7 ms·

People just have lost the ability to comprehend the concept of federation because everything in the current internet is walled gardens. There is nothing Mastodo

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.
- happymellon 4y ago
  I would disagree, most people know that they can write to both bob@hotmail.com and to fred@gmail.com, and that they are people using different services. Phone numbers with area codes are still a thing? @ted@funkychips.com shouldn't be too hard to wrap their head around.
- dkarl 4y ago
  I think the parallel is that people don't click on a link to send an email to someone for the first time. They copy and paste an email address into the "To" field of their email client. Same thing with getting someone's number to send them a text. And they know that people use different-looking email programs to read their email. Many people use the iPhone mail app on their phone and web mail on their computer. They don't know the word "federated," but the differences aren't alien to them.
MivLives 4y ago
I think it helps mastadon writes it's users as @<username>@instance.example which looks very similar to email with a twitter handle slapped on front.
- camjohnson26 4y ago
  Most people choose Gmail as their email provider specifically because understanding federation is too much mental overhead. There is no gmail equivalent in the Mastodon space, instead there’s many small instances that are difficult to compare.
  - saurik 4y ago
    People who use Gmail still have to know how to send e-mail to support@apple.com and when asked what their e-mail address is know to tell people someone@gmail.com instead of someone@hotmail.com. You don't get to not understand how e-mail addresses work just because you are using Gmail. There is clearly something else broken about how Mastadon tries to do federation if people are having a hard time with this, but you can't blame federated addresses.
    - camjohnson26 4y ago
      The addresses aren’t the problem, most people see an email address as just a unique identifier for the other person. The problem is choosing an instance to sign up on.
    - MivLives 4y ago
      I think part of the issue is just... habit. We know how email works because email has always worked like that. But twitter is not that environment currently works like that so people getting confused is sort of understandable. Honestly which instance is hard because instances can be small. Which means that an instance runner can get petty with federation. One instance I looked at clearly had the owner in some sort of drama with the owner of another instance. Sure while it may be possible to avoid now, imagine that drama had happened after I'd been on the instance for a year. I wouldn't likely know until I suddenly stopped seeing my friends posts in my feed. Or what if my previous one had shut down with no warning instead of giving me months to migrate. Should a normal person have to back up their data weekly from the site in case it's owner does something stupid? In reality Federation is cool and all but most people are going to end up on Mastadon.social
giantrobot 4y ago
> People just have lost the ability to comprehend the concept of federation because everything in the current internet is walled gardens. Non-technical users have never understood these things. They browse the web by accident and sending e-mail is incomprehensible magic. Most people don't care at all how such things work, they only care when they don't work.
- cyborgx7 4y ago
  Yes that type of person exists but they are not the ones looking for a twitter alternative because of Elon Musk right now. There are shades of gray between the people who understand the technical definition of federation, and people who, as you put it "browse the web by accident". The people who are looking for an alternative right now understand e-mail well enough (from an end-user perspective) to make the comparison. If we ever get to the point where enough people use mastodon that the latter category would also be interested in participating in it, it would be so ubiquitous that they would ask someone with a minimum of understanding to et it up for them. Just the way it works now with other things.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    The "federation" of e-mail and Mastodon are only superficially similar. It's non-intuitive to follow a user from a different instance. It's also non-intuitive to find those users to follow. Most of the time Mastodon users are found via some side channel where they advertise their presence. Every point of friction you add for a user of a new thing is a reason for them to abandon it. Even if Mastodon isn't trying to necessarily replace Twitter, catering only to the most dedicated users is not a way to grow a healthy community.
- rchaud 4y ago
  It's much worse now, partially due to the fact that young people's first computing device is a phone, instead of a family computer. Here's a story about an engineering professor lamenting that their first-year students do not understand folder structures, because they have been using Google Docs for a decade, and don't use use anything besides the search bar. https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
pwinnski 4y ago
People keep using email as the prime example of federation, but email is pretty terrible! I can't communicate with anyone whose address I don't already know. There's no real "discoverability." Many people have multiple email addresses, and I don't know whether I'm communicating with the correct one, or even whether more exist that I don't know about. If an email address stops working, it just... stops working. Emails bounce back (if I'm lucky!) with no easy or standard way to say why, or what address to use instead. I could go on. Email is great for point-to-point communication, modulo some of the issues listed above, but that's a very limited use case, not at all comparable to most social media. It's a poor replacement for Twitter, for example.
- simfree 4y ago
  Browsing the federated timeline, searching by hashtag and looking at who other people you know are following is the discoveability mechanism. Unlike Twitter, ActivityPub sites generally don't beat you over the head with follow recommendations. The goal is not to get you mentally addicted to spending hours a day on Social Media.
  - skybrian 4y ago
    That doesn't help at all for following a particular person. (For example, consider finding the account of a band that you already know.) A Google search is probably the most common discovery mechanism. Once people start putting their Mastodon addresses on their web pages, it will start getting easier.
    - simfree 4y ago
      Google has terrible indexing of Fediverse posts. Your better off just using a large instance to search from.
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    I was actually describing issues with email, but yes, many of the same issues apply to mastodon as well.
- 4y ago
kzrdude 4y ago
Of course it can work on smoothing it out. Most instances do upgrades and use the same software. Short term interface changes and long term they can work on protocol changes.
skybrian 4y ago
It's not conceptual, it's UI. The easy way to is copy the address and paste it into the search box on your home instance. Then hit the subscribe button. This isn't very discoverable at all, though. Hitting the follow button is worse and doesn't tell you the easy way.
chris_st 4y ago
> 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. I think you misunderstood what I wrote. The problem is the Mastodon software is incredibly hard to use, and flaky. This has nothing to do with "understanding federation"! In fact, a few people have said, "Someone said it was just like email, but wow, it's not at all like email!". That explanation does not work for non-nerds. At all. It does not help.
rchaud 4y ago
It doesn't work like email. Email for people is setting up an account on Gmail. "It just works", so to speak. Even Hotmail was able to sign up millions of users with 1996 levels of tech-savviness. It's only 'like email' if the people you're talking to have set up their own IMAP and POP servers.
- cyborgx7 4y ago
  What are you talking about? You don't need to host your own Mastodon server. You can sign up with one of the many open instances, just like gmail and hotmail let you do for e-mail.
syntheweave 4y ago
The problem isn't that people need the right analogy. It's that they never really learned email. Right from the beginning, the commercial Internet has been trying to blackbox technology and present the "just works" button. So when email breaks because of federation issues, people shrug and say "well it worked for me (using the most centralized email systems)". The amount of conceptual learning needed to understand the federation model is roughly similar to a complicated strategy game that needs a 15-minute tutorial. A motivated child can work it out; a stressed and distracted thirty-something will try to avoid it, or maybe mock it so as not to normalize its use. I totally think it's possible to normalize federation since there are tons of conceptually difficult systems in daily life. Some of the burden of that rests on UX and onboarding. But far more of it is a case of, are people desperate enough to bother?

