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I'm on a discord server with a lot of non-nerds, and various ones are interested in Mastodon, due to Twitter issues. It's amazing to see how much trouble they'

I'm on a discord server with a lot of non-nerds, and various ones are interested in Mastodon, due to Twitter issues. It's amazing to see how much trouble they're having... "Do I have to create a log in on every Mastodon?" ("No, and it's pretty much impossible"), "Can I follow someone on another server?" ("Yes, but it's incredibly hard -- try to follow them on whatever server you're on, maybe someone else is following them already in which case you'll be able to, otherwise here are directions that sometimes work") kind of things. It's just not ready for prime-time, even (IMHO) among nerds, but wow, are normal folks having a hard time.

vegai_ 4y ago
How is following someone on another server with Mastodon difficult? Or is that some sort of a meme now?
- roywiggins 4y ago
  It's confusing if someone posts a Mastodon handle on eg Twitter. If it's a link to their profile, you can't follow them on that page. You have to go to your own instance and paste their handle into the search box and follow them that way.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    That is a legit UX annoyance, yes. Similarly, local-to-your-instance links to a specific toot, vs. globally-accessible / canonical toot URLs. Both can be resolved through the Search dialogue on Mastodon, but it took me a while to work that out myself.
    - roywiggins 4y ago
      Oh, and I should add, it doesn't work if you ended up on an instance that doesn't federate with the one that your followee is on. And the UI for that is "it just doesn't show up in search."
      - dredmorbius 4y ago
        Much of the feedback around blocking (instances and profiles) is less than transparent, some of which is by design. Fully-transparent blocking tends to play to the interests of griefers, abusers, and trolls. For many instances, blocks are listed on the /about/more page of the instance. Mind that you'd also have to check to see if the remote instance is blocking your own.
cyborgx7 4y ago
People just have lost the ability to comprehend the concept of federation because everything in the current internet is walled gardens. There is nothing Mastodon can do to "fix this" without giving up on federation. But people understand how federation works. They see it happen everyday with e-mail. You just need to tell them it works like that and they'll get it.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  For 90% of non-tech folks, email is gmail or whatever their ISP gave them, or came along with their phone, or their employer gave them. It's not something they put any thought into or understand as a "federated" system.
  - cyborgx7 4y ago
    They understand you can send e-mails without needing to have an account with the same provider. They may not know it under the name federation, but they do understand the relevant part, for them.
    - ethanbond 4y ago
      Right because the UX is so good, thus the conversation
      - cyborgx7 4y ago
        People don't understand how e-mail works because the UX is so good. They understand it because it is ubiquitous and they are used to it. They don't expect anything else to work like that, because nothing else on the internet they use works like that. There is no UX to fix this. People just have to be taught that this is an option.
        vidarh 4y ago
        Can vouch for that, after having run first an ISP in the 90's and then a webmail provider a few years later. The number of people I had to teach about the "@" symbol alone. And then a few years later the pain was gone. Enough people had learned that most people asked their friends and family rather than need tech support. The tipping point comes quicker than people expect. E.g. many of the discussions on Mastodon on Twitter is already full of neophytes who had never heard about federation a week ago who are now explaining it to others. I have no illusion this wave here and now will be the watershed for Mastodon, even with 10x-20x as many daily signups as a couple of weeks ago (currently the hourly signups are above the daily signups two weeks ago), but every wave makes the next one easier.
culi 4y ago
> Yes, but it's incredibly hard -- try to follow them on whatever server you're on Confused about this. In my experience it's always just been a matter of adding @personiwannafollow@otherinstance.com Is this not always so simple?
- bioemerl 4y ago
  The moment you're manually typing a username it's game over. It should be rare to never that you need a specific user id, let alone a specific server. You should just have to see a user and click follow.
  - happymellon 4y ago
    Can you not do that?
    - gtr 4y ago
      Not sure what you mean, I think that is a valid point.
      - happymellon 4y ago
        I don't use mastadon, so learning that the idea it doesn't have a registered "follow" scheme is not great.
    - jayknight 4y ago
      Imagine I'm on hacker news and there's someone on mastodon I think someone should follow and their mastodon handle is @cooldude@cooldude.example.com (because they are so cool they run their own instance). You definitely can't click that handle and add follow them, I could put https://cooldude.example.com/@cooldude https://cooldude.example.com/@cooldude and you could click to their profile on their instance, but there would be no way to follow them directly from there on your mastodon.social (or whatever) account, you have to go to your instance and type/paste in their handle and then click follow. Edit: There is a remote-follow workflow that involves clicking a link and entering your full handle to get redirected to a page where you can follow them. Maybe slightly better, but still not great.
