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As a journalist who often writes about tech and has found the transition to Mastodon pretty fulfilling, let me just say that I didn't realize how much of a prob

As a journalist who often writes about tech and has found the transition to Mastodon pretty fulfilling, let me just say that I didn't realize how much of a problem this was until a fellow writer reached out to me about how to get set up over there, I offered to help, they posted twice, didn't appear to read any of my advice on where to start or who to follow, then ... completely dunked on the network. I am convinced that some journalists are using the wrong signals to decide whether a social network is good. It's not the onboarding, it's how the experience goes a month, or even a year, in. But tech companies are focused on building the userbase which means they're figuring out the infrastructure after the fact. Because the fediverse is open and has figured out this part, onboarding isn't as much a priority, when in reality it's the final coat of paint, the thing house flippers use to distract from the poor foundation. That has me convinced that there needs to be folks actually writing about this space in earnest as a phenomenon, because they're not getting it from their usual sources. I'm working on this now. If anyone here has thoughts on what that should look like, I'd love to hear.

shortformblog 4y ago
I can’t get over that I posted this comment emphasizing that there needed to be more direct coverage of this space and asking what people thought they wanted that to look like and literally everyone who responded minus, like, one person, seemed to focus only on a side comment I made about onboarding. It’s disappointing, if you ask me.
newsclues 4y ago
"It's not the onboarding, it's how the experience goes a month, or even a year, in." As a techie person, that makes sense, but as a normal user, if the onboarding isn't simple and easy enough, users won't make it to a month or year of using the service. If Mastadon is too complex to attract critical mass of users to achieve a competitive network effect, it will not replace Twitter.
- shortformblog 4y ago
  My point is that Mastodon is being judged for not focusing on the easy part. And I'm convinced that Mastodon does not need to be a Twitter replacement to be a success. That is an important distinction that we should concede. It just needs to be a vibrant network that lots of people like using to succeed.
  - friedman23 4y ago
    Building good onboarding is not easy and it's quite tedious work. It's also extremely important work that is frequently ignored because of how tedious and thankless it is. Why is it important? Onboarding is the single place in a product that every user is guaranteed to experience at least once. Small changes to onboarding can have effects on user retention like the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane. I'm not surprised an app with no profit motive behind it doesn't focus on this kind of work. It's very hard to motivate yourself to do it if it's not your job.
    - shortformblog 4y ago
      But in the scope of an open source project user retention is not always the most important thing. One could argue that pre-2010 Twitter itself is proof that not having the slickest onboarding path is not something that will prevent success. Onboarding can be improved and reinforced over time. Infrastructure is much more complex and building it first prevents a fake-it-until-you-make-it mindset.
  - im3w1l 4y ago
    Onboarding for a federated network is not easy. Answering "which server should I set up on" is almost inherently difficult and mired in politics. The issue is that advice has a centralizing effect. If it becomes common wisdom that a given server is the best and everyone joins it, then decentralization is over. This is an issue that neither a centralized service nor a pure p2p service has (e.g. Patchbay/SSB).
    - fragmede 4y ago
- carapace 4y ago
  Think about it as a filter: the early adopters are folks who are at least smart enough to join a Mastodon server. (And BTW that's really a low bar. A friend of mine was talking the other day about "the pain of switching from Twitter to Mastodon" and I had to stop him. You just click some buttons and type a bit. You don't even have to get out of your chair!? I am always reminded of the Jetsons arguing over who is going to push the button to make dinner. Anyway...) > If Mastadon (sic) is too complex to attract critical mass of users to achieve a competitive network effect, I would say it already has attracted critical mass of users, eh? > it will not replace Twitter. Question the assumption that it should?
- maxbond 4y ago
  Mastadon is not a big tent community like Twitter. It's not a tech company seeking to attract every user on the planet. It's a toolkit for building communities. People will join because the communities they want to participate in are there (which eliminates the supposed dilemma of "which instance should I join?" - this is only a problem for people fleeing Twitter and looking for safe harbor, not for people discovering it organically). They'll stay because it's a good toolkit and they want to join more communities. Or those things won't turn out to be true and it will fade away, nothing is guaranteed, but if you judge it based on whether it is Twitter, you're missing the value proposition. In my view, having everyone in the same tent is one of the mistakes Twitter made; it doesn't need to be replicated. It created opportunities for messages intended for a certain community at a certain time to be taken out of that context and misinterpreted to fuel flamewars. It made it possible for there to be this spectacle of the "main character" who was ridiculed for day and then tossed aside.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    This. Facebook's founding premise wasn't easy onboarding. It was getting laid at Harvard. And then getting laid by someone who knew someone at Harvard, or another selective-admissions university. The initial founding cohort was one that engendered strong aspiration of others to join that group, though of course, in others joining the group, the specific appeal waned. A loss in per node value however was offset largely by the network value of the group as a whole. (I've argued that this dynamic of balancing network value with network costs is key to how social networks grow, are limited, and ultimately decline. In particular, each new member adds a variable value (not all nodes are created equal) but a fairly uniform cost, in the form of additional friction, information overload, and the like. A large-scale network attacks those costs ruthlessly through hygiene functions, including content moderation and the like.)
