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For social media to be social it needs people. While I have hope for the future, current fediverse offerings don’t meet people’s basic social media usability ne

For social media to be social it needs people. While I have hope for the future, current fediverse offerings don’t meet people’s basic social media usability needs. People use social media because it’s fun, it fosters connection with people they know, delivers information about news/hobbies etc., helps people find communities with shared interests and experiences, and most importantly, does it all in one easy-to-use place. Everybody knows there are better sources for everyday news than Twitter but if they’re already there interacting with people about the game last night… More importantly, it’s all conceptually easy for users to understand. You’re on Facebook, your friend is on Facebook, you find your friend on Facebook and you can interact on Facebook. If there was a bunch of Facebooks and your friends are in a different Facebook that doesn’t talk to your Facebook and the Recipe Facebook your friend likes is kinda janky and doesn’t always show up when you search for it… your average user would stop using social media altogether if that was their only option. It can be hard for developers to imagine that, but what if it was a different realm of expertise? Imagine you had to have a rudimentary understanding of mail routing to know which post office you needed to use to mail each package and it was only conceptually documented for people who worked in the postal industry and each paragraph required background knowledge you didn’t have? You’d probably just suck it up and use UPS, especially if it was the same price. If someone wants a recipe for French onion soup, they want a recipe — not a culinary school text book chapter on soup. How much documentation or theoretical background knowledge does your average netizen need to use Facebook? Zero. None. That doesn’t even get into the whole branding aspect. Like it or not, appeal is a prerequisite and not a bolt-on feature for a social media network. People like feeling competent and hip and hate uncertainty. They don’t want to wonder if their friends on the other mastodon and the other friend on the other other mastodon can smell, er, see their toot. We can’t sell non-technical people on technical capability. While there are technical components to this problem, the solution will not be entirely technical. We need to give them a compelling experience first, and make that work on the tech side. Unless you really only want people in your fediverse who get satisfaction out of wrangling clunky software, that’s just the way it is.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
I don't think the branding issue is too hard to overcome. The Mastodon and Mastodon-clone interfaces are often very similar to Twitter so just minor verbiage changes should be sufficient to improve the UX. On the other points though, I agree. Fundamentally a social network has _everyone_ on it. The Fediverse as it is now is a collection of small and medium communities. On top of this there's lots of drama in the Fediverse. The relationship that Fediverse instances have with each other is constantly changing and many of the smaller instance owners aren't exactly the most consistent mods/admins (kind of like IRC mods back in its heyday.) There's a certain kind of person that enjoys this kind of fluid, unprofessional (e.g. run by amateur staff, not a knock on the community at large) community, but it's not the experience most people who like social media are looking for. If you're interested in trying the Fediverse I highly recommend peeking inside at the fun and chaos but if you're looking to replace traditional social media, I'd say look elsewhere.
- DrewADesign 5y ago
  > minor verbiage changes should be sufficient to improve the UX. This is going to sound flippant but I really don’t mean it to be— this is why FOSS alternatives will remain alternatives. While both related to design, branding/identity serves a fundamentally different purpose than UI design which is distinct from UX. Being similar to something else makes branding much more difficult, but branding is critical for social media. You seem not to totally grok the utility of any of those things— which is totally fine because it’s not your job, but that’s exactly why developers never, ever make these decisions in mature, accountable product development organizations. I’m not saying designers are fundamentally more useful — If FOSS projects were primarily run by groups of designers who were as dismissive about technical improvements as developers are about design, you’d have a shitload of super duper slow electron apps that are all super neat and give you just the right controls to solve your problem but do a terrible job at it, at best… and we’d all still be using CLI utilities from the original system V. > if you're looking to replace traditional social media, I'd say look elsewhere. Right now, sure. That’s the problem. Luckily, you can have your own corner of the internet that will be exactly like that even if someone builds something on the Fediverse that’s also useful to people who don’t regularly read man pages. Though I’m not interested in inter-fora drama, I am quite concerned by the very real ways for-profit no-pay social media shapes our culture and world events. Many people in the FOSS world position various Fediverse offerings as our savior from the ills of social media and seem utterly baffled by the lack of mainstream adoption, assuming it’s a matter of marketing or some other money-related corporate magic. It’s not. Just like Gimp and every other major user-facing FOSS application that managed to remain an “alternative” despite a giant demand and the technical capability to cater to it— they only really cared if horrible-UI-tolerant developers found it usable.
AlexandrB 5y ago
> delivers information about news On the contrary, I think this is one thing that turns social media toxic. A lot of news is inherently political and having news on the same platform as social interaction means a lot of social interaction will be about the news. Communities focused on hobbies (e.g. forums) tend to stay a lot more civil.
- DrewADesign 5y ago
  Yep. Unfortunately it is still an extremely important use case and users won’t likely choose something that doesn’t address one of their use cases unless it’s very, very compelling in other ways — e.g. Instagram.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago

I don't think the branding issue is too hard to overcome. The Mastodon and Mastodon-clone interfaces are often very similar to Twitter so just minor verbiage changes should be sufficient to improve the UX. On the other points though, I agree. Fundamentally a social network has _everyone_ on it. The Fediverse as it is now is a collection of small and medium communities. On top of this there's lots of drama in the Fediverse. The relationship that Fediverse instances have with each other is constantly changing and many of the smaller instance owners aren't exactly the most consistent mods/admins (kind of like IRC mods back in its heyday.) There's a certain kind of person that enjoys this kind of fluid, unprofessional (e.g. run by amateur staff, not a knock on the community at large) community, but it's not the experience most people who like social media are looking for. If you're interested in trying the Fediverse I highly recommend peeking inside at the fun and chaos but if you're looking to replace traditional social media, I'd say look elsewhere.

DrewADesign 5y ago
> minor verbiage changes should be sufficient to improve the UX. This is going to sound flippant but I really don’t mean it to be— this is why FOSS alternatives will remain alternatives. While both related to design, branding/identity serves a fundamentally different purpose than UI design which is distinct from UX. Being similar to something else makes branding much more difficult, but branding is critical for social media. You seem not to totally grok the utility of any of those things— which is totally fine because it’s not your job, but that’s exactly why developers never, ever make these decisions in mature, accountable product development organizations. I’m not saying designers are fundamentally more useful — If FOSS projects were primarily run by groups of designers who were as dismissive about technical improvements as developers are about design, you’d have a shitload of super duper slow electron apps that are all super neat and give you just the right controls to solve your problem but do a terrible job at it, at best… and we’d all still be using CLI utilities from the original system V. > if you're looking to replace traditional social media, I'd say look elsewhere. Right now, sure. That’s the problem. Luckily, you can have your own corner of the internet that will be exactly like that even if someone builds something on the Fediverse that’s also useful to people who don’t regularly read man pages. Though I’m not interested in inter-fora drama, I am quite concerned by the very real ways for-profit no-pay social media shapes our culture and world events. Many people in the FOSS world position various Fediverse offerings as our savior from the ills of social media and seem utterly baffled by the lack of mainstream adoption, assuming it’s a matter of marketing or some other money-related corporate magic. It’s not. Just like Gimp and every other major user-facing FOSS application that managed to remain an “alternative” despite a giant demand and the technical capability to cater to it— they only really cared if horrible-UI-tolerant developers found it usable.

AlexandrB 5y ago

> delivers information about news On the contrary, I think this is one thing that turns social media toxic. A lot of news is inherently political and having news on the same platform as social interaction means a lot of social interaction will be about the news. Communities focused on hobbies (e.g. forums) tend to stay a lot more civil.

DrewADesign 5y ago
Yep. Unfortunately it is still an extremely important use case and users won’t likely choose something that doesn’t address one of their use cases unless it’s very, very compelling in other ways — e.g. Instagram.