nemo44x 4y ago
I think they're going to find out that it's nerdy and that they now hang out among the nerds and not the cool people anymore. And then within a week or so pretend that it never happened, they'll buy their blue checkmark so their posts aren't buried with the spam & rabble, and be on their merry ways as if this whole meltdown never happened.
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
> ... but wow, are normal folks having a hard time. We should stop picking on normal folks. I write software for a living and, honestly, I'm over dealing with BS software. We've swung WAY too far to the "developer productivity" side of engineering and away from "consumer productivity". It's annoying and, frankly, if I have to jump through hoops, I simply choose not to anymore.
- ytpete 4y ago
  I didn't read that comment as picking on normal people. It's using their experience to pick on Mastodon by illustrating how its UX is more flawed than many "tech users" are able to realize from their own frame of reference.
- slfnflctd 4y ago
  I really thought consumer/worker interfaces would become much more efficient over time. Turns out the market doesn't care much about front line people having to go through way too many steps to perform a task except in very niche cases. The all text, green screen terminals hooked into an AS-400 were far quicker to use than the mess of mouse driven web GUI stuff (often with slow page loads on top of it), and 'discoverability' has not exactly improved a ton in the mean time. It sucks that repetitive task efficiency isn't valued more in so many situations.
ljosifov 4y ago
Hm - following someone on another server is incredibly easy for me? I look at the Fediverse feed now, see a message that looks interesting to me, click on the author's username, and then click "Follow". What am I missing?
- roywiggins 4y ago
  If someone hands you (outside of Mastodon) a Mastodon handle on a different instance or a link to their profile, it's not obvious how to follow them. (the way to do it is to paste it into the Search box of your mastodon instance)
  - Kye 4y ago
    Why wouldn't you just ask the person who gave it to you how to use it? I've always been there to answer questions when introducing people to new technology. I know I had to walk people through emailing me back in the 90s. It's no different. What kind of Johnny Appleseed jackass is strolling around telling people their handle and skipping out before telling them how to use it?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - ljosifov 4y ago
    On the web interface: I paste the handle in the Search box under my Home page, click the search button. The user is found, I click on the hit, user's page appears in the right-most pane, I click on Follow. In the Tusky App: top right corner is Search, tap on it, paste the handle in the search box, tap to the ACCOUNTS tab (have forgotten couple of times to do that! - default tab is POSTS), then press Enter, the user is found, tap on the hit, tap on Follow. Not that different to any other similar social service (TW, FB) tbh. If anything - Twitter search I've found harder to navigate in the past. Fwiw - Twitter and Mastodon are different, there is no one-to-one replacement. I've been using both, there are pros and cons. Twitter has superior SNR for my interests.
jonnycomputer 4y ago
Naively here, I just don't see why it should be hard to follow people on other instances--at least for public posts (which again naively I assume are most).
_ph_ 4y ago
I consider myself quite a nerd, but honestly, I am struggling with exactly those questions. I do think better introductions for newcomers are needed so the explanations are understandable for people who are thinking in "twitter" terms. There should be just a page with a quick checklist/cheat sheet for twitter users.
- Kye 4y ago
  I think nerds often have an overthinking problem with it on both the learning and explanation sides. For example: extremely normie comedian Kathy Griffin got on via a short primer in an aggressively mainstream publication and started teaching her friends how things work. Lots of recent happy users are non-tech journalists and other professionals who got it from similar publications or had a friend helping. Meanwhile, serious tech journalists are having conniption fits, and nerds are wailing and gnashing teeth. There's some disconnect between how people who really understand it on a deep level are explaining it to other people who understand other technical things on a similar level and how people with 30 minutes and a publication deadline are explaining it.
  - _ph_ 4y ago
    Do you have a link to that guide, I would be quite interested to read it, as I am still trying to figure out mastodon.
    - Kye 4y ago
      I lost the link. And it was on her now-suspended Twitter, so I can't go get it, unfortunately. However, I would not be surprised if helpful people popped up in your notifications if you asked questions on Mastodon (assuming you have an account).
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    This is also my perception. There's a cynicism that permeates this industry about what people are capable of understanding or using if given a little time and some motivation, to the point that listening to a forum like HN you'd think no one who sits in front of a computer can even type, let alone aim a mouse at a button. Twitter was once considered pretty obtuse compared to facebook, at any rate. Once upon a time people didn't know what a retweet was or how to "at" someone. They didn't learn because twitter was "so easy" they learned because the people they wanted to talk to were there. Network effects always trump all on these things.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
