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The past few days' discussion of federated social networking have really brought out the... I don't know how to describe them, KPI-brained people? If you've wor

The past few days' discussion of federated social networking have really brought out the... I don't know how to describe them, KPI-brained people? If you've worked in social networking UX for the past decade your entire professional experience & perception of norms have been geared toward funneling people into the optimal mould to which to sell advertisers the right to manipulate them. That's it! All the frictionless stuff isn't about making peoples' lives better, or "delighting" them, or whatever. It's to ensure as many people as possible are available as grist for the manipulation mill. Myopic, this makes the UX actually very bad. I don't need to rant about all the consent-disregarding stuff we've all seen ("Do you want to enable bad thing? Yes/Ask me later") but fundamentally I don't think we should care about the opinions of anyone applying their corporate UX reasoning skills against the idea of federation, appealing to some prescriptive sense of what people care about.

phailhaus 4y ago
Here's a recent BBC article about Mastodon: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63534240 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63534240 Notice how much trouble it has trying to explaining it, going as far as to include a tweet making a joke about how complicated it is. Mastodon is more often than not just described as Twitter, but more complicated. I would posit that both Twitter and Mastodon have terrible UX. But everyone understands Twitter. This is a real problem that federated platforms need to solve before they can be seen as viable alternatives to centralized social media. One of the biggest concerns about Twitter right now is consistent content moderation, but Mastodon proudly claims that it has none. Why should people switch?
- ahelwer 4y ago
  Peoples' understanding grows and changes over time. There was a time when the concept of signing up for an interactive website was unknown to the entire world (the advent of this understanding was called Web 2.0). You can find similar BBC articles from that era. I'm not going to argue why people "should" switch to Mastodon because that's up to them. It's there if they finally get frustrated enough being abused by twitter to look up how to switch. It seems like quite a lot of people are feeling that lately, which is why we're having these discussions. It's also untrue that mastodon "proudly has no" content moderation, and I'm sure you know this.
  - phailhaus 4y ago
    Mastodon is in trouble if it still has a communication problem in late-2022. It's had 6 years to refine its experience, and apparently is still unable to capitalize on Twitter's missteps.
    - ahelwer 4y ago
      I don't know how 30% overnight growth means it is in trouble. I don't know how a service that isn't geared toward profit is in trouble from a lot more people using it and learning about it. I really, honestly don't know what you mean by that.
      - phailhaus 4y ago
        Basically, Mastodon still can't explain in layman's terms how users should think about its federated model, or why they should care. This 30% bump is driven entirely by short-term drama around Twitter. I bet you that in the next few months, you will see Mastodon's DAU's drop back to around what it was before this whole mess. The biggest reason for this is that, as you yourself said, Twitter's UX is terrible but Mastodon is almost identical. So why switch?
        ahelwer 4y ago
        Thankfully laypeople will always continually excel beyond your professional opinion that they can't understand how to log into one of several websites.
        phailhaus 4y ago
        Again, why should users switch to Mastodon if the UI is identical? You made some good points about Twitter's UX being terrible due to their focus on advertisers, but it looks like Mastodon is literally trying to be a Twitter knock-off. What's the benefit?

phailhaus 4y ago

Here's a recent BBC article about Mastodon: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63534240 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63534240 Notice how much trouble it has trying to explaining it, going as far as to include a tweet making a joke about how complicated it is. Mastodon is more often than not just described as Twitter, but more complicated. I would posit that both Twitter and Mastodon have terrible UX. But everyone understands Twitter. This is a real problem that federated platforms need to solve before they can be seen as viable alternatives to centralized social media. One of the biggest concerns about Twitter right now is consistent content moderation, but Mastodon proudly claims that it has none. Why should people switch?

ahelwer 4y ago
Peoples' understanding grows and changes over time. There was a time when the concept of signing up for an interactive website was unknown to the entire world (the advent of this understanding was called Web 2.0). You can find similar BBC articles from that era. I'm not going to argue why people "should" switch to Mastodon because that's up to them. It's there if they finally get frustrated enough being abused by twitter to look up how to switch. It seems like quite a lot of people are feeling that lately, which is why we're having these discussions. It's also untrue that mastodon "proudly has no" content moderation, and I'm sure you know this.
- phailhaus 4y ago
  Mastodon is in trouble if it still has a communication problem in late-2022. It's had 6 years to refine its experience, and apparently is still unable to capitalize on Twitter's missteps.
  - ahelwer 4y ago
    I don't know how 30% overnight growth means it is in trouble. I don't know how a service that isn't geared toward profit is in trouble from a lot more people using it and learning about it. I really, honestly don't know what you mean by that.
    - phailhaus 4y ago
      Basically, Mastodon still can't explain in layman's terms how users should think about its federated model, or why they should care. This 30% bump is driven entirely by short-term drama around Twitter. I bet you that in the next few months, you will see Mastodon's DAU's drop back to around what it was before this whole mess. The biggest reason for this is that, as you yourself said, Twitter's UX is terrible but Mastodon is almost identical. So why switch?
      - ahelwer 4y ago
        Thankfully laypeople will always continually excel beyond your professional opinion that they can't understand how to log into one of several websites.
        phailhaus 4y ago
        Again, why should users switch to Mastodon if the UI is identical? You made some good points about Twitter's UX being terrible due to their focus on advertisers, but it looks like Mastodon is literally trying to be a Twitter knock-off. What's the benefit?