile, when you sign up for Threads your timeline is nothing but shitty influencers for the first few days, yet somehow they manage to press on through that without getting the vapors or whatever.
My account never made it through the first few days before they shut it down for community violation.
I never posted, I just want to be ready for if they ever start federating.
One thing I don’t get. Among the gazilion “Oh, it is sooo easy to do this better” complainers are countless developers and designers. This whole Mastodon thing is Free Software, where countless people spent some of their free time and energy to give you what there is today. Complainer devs and UX folks, are your PR’s getting rejected?
So… Someone deluded says it’s super easy to sign up.
Someone points out that it’s really not for a non technical person. Let’s say that someone is me, and let’s say I’m a developer.
Is it suddenly my problem? Is it now my responsibility to fix it? I already have enough problems and responsibilities, thank you. I’m already busy with work and life. I got my own things I’m working on.
Fuck off with that attitude.
There’s no responsibility at all. There’s also full freedom to complain however you wish. If you do that on someone’s free work with which they try to help others, it just doesn’t look very good on you. That’s all.
i also love the “oh noes there are nerds on there!” concern trolling, motherfucker read the wikipedia page on who first adopted and built the communities on twitter and reddit
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?