> It's just not ready for prime-time, even (IMHO) among nerds, but wow, are normal folks having a hard time. Yeah. I've taken a look at it a couple of times but never actually jumped on because whenever I try I'm faced with the same sort of creeping dread I face when reading the how-to for reverting a fauly git merge[1], where like... why do I need to understand this much low level plumbing to do this very basic thing. The Feynman diagrams help but it's still insane. [1] https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/howto/revert-a-faulty-merge.txt https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/howto/r...
camjohnson26 4y ago
Mastodon is built for the world some people wish we lived in, not the world we actually have. It has way too many issues that are disqualifying on their face to most people, starting with there’s no way to preview the community without signing up, but the list goes on and on.
- yborg 4y ago
  >no way to preview the community without signing up This is incorrect. You click the "Discover Users" from the instance home page, and you can view (public) profiles and as well as posts that they have made. I agree that it would be better to just be able to view the local timeline.
KerrAvon 4y ago
People who learned how to use Discord can sure as heck deal with Mastodon. They just need a real motivation beyond curiosity.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  Okay, I know that to see content about X, I connect to the X discord server, and to see content about Y, I connect to the Y discord server, and so on. But to message someone, I don't need to know or care what server they're on, or where I know them from. I just message username#uid, and that's it. Discord is different enough from other tools that many people are confused by it. But even then, Mastodon is different enough from Discord--and other tools--that many people are confused by it.
  - solanav 4y ago
    How is "I just message username#uid" different from "I just message username@instance"?
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      Okay, taking this at face value. I load Discord, and I see someone's post, and I think to myself, I should message that person. So I click their username, and right there is a text box for me to start typing a direct message to them. Alternatively, there's a "Direct Messages" option in my left toolbar where I can hit "+" to start a conversation with any "Friend." I load mastodon, and I see someone's post, and I think to myself, I should message that person. So I click their username, and then on their profile page, I click the three dots and choose the "Direct message" option. So that's not quite as direct, but not too bad. Alternatively, there's a "Direct messages" option in my right toolbar where... all I see is "You don't have any direct messages yet. When you send or receive one, it will show up here." No options to start one from here, and no friends list here. Hmm, there's a "Follows and followers" sidebar link which takes me to the expected list of people, and then I guess I can click on their profiles and again navigate to the three dots, and... huh, this person doesn't actually have a "Direct message" option there. Okay, maybe that person doesn't accept DMs, at least from me. Let me try someone who is following me back. I click their name and... their profile doesn't have a three-dots link. Oh, in fact several of these don't. Well, I guess I don't actually know how to DM most people on mastodon. Let me try something else. If I go to Notifications, and since I have "show every option" enabled, I can see just my "follows," and I can click on those names, and yes, there I have the three dots and can DM people. So maybe I can only DM people who follow me? Or who have showed up in my notifications? No, there, if I am looking in my timeline view, then I can get to the three dots for anybody. Anyway, perhaps it seems like I'm making this too complicated, but I assure you that I won't be the only one wondering why "Direct messages" doesn't let me send direct messages, or why sometimes I can see contact options and sometimes I can't!
baxtr 4y ago
There is really nothing Musk should be worried about. The funny thing is: If there was a service called dwitter and had exact the same features that twitter had, people might be willing to give it a try. At this point a twitter alternative doesn't need to be different. It only needs to have a different owner.
- FeteCommuniste 4y ago
  "Dwitter" is taken, it's like Twitter but for JS demos: https://www.dwitter.net/ https://www.dwitter.net/
skrowl 4y ago
The "Twitter issues" that people are discussing currently come down to just wanting more censorship (they perceive that Elon's Twitter won't silence all the conservative voices as well as pre-Elon Twitter did). A federated solution isn't right a great fix for this, as a single instance that doesn't moderate the way you want can still show up in your federated timeline.
alwillis 4y ago
It's just not ready for prime-time, even (IMHO) among nerds, but wow, are normal folks having a hard time. As someone who’s been on Mastodon for a few years, the front-ends and apps aren’t very good, with the UI/UX being particularly bad. One of the few apps I would recommend for iPhone users is Metatex, which is the best mobile app I’ve seen—by far [1]. [1]: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1523996615 https://apps.apple.com/app/id1523996615

