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I'm quite a bit unimpressed by (actual and armchair) UX and product experts' commentary jumping on Mastodon's rough edges -- yes, a lot of us know it's a bit cl

I'm quite a bit unimpressed by (actual and armchair) UX and product experts' commentary jumping on Mastodon's rough edges -- yes, a lot of us know it's a bit clunky and the onboarding hasn't been A/B tested to death, and the UI/UX hasn't been hyper-optimised for LE EPIC ENGAGEMENT and that's perfectly fine! It's arguably not ready for full mainstream adoption right now, but hopefully that'll continue to change as the tech crowd uptake increases and the contributions to the core/protocol/apps goes up as well. I like the community feel of the somewhat smaller instance that I moved my presenec over to (from mastodon.technology, which is shutting down), and there's a frisson of the original excitement I felt when exploring early communications services on the interwebs like IRC.

notacoward 4y ago
I'm a lot less concerned about UX/onboarding issues than about the fact that the simplistic federation model is going to fall apart long before they even reach 1/10 of Twitter's scale. Now, if you're OK with having a lot of smaller communities that only communicate sporadically, forcing people to have ten identities and ten tabs open to participate effectively in each one, that's not a problem. However, if you want to have a single identity fully participating in multiple communities, then the federation model needs to improve a lot. The current ad hoc relays are just the first step on a long road toward a network/proxy/cache layer that can reduce the unnecessary latency and load on the servers themselves, to provide a federated experience beyond the old FIDOnet level. There are lessons to be learned from IRC, Usenet, and P2P file sharing that can help with this.
- parasubvert 4y ago
  The web itself has a proxy/cache layer, what more is needed? I don’t think it’s inherently unavailable as it is, no more than RSS readers were.
  - notacoward 4y ago
    HTTP caching doesn't work as well as it could for ActivityPub data patterns as it does for popular single sites, and AFAICT the servers don't do the things necessary to make it even as effective as it could be. There's a reason big Mastodon instances need to devote so many resources to Sidekiq.

notacoward 4y ago

I'm a lot less concerned about UX/onboarding issues than about the fact that the simplistic federation model is going to fall apart long before they even reach 1/10 of Twitter's scale. Now, if you're OK with having a lot of smaller communities that only communicate sporadically, forcing people to have ten identities and ten tabs open to participate effectively in each one, that's not a problem. However, if you want to have a single identity fully participating in multiple communities, then the federation model needs to improve a lot. The current ad hoc relays are just the first step on a long road toward a network/proxy/cache layer that can reduce the unnecessary latency and load on the servers themselves, to provide a federated experience beyond the old FIDOnet level. There are lessons to be learned from IRC, Usenet, and P2P file sharing that can help with this.

parasubvert 4y ago
The web itself has a proxy/cache layer, what more is needed? I don’t think it’s inherently unavailable as it is, no more than RSS readers were.
- notacoward 4y ago
  HTTP caching doesn't work as well as it could for ActivityPub data patterns as it does for popular single sites, and AFAICT the servers don't do the things necessary to make it even as effective as it could be. There's a reason big Mastodon instances need to devote so many resources to Sidekiq.