    - trenning 4y ago
      I also remember when Snapchat purposely obfuscated features in the UI and was designed to not cater to the “Facebook boomer” audience. Bad onboarding and complexity was a growth feature.
- SyzygistSix 4y ago
  At the risk of sounding like the snob that I am, isn't that a selling point for Mastodon? Keeping the complete morons out by making it slightly difficult or requiring a modicum of effort is a big plus, as far as I am concerned.
  - charlie0 4y ago
    Yes, this is definitely a plus. Not everything should be hard to use, but one must admit even small barriers means only a certain type of person will use it. As someone in the minority, these are nice spaces.
Cyberdog 4y ago
Before you write anything, please understand what Mastodon actually is. It is one of many pieces of software which uses the ActivityPub protocol to exchange messages between servers. There is no "Mastodon network" and using that term is like calling the web "the Chrome network" or calling email "the Gmail network." - the commonly-accepted term is "the fediverse" but you can call it "the ActivityPub network" if that sounds too silly. Similarly, trying to explain the experience of "using Mastodon" should be like explaining using a web browser; it's just a piece of software which can show you almost any sort of content, so there's really no singular experience you can have. In these regards, the OP article is yet another example of journalism from the last few weeks gushing about and/or bashing on "Mastodon" without really understanding what it is and conflating it with the underlying network, which existed before Mastodon and will probably exist after it.
- shortformblog 4y ago
  I’ve been using it for five years. I know.
- schuyler2d 4y ago
  I have news for you -- the public barely understands webbrowsers -- mostly not. Yes, we could take the time to explain that "the Internet" isn't just the web -- but you'll just lose your original point. I'd rather accept "Mastodon" as a (maybe temporary) moniker while we bootstrap familiarity. The worst that happens is people ask if something else is "compatible with Mastodon" which may end being a good baseline anyway if Twitter or another company try an Embrace-and-extend move
  - Cyberdog 4y ago
    It's fine if the public barely understands web browsers, so long as they are not journalists or other people with a facade of seriousness and stature writing articles explaining how web browsers work and why they're better or worse than gopher browsers or whatever.
  - BeetleB 4y ago
    > I have news for you -- the public barely understands webbrowsers -- mostly not. It's also fine if most of the public doesn't understand Mastodon.
crazygringo 4y ago
> It's not the onboarding, it's how the experience goes a month, or even a year, in. No -- as any product or marketing manager could tell you, it is the onboarding. Using any product is a "funnel" that starts when you open the website/app for the first time. Every piece of friction/confusion that results in lost users, well it results in lost users, period. And that's 100% the fault of the onboarding process. It's never the fault of users who won't stick it out for "a month" or "even a year" (!). And journalists should be reporting on the experience of the average user. Sure, they should get the perspective and some quotes from die-hard fans as well, but you certainly can't expect a journalist to use a product for a year before writing an article about it that needs to be published tomorrow.
- patcon 4y ago
  > No -- as any product or marketing manager could tell you, it is the onboarding. Agreed. Onboarding is the main control of the boundary. The boundary (whether in a cell, in a community, in a company, in a fandom, etc) it controls what is "in" and "out", self and non-self. Onboarding is the cell membrane of community. If you fail to onboard effectively, you are a different creature :)
- shortformblog 4y ago
  This is a product mindset that’s being applied to something that is not a product in a traditional sense. That’s kind of my point here. Mastodon represents a presentation of open protocols, and all of the work was put into making sure those protocols and the broader network provided a good experience. Additionally, social networks are not things you use just once or twice. I would argue that social media is defined by how it functions as a mature tool much more than the initial experiences. We have not had much in the way of social networks that seem to be designed for long-time users. We focus too much on new users in a space where people use these tools for years, decades even.
  - dasil003 4y ago
    Yes, the pursuit of scale at all costs is what has led traditional social media to become such a dumpster fire. Is Mastodon the answer? I’m not sure, but it’s a legitimately interesting experiment at the very least.
schuyler2d 4y ago
Onboarding is very important but I think the metaphor to reach for is maybe (bad) corporate onboarding: People will point you in the right direction (if you ask) but everyone is busy with something else and if you don't get email or your slack account on the first day, you'll have it by the time that it matters. You're expected to figure it out because you have your own motivations rather than needing to make it easy. I'm very interested how journalists and others bounce off the platform. I get the sense that people are looking for some "hook" or that people used to 1000s of followers enter unenthused to the task of building things up with slightly different rules and none of the recruitment/support for "influencers". But it all seems pretty straightforward to me -- boringly so almost
- judge2020 4y ago
  If Slack isn't apart of your day-one onboarding, you're using Slack wrong.
PixyMisa 4y ago
That's like telling someone that Dragon Ball Z gets good around episode 100. Maybe it's even true, but it doesn't matter.
- tarboreus 4y ago
  It does if they have some patience, I guess.
wheats 4y ago