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.
happymellon 4y ago
I would disagree, most people know that they can write to both bob@hotmail.com and to fred@gmail.com, and that they are people using different services. Phone numbers with area codes are still a thing? @ted@funkychips.com shouldn't be too hard to wrap their head around.
dkarl 4y ago
I think the parallel is that people don't click on a link to send an email to someone for the first time. They copy and paste an email address into the "To" field of their email client. Same thing with getting someone's number to send them a text. And they know that people use different-looking email programs to read their email. Many people use the iPhone mail app on their phone and web mail on their computer. They don't know the word "federated," but the differences aren't alien to them.

MivLives 4y ago

I think it helps mastadon writes it's users as @<username>@instance.example which looks very similar to email with a twitter handle slapped on front.

camjohnson26 4y ago
Most people choose Gmail as their email provider specifically because understanding federation is too much mental overhead. There is no gmail equivalent in the Mastodon space, instead there’s many small instances that are difficult to compare.
- saurik 4y ago
  People who use Gmail still have to know how to send e-mail to support@apple.com and when asked what their e-mail address is know to tell people someone@gmail.com instead of someone@hotmail.com. You don't get to not understand how e-mail addresses work just because you are using Gmail. There is clearly something else broken about how Mastadon tries to do federation if people are having a hard time with this, but you can't blame federated addresses.
  - camjohnson26 4y ago
    The addresses aren’t the problem, most people see an email address as just a unique identifier for the other person. The problem is choosing an instance to sign up on.
  - MivLives 4y ago
    I think part of the issue is just... habit. We know how email works because email has always worked like that. But twitter is not that environment currently works like that so people getting confused is sort of understandable. Honestly which instance is hard because instances can be small. Which means that an instance runner can get petty with federation. One instance I looked at clearly had the owner in some sort of drama with the owner of another instance. Sure while it may be possible to avoid now, imagine that drama had happened after I'd been on the instance for a year. I wouldn't likely know until I suddenly stopped seeing my friends posts in my feed. Or what if my previous one had shut down with no warning instead of giving me months to migrate. Should a normal person have to back up their data weekly from the site in case it's owner does something stupid? In reality Federation is cool and all but most people are going to end up on Mastadon.social

giantrobot 4y ago

> People just have lost the ability to comprehend the concept of federation because everything in the current internet is walled gardens. Non-technical users have never understood these things. They browse the web by accident and sending e-mail is incomprehensible magic. Most people don't care at all how such things work, they only care when they don't work.

