8 ms·

The fact that one has to pick from many different places to set up an account is a massive barrier to entry. Let alone the complexity of moving an account from

• KindAndFriendly 4y ago
  I politely disagree: you just pick an "entry node", similar to picking an ISP or an email provider. You can interact with everyone in the Fediverse just fine. Having a newsfeed for your chosen "entry node" is an additional nice-to-have imho but not the defining criteria.
  • _ph_ 4y ago
    Picking an ISP should be transparent - my usage of internet services, like with whom I communicate - isn't influenced by it. I can change my ISP any time and no one will even notice, no one will have to be informed about a changed address. Picking an email provider is quite critical - if you change your email address, you can be only reached if everyone knows your new address, lets not even get started about where the email is used to identify you with other serviced. I think your choice of a a mastodon server falls in the middle ground between those examples, at minimum, there needs to be a bit more education of users to overcome (perceived?) hurdles there. I can confirm that while I noticed mastodon before, earlier attempts to use it stopped at the question on how to select the proper node and what consequences that has. That might be a perceived problem, but one that needs to be overcome if mastodon should be a popular Twitter alternative.
  • stewbrew 4y ago
    No, it's more like picking your community. Compare an account on mastodon.social vs an instance localated in your hometown to see the difference.
    • the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
      What is the difference? From my limited exposure to Mastodon at the moment I don't actually interact with "my instance", i just follow a bunch of people most of which are not actually on my instance. Not sure what I would be missing out on.
      • stewbrew 4y ago
        You can use mastodon this way of course and ignore the local feed.
        • the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
          I mean coming from Twitter the entire idea of a "local feed" is already so weird. Why would I want to follow random people?
          • wrycoder 4y ago
            Because you happened to notice they were interesting?
      • toofy 4y ago
        yeah, the panic people are putting forward about server choice is really strange. my account is on a friends invite server and 99% of the people i follow and interact with are on all kinds of other servers. my timeline is almost entirely people from dozens of other servers. im not at all sure why people are panicked about this.
        • pwinnski 4y ago
          The key phrase in your statement is "on a friends invite server." Okay, so if you don't already have a friend on Mastodon, then what? Have you actually looked at the list on https://joinmastodon.org/servers https://joinmastodon.org/servers recently? Half the comments here say it doesn't matter what server you choose, and half are saying to be sure to choose the one that aligns with your interests, which... see the list above for why that's an issue. Panic? No. It's just an example of mastodon needlessly limiting itself in terms of usability right at the starting gate.
  • nr2x 4y ago
    If I own a domain I can host my email anywhere. I own the name, and every possible address. Mastodon does not have nearly the same level of portability and ownership. This is why I think AT is more promising.
    • toofy 4y ago
      > Mastodon does not have nearly the same level of portability and ownership. how so? its just a protocol, just like email. which concerns do you have that it is not as portable as email?
      • nr2x 4y ago
        I can move my email host and my mail keeps coming to me. Mastodon you need to set up some weird redirects from one server to another. It’s the difference between forwarding your Hotmail to your new gmail vs just swapping your provider and keeping your domain the same.
  • pwinnski 4y ago
    People "pick" an ISP based on price. They pick an email provider based on UI, or features, or price, or cachet. How should I pick an entry node? I go to https://mastodon.social/ https://mastodon.social/ because that's where people say things are happening, and I click "Create Account." I'm told I can't sign up here, but I can "Find another server" You've already lost a huge percentage of potential users, but let's say I press on. I click through to https://joinmastodon.org/servers https://joinmastodon.org/servers and see things like glasgow.social and metalhead.club. I'm neither Glaswegian nor a metalhead, so what do I choose? On what basis do I make this choice? It's immediately overwhelming, with a very real fear of picking the "wrong" server and somehow missing out on, well, I don't know, because how would I?
• nimbius 4y ago
  I understand coming from Twitter --where artificial choices are manufactured in order to extract value from things like outrage and fear-- it might be overwhelming to experience real choice for the first time. We made a tool for that, so lets help find you an instance youll enjoy :) dont worry, you can shop around for the right one, your choice isnt set in stone at all. https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/
  • MivLives 4y ago
    Except even that tool sucks. I can't even use the list to filter for things that are say... less then 1k users, have an uptime of 95% or higher, and have A+ grade HTTPs. Whatever A+ HTTPS that means, it's also not explained on that site. Hell you can't even filter on registrations and actually up at the same time. Sorry for the rant, my previous instance went read only, and I had to go find a new one. I know what i want and not being bale to search for it except by rough approximations was incredibly annoying.