vegai_ 4y ago

How is following someone on another server with Mastodon difficult? Or is that some sort of a meme now?

roywiggins 4y ago
It's confusing if someone posts a Mastodon handle on eg Twitter. If it's a link to their profile, you can't follow them on that page. You have to go to your own instance and paste their handle into the search box and follow them that way.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  That is a legit UX annoyance, yes. Similarly, local-to-your-instance links to a specific toot, vs. globally-accessible / canonical toot URLs. Both can be resolved through the Search dialogue on Mastodon, but it took me a while to work that out myself.
  - roywiggins 4y ago
    Oh, and I should add, it doesn't work if you ended up on an instance that doesn't federate with the one that your followee is on. And the UI for that is "it just doesn't show up in search."
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Much of the feedback around blocking (instances and profiles) is less than transparent, some of which is by design. Fully-transparent blocking tends to play to the interests of griefers, abusers, and trolls. For many instances, blocks are listed on the /about/more page of the instance. Mind that you'd also have to check to see if the remote instance is blocking your own.

cyborgx7 4y ago

People just have lost the ability to comprehend the concept of federation because everything in the current internet is walled gardens. There is nothing Mastodon can do to "fix this" without giving up on federation. But people understand how federation works. They see it happen everyday with e-mail. You just need to tell them it works like that and they'll get it.

SoftTalker 4y ago
For 90% of non-tech folks, email is gmail or whatever their ISP gave them, or came along with their phone, or their employer gave them. It's not something they put any thought into or understand as a "federated" system.
- cyborgx7 4y ago
  They understand you can send e-mails without needing to have an account with the same provider. They may not know it under the name federation, but they do understand the relevant part, for them.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Right because the UX is so good, thus the conversation
    - cyborgx7 4y ago
      People don't understand how e-mail works because the UX is so good. They understand it because it is ubiquitous and they are used to it. They don't expect anything else to work like that, because nothing else on the internet they use works like that. There is no UX to fix this. People just have to be taught that this is an option.
      - vidarh 4y ago
        Can vouch for that, after having run first an ISP in the 90's and then a webmail provider a few years later. The number of people I had to teach about the "@" symbol alone. And then a few years later the pain was gone. Enough people had learned that most people asked their friends and family rather than need tech support. The tipping point comes quicker than people expect. E.g. many of the discussions on Mastodon on Twitter is already full of neophytes who had never heard about federation a week ago who are now explaining it to others. I have no illusion this wave here and now will be the watershed for Mastodon, even with 10x-20x as many daily signups as a couple of weeks ago (currently the hourly signups are above the daily signups two weeks ago), but every wave makes the next one easier.

culi 4y ago

> Yes, but it's incredibly hard -- try to follow them on whatever server you're on Confused about this. In my experience it's always just been a matter of adding @personiwannafollow@otherinstance.com Is this not always so simple?

bioemerl 4y ago
The moment you're manually typing a username it's game over. It should be rare to never that you need a specific user id, let alone a specific server. You should just have to see a user and click follow.
- happymellon 4y ago
  Can you not do that?
  - gtr 4y ago
    Not sure what you mean, I think that is a valid point.
    - happymellon 4y ago
      I don't use mastadon, so learning that the idea it doesn't have a registered "follow" scheme is not great.
  - jayknight 4y ago
    Imagine I'm on hacker news and there's someone on mastodon I think someone should follow and their mastodon handle is @cooldude@cooldude.example.com (because they are so cool they run their own instance). You definitely can't click that handle and add follow them, I could put https://cooldude.example.com/@cooldude https://cooldude.example.com/@cooldude and you could click to their profile on their instance, but there would be no way to follow them directly from there on your mastodon.social (or whatever) account, you have to go to your instance and type/paste in their handle and then click follow. Edit: There is a remote-follow workflow that involves clicking a link and entering your full handle to get redirected to a page where you can follow them. Maybe slightly better, but still not great.

nemo44x 4y ago

I think they're going to find out that it's nerdy and that they now hang out among the nerds and not the cool people anymore. And then within a week or so pretend that it never happened, they'll buy their blue checkmark so their posts aren't buried with the spam & rabble, and be on their merry ways as if this whole meltdown never happened.

