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An EXTREMELY Simple Guide to Mastodon (for when someone says it's too complicated to catch on)
(www.staygrounded.online)
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Fediverse
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Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
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The problem a lot of people have with it is in Steps 1 and 2.
Step 1: download an app. There are so many now, it's hard to tell them apart and decide which one is better or worse. The official mobile one is OK for most, but there are half a dozen others and no easy way to pick one over the other.
Step 2: Create an account. Turns out that decision is where people get stuck the most. Which server should they choose? One based on their interests, their location, where other exiles from their previous social network went, or go for a big one like mastodon.social? And since you can create more than one on a different server, should you create more than one before you get going? So many decisions.
Finally, let's say you've gone through both steps and are finally on. How do you get followers, or decide who to follow?
Itt's all good once you've jumped in, gone through a week of confusion, missed all the people you used to follow because they're too scared to leave and FOMO. Then you realize following a hashtag is a good thing, but it brings in a lot of people spamming it (try following #press to get news) so now you have to start muting accounts.
Now put yourself in the shoes of an old auntie fed up with the crap on other sites and how they can navigate all this.
Until the onboarding experience -- from zero to where you're enjoying the experience and not feeling like every step is a potential cowpie -- is streamlined, people will keep saying it's hard.
I'm a big fan, btw, and have pretty much cut out all other social networks, but I don't think my auntie would enjoy it quite as much.
That's the thing
Every new user should by default download the official Mastodon app and make a mastodon.social account.
Any other choice should be under an expandable Advanced or Custom Account Creation.
Techies claiming to have to idea what the problem is are really revealing a serious lack of intelligence.
People are primates. Chimps with language.
You've seen the video of the chimp browsing Instagram. That's what the user is like. That's how easy you need to make the UX.
Largely, they're clueless with simple motivations. They don't care about helping the fediverse be a viable and growing competitor to corporate social media. They don't share your goal, they don't care, they won't suffer through even the slightest inconvenience for this.
So make the decision for them. Don't present them with the list of choices unless they specifically ask for it.
Put horse blinders on them.
They need it.
I could've sworn Mastodon's official app signs you up to m.s as the default instance now? I remember there being a massive roar on their GitHub when they started pushing the change.
Did it get rolled back?
No, it does. Sign up is extremely straightforward now. All things involving federation are essentially optional on the official app.
Yes my thoughts exactly. When email was too confusing ISPs included it pre-configured as a perk initially and Gmail came later.
My feelings in regards to social media are stop the bleeding first, remove society's dependence on X, Meta, and other for-profit platforms. Then we can worry about educating "normal" people on Federation, ActivityPub, etc.
ISPs included email because almost everyone was a modem user (and hence only connected sporadically) and email servers need constant uptime or they lose messages.
They also ran news servers and hosted user web pages for basically the same reason.
Only freaks and weirdos (like me) ran servers from home.