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I used Mastodon for a while, and it was a pretty good experience. I guess I just found it wasn't my crowd; every other person with something interesting to say

I used Mastodon for a while, and it was a pretty good experience. I guess I just found it wasn't my crowd; every other person with something interesting to say turned out to be a "demi-girl otherkin fur-friend," or something like that, and while I am happy for people to have a place to do their thing — exercise your liberty, fur-friend! — I came to feel a bit out of place. It seems like its strong secondary focus on trigger warnings and safe spaces draws too narrow an audience to achieve wide adoption.

Angostura 8y ago
Similar experience, but I suspect it depends rather on which local instance you join. Unfortunately, while this is some respects a strength (find a likeminded server, have fun) it also adds significant complexity to the UX.
ColinWright 8y ago
That depends heavily on the instance you choose. There's much, much less of that on the instance I'm (mainly) on. And if they're saying interesting things, why do you care if they turn out to have a different lifestyle from yours? Pick a different instance and try again.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  But that defeats the whole point. Yeah it's nice that you can have your sub-communities but the value of Twitter such as it is is that it;s the universal default microblogging platform in the English-speaking world. Almost everyone who is important in society is accessible via Twitter, just the way that having an email address is a universal default. When someone is telling you that their experience of a product or service sucks, and you tell them to use it differently, you're failing to understand them.
  - ColinWright 8y ago
    I'm not telling people they're using it wrongly, I'm saying that Mastodon has benefits that they may not (yet) have realised, and that it's not Twitter. This is why I say that using both is a perfectly reasonable option. And Mastodon is not Twitter. Twitter does have some advantages over Mastodon, and if that's what you want or need, then great. But if you want a quality audience, Mastodon might be a reasonable alternative, and criticising it for not being the same as Twitter, or using the same metrics that you use for Twitter, is misguided. I'm not good at analogies - never have been - but let me try one. If someone tells me that their experience of using my car sucks and I point out that it's a stick-shift and not an automatic, that's not my failure to understand them, that's me providing information to try to help them get the most out of an alternative experience. Choosing an instance that matches your interests is part of the federated/non-centralised experience. It's different, and for some, like me, there is value in that difference.
    - anigbrowl 8y ago
      The thing is, the OP has already explained that the value of Twitter to their project is the large number of people on that platform. It's great that you find Mastodon valuable, I do too - but it simply doesn't have enough users to generate the network effects required. To build on your analogy, your distinction between stick shift and automatic in your car is not relevant to the person who needs a pickup truck to haul a large load. It misses the point of what the OP is trying to achieve in the first place.
      - jordigh 8y ago
        It does have enough users -- it just depends on which network you want to generate an effect. I'm able to have discussions on writing, on mathematics, on coding, on politics, and on society on Masto. It's not a ghost town.
- JasonFruit 8y ago
  There would probably be instances that I would fit into better, but discoverability is also a problem. I also had a hard time figuring out how to make multiple instances visible at once in a single interface, either on mobile or desktop; I'm not sure if that's even supposed to be possible. As far as why I care, it's because these interesting people very understandably want to talk about their lifestyle choices, and I don't really want to hear about it. (Just like how I'm okay with people smoking in their homes, but I find their smoke distasteful.) It made the signal-to-noise ratio for me a little too low for pleasure.
  - ColinWright 8y ago
    I'm not sure about having simultaneous visibility of multiple instances, I just follow the people in whom I'm interested, and their toots turn up in my instance. That's part of how federation works. Discoverability is a problem, one that people are working on, but you can find people and follow them, and then others on that instance over there can be safely ignored. And if there are people who say really interesting things mixed in with stuff you don't care about, that's a problem everywhere. There are a few things you can do. One is that you can use regex's to filter out stuff you're not interested in. Another is that you can choose to follow only people who don't talk about the other things, and trust that they will boost the things that you care about from others. But it's a social medium, so there will be a mix. You can control it to some extent, but I've found the tools in Mastodon to be much more powerful than those in Twitter.

Angostura 8y ago

Similar experience, but I suspect it depends rather on which local instance you join. Unfortunately, while this is some respects a strength (find a likeminded server, have fun) it also adds significant complexity to the UX.

ColinWright 8y ago

That depends heavily on the instance you choose. There's much, much less of that on the instance I'm (mainly) on. And if they're saying interesting things, why do you care if they turn out to have a different lifestyle from yours? Pick a different instance and try again.

anigbrowl 8y ago
But that defeats the whole point. Yeah it's nice that you can have your sub-communities but the value of Twitter such as it is is that it;s the universal default microblogging platform in the English-speaking world. Almost everyone who is important in society is accessible via Twitter, just the way that having an email address is a universal default. When someone is telling you that their experience of a product or service sucks, and you tell them to use it differently, you're failing to understand them.
- ColinWright 8y ago
  I'm not telling people they're using it wrongly, I'm saying that Mastodon has benefits that they may not (yet) have realised, and that it's not Twitter. This is why I say that using both is a perfectly reasonable option. And Mastodon is not Twitter. Twitter does have some advantages over Mastodon, and if that's what you want or need, then great. But if you want a quality audience, Mastodon might be a reasonable alternative, and criticising it for not being the same as Twitter, or using the same metrics that you use for Twitter, is misguided. I'm not good at analogies - never have been - but let me try one. If someone tells me that their experience of using my car sucks and I point out that it's a stick-shift and not an automatic, that's not my failure to understand them, that's me providing information to try to help them get the most out of an alternative experience. Choosing an instance that matches your interests is part of the federated/non-centralised experience. It's different, and for some, like me, there is value in that difference.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    The thing is, the OP has already explained that the value of Twitter to their project is the large number of people on that platform. It's great that you find Mastodon valuable, I do too - but it simply doesn't have enough users to generate the network effects required. To build on your analogy, your distinction between stick shift and automatic in your car is not relevant to the person who needs a pickup truck to haul a large load. It misses the point of what the OP is trying to achieve in the first place.
    - jordigh 8y ago
      It does have enough users -- it just depends on which network you want to generate an effect. I'm able to have discussions on writing, on mathematics, on coding, on politics, and on society on Masto. It's not a ghost town.
JasonFruit 8y ago
There would probably be instances that I would fit into better, but discoverability is also a problem. I also had a hard time figuring out how to make multiple instances visible at once in a single interface, either on mobile or desktop; I'm not sure if that's even supposed to be possible. As far as why I care, it's because these interesting people very understandably want to talk about their lifestyle choices, and I don't really want to hear about it. (Just like how I'm okay with people smoking in their homes, but I find their smoke distasteful.) It made the signal-to-noise ratio for me a little too low for pleasure.
- ColinWright 8y ago
  I'm not sure about having simultaneous visibility of multiple instances, I just follow the people in whom I'm interested, and their toots turn up in my instance. That's part of how federation works. Discoverability is a problem, one that people are working on, but you can find people and follow them, and then others on that instance over there can be safely ignored. And if there are people who say really interesting things mixed in with stuff you don't care about, that's a problem everywhere. There are a few things you can do. One is that you can use regex's to filter out stuff you're not interested in. Another is that you can choose to follow only people who don't talk about the other things, and trust that they will boost the things that you care about from others. But it's a social medium, so there will be a mix. You can control it to some extent, but I've found the tools in Mastodon to be much more powerful than those in Twitter.