JustSomeNobody 4y ago

> ... but wow, are normal folks having a hard time. We should stop picking on normal folks. I write software for a living and, honestly, I'm over dealing with BS software. We've swung WAY too far to the "developer productivity" side of engineering and away from "consumer productivity". It's annoying and, frankly, if I have to jump through hoops, I simply choose not to anymore.

ytpete 4y ago
I didn't read that comment as picking on normal people. It's using their experience to pick on Mastodon by illustrating how its UX is more flawed than many "tech users" are able to realize from their own frame of reference.
slfnflctd 4y ago
I really thought consumer/worker interfaces would become much more efficient over time. Turns out the market doesn't care much about front line people having to go through way too many steps to perform a task except in very niche cases. The all text, green screen terminals hooked into an AS-400 were far quicker to use than the mess of mouse driven web GUI stuff (often with slow page loads on top of it), and 'discoverability' has not exactly improved a ton in the mean time. It sucks that repetitive task efficiency isn't valued more in so many situations.

ljosifov 4y ago

Hm - following someone on another server is incredibly easy for me? I look at the Fediverse feed now, see a message that looks interesting to me, click on the author's username, and then click "Follow". What am I missing?

roywiggins 4y ago
If someone hands you (outside of Mastodon) a Mastodon handle on a different instance or a link to their profile, it's not obvious how to follow them. (the way to do it is to paste it into the Search box of your mastodon instance)
- Kye 4y ago
  Why wouldn't you just ask the person who gave it to you how to use it? I've always been there to answer questions when introducing people to new technology. I know I had to walk people through emailing me back in the 90s. It's no different. What kind of Johnny Appleseed jackass is strolling around telling people their handle and skipping out before telling them how to use it?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ljosifov 4y ago
  On the web interface: I paste the handle in the Search box under my Home page, click the search button. The user is found, I click on the hit, user's page appears in the right-most pane, I click on Follow. In the Tusky App: top right corner is Search, tap on it, paste the handle in the search box, tap to the ACCOUNTS tab (have forgotten couple of times to do that! - default tab is POSTS), then press Enter, the user is found, tap on the hit, tap on Follow. Not that different to any other similar social service (TW, FB) tbh. If anything - Twitter search I've found harder to navigate in the past. Fwiw - Twitter and Mastodon are different, there is no one-to-one replacement. I've been using both, there are pros and cons. Twitter has superior SNR for my interests.

jonnycomputer 4y ago

Naively here, I just don't see why it should be hard to follow people on other instances--at least for public posts (which again naively I assume are most).

_ph_ 4y ago

I consider myself quite a nerd, but honestly, I am struggling with exactly those questions. I do think better introductions for newcomers are needed so the explanations are understandable for people who are thinking in "twitter" terms. There should be just a page with a quick checklist/cheat sheet for twitter users.

Kye 4y ago
I think nerds often have an overthinking problem with it on both the learning and explanation sides. For example: extremely normie comedian Kathy Griffin got on via a short primer in an aggressively mainstream publication and started teaching her friends how things work. Lots of recent happy users are non-tech journalists and other professionals who got it from similar publications or had a friend helping. Meanwhile, serious tech journalists are having conniption fits, and nerds are wailing and gnashing teeth. There's some disconnect between how people who really understand it on a deep level are explaining it to other people who understand other technical things on a similar level and how people with 30 minutes and a publication deadline are explaining it.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  Do you have a link to that guide, I would be quite interested to read it, as I am still trying to figure out mastodon.
  - Kye 4y ago
    I lost the link. And it was on her now-suspended Twitter, so I can't go get it, unfortunately. However, I would not be surprised if helpful people popped up in your notifications if you asked questions on Mastodon (assuming you have an account).
- stormbrew 4y ago
  This is also my perception. There's a cynicism that permeates this industry about what people are capable of understanding or using if given a little time and some motivation, to the point that listening to a forum like HN you'd think no one who sits in front of a computer can even type, let alone aim a mouse at a button. Twitter was once considered pretty obtuse compared to facebook, at any rate. Once upon a time people didn't know what a retweet was or how to "at" someone. They didn't learn because twitter was "so easy" they learned because the people they wanted to talk to were there. Network effects always trump all on these things.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