cyborgx7 4y ago
Yes that type of person exists but they are not the ones looking for a twitter alternative because of Elon Musk right now. There are shades of gray between the people who understand the technical definition of federation, and people who, as you put it "browse the web by accident". The people who are looking for an alternative right now understand e-mail well enough (from an end-user perspective) to make the comparison. If we ever get to the point where enough people use mastodon that the latter category would also be interested in participating in it, it would be so ubiquitous that they would ask someone with a minimum of understanding to et it up for them. Just the way it works now with other things.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  The "federation" of e-mail and Mastodon are only superficially similar. It's non-intuitive to follow a user from a different instance. It's also non-intuitive to find those users to follow. Most of the time Mastodon users are found via some side channel where they advertise their presence. Every point of friction you add for a user of a new thing is a reason for them to abandon it. Even if Mastodon isn't trying to necessarily replace Twitter, catering only to the most dedicated users is not a way to grow a healthy community.
rchaud 4y ago
It's much worse now, partially due to the fact that young people's first computing device is a phone, instead of a family computer. Here's a story about an engineering professor lamenting that their first-year students do not understand folder structures, because they have been using Google Docs for a decade, and don't use use anything besides the search bar. https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

pwinnski 4y ago

People keep using email as the prime example of federation, but email is pretty terrible! I can't communicate with anyone whose address I don't already know. There's no real "discoverability." Many people have multiple email addresses, and I don't know whether I'm communicating with the correct one, or even whether more exist that I don't know about. If an email address stops working, it just... stops working. Emails bounce back (if I'm lucky!) with no easy or standard way to say why, or what address to use instead. I could go on. Email is great for point-to-point communication, modulo some of the issues listed above, but that's a very limited use case, not at all comparable to most social media. It's a poor replacement for Twitter, for example.

simfree 4y ago
Browsing the federated timeline, searching by hashtag and looking at who other people you know are following is the discoveability mechanism. Unlike Twitter, ActivityPub sites generally don't beat you over the head with follow recommendations. The goal is not to get you mentally addicted to spending hours a day on Social Media.
- skybrian 4y ago
  That doesn't help at all for following a particular person. (For example, consider finding the account of a band that you already know.) A Google search is probably the most common discovery mechanism. Once people start putting their Mastodon addresses on their web pages, it will start getting easier.
  - simfree 4y ago
    Google has terrible indexing of Fediverse posts. Your better off just using a large instance to search from.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  I was actually describing issues with email, but yes, many of the same issues apply to mastodon as well.
4y ago

kzrdude 4y ago

Of course it can work on smoothing it out. Most instances do upgrades and use the same software. Short term interface changes and long term they can work on protocol changes.

skybrian 4y ago

It's not conceptual, it's UI. The easy way to is copy the address and paste it into the search box on your home instance. Then hit the subscribe button. This isn't very discoverable at all, though. Hitting the follow button is worse and doesn't tell you the easy way.

chris_st 4y ago

> 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. I think you misunderstood what I wrote. The problem is the Mastodon software is incredibly hard to use, and flaky. This has nothing to do with "understanding federation"! In fact, a few people have said, "Someone said it was just like email, but wow, it's not at all like email!". That explanation does not work for non-nerds. At all. It does not help.

rchaud 4y ago

It doesn't work like email. Email for people is setting up an account on Gmail. "It just works", so to speak. Even Hotmail was able to sign up millions of users with 1996 levels of tech-savviness. It's only 'like email' if the people you're talking to have set up their own IMAP and POP servers.

cyborgx7 4y ago
What are you talking about? You don't need to host your own Mastodon server. You can sign up with one of the many open instances, just like gmail and hotmail let you do for e-mail.

syntheweave 4y ago

The problem isn't that people need the right analogy. It's that they never really learned email. Right from the beginning, the commercial Internet has been trying to blackbox technology and present the "just works" button. So when email breaks because of federation issues, people shrug and say "well it worked for me (using the most centralized email systems)". The amount of conceptual learning needed to understand the federation model is roughly similar to a complicated strategy game that needs a 15-minute tutorial. A motivated child can work it out; a stressed and distracted thirty-something will try to avoid it, or maybe mock it so as not to normalize its use. I totally think it's possible to normalize federation since there are tons of conceptually difficult systems in daily life. Some of the burden of that rests on UX and onboarding. But far more of it is a case of, are people desperate enough to bother?