    • nimbius 4y ago
      Then lets work to make it better! most of your mastodon stuff is open source. Reach out to the maintainer on Github and let them know :) https://github.com/TheKinrar/instances https://github.com/TheKinrar/instances
      • MivLives 4y ago
        You know, this is a good call out. I've been looking for a small project to work on and this is perfect.
  • nr2x 4y ago
    Yes, my problems with data portability are indeed evidence I can’t handle choices in my information diet.
  • falkd 4y ago
    It's nice, but I find myself saying "Don't care" to most of the questions, and I've got a huge list of instances as a result. I still can't really say for sure I'd be picking one I wouldn't regret picking later. I think the biggest questions I'd have are: - How do I know an instance is trustworthy and the mods behave professionally? - How do I know an instance isn't going to go down and lose my account? It seems like there's this "local community" idea where when you join a server, it's like a mini-twitter in its own right. It's a cool idea, but then it seems like part of the decision of which instance to join should be whether you feel like that local community is a good fit for you?
• tapoxi 4y ago
  Mastodon just doubled its active user count to around one million; it's already benefited. It doesn't need to replace Twitter to succeed, just provide value to its userbase.
  • mxuribe 4y ago
    Mastodon instances have certainly gained tons of new users...but, wait 'til some people learn that the fediverse has been around since ~2008, and the current numbers are far higher than *only "mastodon"*. For example, i'm seeing over 6 million accounts as captured before end of October: https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse/ https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse/ Of course, on the fediverse, no one cares about adoption numbers. :-)
  • colin_jack 4y ago
    I think it’d be better to judge it once those users have had a little time to try it. I signed up but couldn’t find anyone to follow, found the lack discoverability baffling, and ultimately bounced off.
• teeray 4y ago
  You’re correct here. Even historically federated services, like email, are referred to by grandmas as “my AOL”. They don’t even think about the fact that others don’t have AOL, they just grab a name out of an address book they’ve been building for the last 20 years. Just because email exists as a federated thing doesn’t mean existing users could use it if they had to sign up for it again.
• mxuribe 4y ago
  > The fact that one has to pick from many different places to set up an account is a massive barrier to entry... I wonder if a statement exactly like the above one was said about alternative email providers being coinsidered by many AOL.com account holder so many years ago? > ...I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus... I suppoose it depends on how "benefit" is defined. But, also, Mastodon might be considered a platform, but (thankfully!) it only represents a single slice of the greater fediverse. Ultimately, if people chose NOT to migrate over to the fediverse, or choose NOT to use the mastodon stack, or do NOT join an instance, etc..., that's still ok, and not considered a "fail". The fediverse is not an industry, nor a competitive landscape in the same fashion that twitter, facebook and other commercial platforms might operate. In fact, the fediverse is not even a platform at all; its a federated network.
  • sp332 4y ago
    Yeah, and what happened with email is everyone moved to gmail and corporate servers. Having a choice of hosts is not something most people are looking for.
    • toofy 4y ago
      if mastodon continues with the growth and hits some kind of critical mass, im sure eventually most people will end up on a few concentrated servers. that just makes sense for people who aren't interested in minutia and want details abstracted away. tons of people use gmail and an awful lot of people don't, they make their own choices. the people who do care about otehr things can go to the more specialized servers. everyone wins. getting back to a norm where people have choice seems ideal from my perspective.
• OscarCunningham 4y ago
  > I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. What you might say is 'I don't think Mastodon is going to replace Twitter', but I don't think you can argue that Mastodon won't benefit from the Twitter exodus because it has already gained a million users. Looking at the charts on https://the-federation.info/mastodon https://the-federation.info/mastodon you can see that in May there was an influx of about 500 thousand new users after Musk's acquisition of twitter was announced. About 100 thousand of those stuck around. This time the number of new users is 1.1 million and still rising. So proportionally, the Twitter exodus will probably bring Mastodon at least 220 thousand new permanent users. My actual guess would be that a higher proportion will stick around this time, because of network effects.