> It's just not ready for prime-time, even (IMHO) among nerds, but wow, are normal folks having a hard time. Yeah. I've taken a look at it a couple of times but never actually jumped on because whenever I try I'm faced with the same sort of creeping dread I face when reading the how-to for reverting a fauly git merge[1], where like... why do I need to understand this much low level plumbing to do this very basic thing. The Feynman diagrams help but it's still insane. [1] https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/howto/revert-a-faulty-merge.txt https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/howto/r...

camjohnson26 4y ago

Mastodon is built for the world some people wish we lived in, not the world we actually have. It has way too many issues that are disqualifying on their face to most people, starting with there’s no way to preview the community without signing up, but the list goes on and on.

yborg 4y ago
>no way to preview the community without signing up This is incorrect. You click the "Discover Users" from the instance home page, and you can view (public) profiles and as well as posts that they have made. I agree that it would be better to just be able to view the local timeline.

KerrAvon 4y ago

People who learned how to use Discord can sure as heck deal with Mastodon. They just need a real motivation beyond curiosity.

pwinnski 4y ago
Okay, I know that to see content about X, I connect to the X discord server, and to see content about Y, I connect to the Y discord server, and so on. But to message someone, I don't need to know or care what server they're on, or where I know them from. I just message username#uid, and that's it. Discord is different enough from other tools that many people are confused by it. But even then, Mastodon is different enough from Discord--and other tools--that many people are confused by it.
- solanav 4y ago
  How is "I just message username#uid" different from "I just message username@instance"?
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    Okay, taking this at face value. I load Discord, and I see someone's post, and I think to myself, I should message that person. So I click their username, and right there is a text box for me to start typing a direct message to them. Alternatively, there's a "Direct Messages" option in my left toolbar where I can hit "+" to start a conversation with any "Friend." I load mastodon, and I see someone's post, and I think to myself, I should message that person. So I click their username, and then on their profile page, I click the three dots and choose the "Direct message" option. So that's not quite as direct, but not too bad. Alternatively, there's a "Direct messages" option in my right toolbar where... all I see is "You don't have any direct messages yet. When you send or receive one, it will show up here." No options to start one from here, and no friends list here. Hmm, there's a "Follows and followers" sidebar link which takes me to the expected list of people, and then I guess I can click on their profiles and again navigate to the three dots, and... huh, this person doesn't actually have a "Direct message" option there. Okay, maybe that person doesn't accept DMs, at least from me. Let me try someone who is following me back. I click their name and... their profile doesn't have a three-dots link. Oh, in fact several of these don't. Well, I guess I don't actually know how to DM most people on mastodon. Let me try something else. If I go to Notifications, and since I have "show every option" enabled, I can see just my "follows," and I can click on those names, and yes, there I have the three dots and can DM people. So maybe I can only DM people who follow me? Or who have showed up in my notifications? No, there, if I am looking in my timeline view, then I can get to the three dots for anybody. Anyway, perhaps it seems like I'm making this too complicated, but I assure you that I won't be the only one wondering why "Direct messages" doesn't let me send direct messages, or why sometimes I can see contact options and sometimes I can't!

baxtr 4y ago

There is really nothing Musk should be worried about. The funny thing is: If there was a service called dwitter and had exact the same features that twitter had, people might be willing to give it a try. At this point a twitter alternative doesn't need to be different. It only needs to have a different owner.

FeteCommuniste 4y ago
"Dwitter" is taken, it's like Twitter but for JS demos: https://www.dwitter.net/ https://www.dwitter.net/

skrowl 4y ago

The "Twitter issues" that people are discussing currently come down to just wanting more censorship (they perceive that Elon's Twitter won't silence all the conservative voices as well as pre-Elon Twitter did). A federated solution isn't right a great fix for this, as a single instance that doesn't moderate the way you want can still show up in your federated timeline.

alwillis 4y ago

It's just not ready for prime-time, even (IMHO) among nerds, but wow, are normal folks having a hard time. As someone who’s been on Mastodon for a few years, the front-ends and apps aren’t very good, with the UI/UX being particularly bad. One of the few apps I would recommend for iPhone users is Metatex, which is the best mobile app I’ve seen—by far [1]. [1]: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1523996615 https://apps.apple.com/app/id1523996615