  • kragen 4y ago
    i fear that Mastodon will suffer enormously from the Twitter exodus because it has already had to accommodate a million new users. a million new customers is great, a million new members of a community is a giant acculturation problem
    • KerrAvon 4y ago
      What’s interesting is that it’s doing fine so far; existing users are being really helpful and welcoming to the newbs. It’s actually a really pleasant place to be compared to Twitter. (It might be helping that everybody leaving Twitter is leaving Twitter for the same reason.)
    • dredmorbius 4y ago
      Septembers happen.
      • kragen 4y ago
        Septembers demolish communities.
        • dredmorbius 4y ago
• Daunk 4y ago
  I recently bumped into this issue and simply decided to not bother with Mastodon.
• jonnycomputer 4y ago
  Kind of like picking gmail or hotmail is a barrier to entry to using email?
  • falkd 4y ago
    This is an interesting point, but many have heard of those providers and they're very popular, very established, and you can generally count on a very professional and reliable service. What I see though is that there are dozens of servers, none of which I know anything about. So it's more like if you had to select an e-mail provider from a list of domains you've never heard of before. Not impossible, but not as easy as signing up on twitter.com.
• ryukafalz 4y ago
  I'm more interested in what the Spritely project is doing along these lines: https://spritely.institute/ https://spritely.institute/ ...but agreed that ultimately being strongly tied to an instance run by someone else is not ideal. I'm glad there are people working on it!
• tootie 4y ago
  Barrier to entry is just one problem. The main one is reach. 99% of the value of Twitter is its reach. Posting messages is easy. I'm sure a thousand entrepreneurs have figured out how to collect 140-character messages, follow and reply. But they will collect dust unless they get seen by 100M people. That means having that many users on one platform, one platform for content creators to promote, and a single place for advertisers to spend to support operation.
  • mxuribe 4y ago
    You might be assuming that people interested in being on the fediverse have the goal of excessive reach. I acknowledge that some coming over from twitter might be interested in such a goal....but those individuals might simply not fully understand the compelling value that the fediverse (and mastodon instances) often represent. Not everyone wants/needs to reach 100M people. - While, twitter (& other commercial socials) promise excessive/massive reach...The Fediverse might offer less, but richer interactions. - While, twitter (& other commercial socials) promise users as cattle/"eyeballs" to ad buyers...The Fediverse offers none of that. (Though, individual instancves have every right and possibility if they so choose to create their own ecosystem of ads to pay for their operations, and their people would need to know that of course) - While, twitter (& other commercial socials) promise a platform for creators to publish their content to a wide audience...The Fediverse offers the same publishing (or better) capabilities and tools, but to a smaller audience...and, at least the existing creators on the Fedi are quite cool with that; most prefer it that way! To me, living on the Fedi, is like people purposefully, willfully, happily (and not accidentally nor due to duress) moving to the rural country away from the big city...and not caring that others feel like "hey, the big city living is where everything is awesome" ;-)
    • tootie 4y ago
      You're right but also you're discounting the value of the Twitter model. Twitter sells eyeballs, but they also give away reach to creators. Politicians may use the platform to amplify nonsense but a lot of them use the platform for good as well. Same with journalists which is the primary reason I'm there. It's easy to follow the kind of people I'm interested in hearing more from and they're all in one place. Looking at ads is the price paid for a free service with adequate moderation. For personal connections or interest groups, there's no shortage of existing platforms that do the job better than Mastodon.
• nperez 4y ago
  Agree. The moment you get into "Well, Mastodon is distributed networking software with different nodes, and you've got to ..." you have already lost a large percent of users. People expect to fill out a familiar registration form, and immediately be able to see/write posts. I think a lot of the complexity of it could be hidden away so that the average user has a similar experience to a Twitter signup, but idk how much friction it would cause to make something like this appear centralized.
• toofy 4y ago
  > ...woefully complex...in for more pain. this is incredibly incredibly hyperbolic if ive ever seen hyperbole. i just migrated my account the other day (i wanted to move onto a friends server) and it was absolutely not "woefully complex"
• shafyy 4y ago
  > I’m putting my hopes on blue sky/AT which appears to solve the above pain points How does AT solve this specific pain point?