>"onboarding isn't as much a priority" I hear people talk extensively about how difficult it is to get acquainted with Mastodon and how their onboarding is a big part of that problem. What exactly is the problem? What solution does that problem have? It seems to me that the issue with federated instances is that the first thing you need to do when you join is to choose an instance which is a huge choice. Mastodon starts off by explaining how federates instances work and then gives you a list of popular ones to choose from. What else should they be doing to decrease the friction here? The documentation exists and I doubt making it mandatory would help. Is it possible to make onboarding easy when learning about the federated server model and choosing an instance is an inherently difficult task? What specifically does everyone think Mastodon is doing wrong here? Is it possible for an ActivityPub/federate instance model to replace something as big as Twitter?
- montebicyclelo 4y ago
  > Mastodon starts off by explaining how federated instances work Exactly, most websites just give you a box to put an email and password in. Whereas here we are trying to get people to understand new concepts with words and ideas that many are not familiar with. And after reading it they still don't necessarily know how to sign up. > then gives you a list of popular instances to choose from So I've got this big list, but how do I pick which one? Since I don't know any better, I'll just pick the most popular one. Oh wait, that one isn't accepting sign ups any more.... Should I just pick the next one? Or should I just give up? Does it matter which one I pick, what if I make a wrong choice? Why are the names so random - what do they mean? Do I need to go through and read a bunch before deciding which one to sign up to? Again, compare this to most websites where you: - Go to the website - Are presented with an email/password form, which lets you make an account
- TheBrokenRail 4y ago
  > Mastodon starts off by explaining how federates instances work and then gives you a list of popular ones to choose from. This is kind of terrible. Now instead of just putting in your emails you have to make an impactful choice that won't be terribly easy to reverse. Now you have to check which instances have sane moderation, which instances actually have funding so they won't just die on you, which instances are fast or slow, which instances have blocked which other instances, and all the other inevitable petty drama between them. And again, this is compared to just putting in your email and not thinking about it. And this isn't even inherent to federation either! Matrix has an officially-endorsed default homeserver for people who just want to create an account (most people). You don't have to understand federation to use Matrix, it's available if you want it, but you could live without understanding any of it. This causes Matrix to have a much better on-boarding experience.
standardUser 4y ago
Forcing users to "choose a server" is a hard ceiling on adoption for Mastodon (as I've commented many times). I recently joined Post and although they currently have the annoying "request access -> wait a week -> get email allowing access", the process was familiar and straightforward enough that I doubt the average Twitter user would fall out of the funnel. With Mastodon, they start by making users make a decision they neither understand nor want to make. It's an onboarding slaughterhouse.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> I offered to help, they posted twice, didn't appear to read any of my advice on where to start or who to follow What is your advice on this? I signed up and mostly saw people complaining about Twitter, which I can get from pretty much every news outlet, and also from Twitter.
- tptacek 4y ago
  Be interested in information security, which has shifted dramatically to Mastodon away from Twitter, which is now kind of a ghost town for it.
- shortformblog 4y ago
  I specifically recommended people who I thought were interesting who had been using the service before the recent surge—as those would be the kind of people who would have something more to say than just complaining about what's happening on Twitter. I also offered to answer any questions they had.
crossroadsguy 4y ago
From a user’s perspective, who could be tech savvy or not, what is in front (including onboarding) is the priority. Not realising is the time tested recipe for going DoA. What I see going on in Mastodon world — let’s just limit it to that for the time being because terms like fediverse, activity-pub, instances confuse users even more — is likely to be a massive missed opportunity, much bigger than that of WhatsApp exodus. So the UX and its aspects like onboarding have to change and be as welcoming as it gets. People writing about how beautiful or pure this thing’s backend and spec are is not going to change anything except like echos for fellow enthusiasts.
ymolodtsov 4y ago
Having users on your network is just as an important part of the product as the backend. You can have the best social networking app out there but if your friends or people you're interested in aren't there you will leave. Mastodon onboarding has gotten much better but still could be improved, especially in third-party apps.

shortformblog 4y ago

I can’t get over that I posted this comment emphasizing that there needed to be more direct coverage of this space and asking what people thought they wanted that to look like and literally everyone who responded minus, like, one person, seemed to focus only on a side comment I made about onboarding. It’s disappointing, if you ask me.

newsclues 4y ago

"It's not the onboarding, it's how the experience goes a month, or even a year, in." As a techie person, that makes sense, but as a normal user, if the onboarding isn't simple and easy enough, users won't make it to a month or year of using the service. If Mastadon is too complex to attract critical mass of users to achieve a competitive network effect, it will not replace Twitter.

shortformblog 4y ago
My point is that Mastodon is being judged for not focusing on the easy part. And I'm convinced that Mastodon does not need to be a Twitter replacement to be a success. That is an important distinction that we should concede. It just needs to be a vibrant network that lots of people like using to succeed.
- friedman23 4y ago
  Building good onboarding is not easy and it's quite tedious work. It's also extremely important work that is frequently ignored because of how tedious and thankless it is. Why is it important? Onboarding is the single place in a product that every user is guaranteed to experience at least once. Small changes to onboarding can have effects on user retention like the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane. I'm not surprised an app with no profit motive behind it doesn't focus on this kind of work. It's very hard to motivate yourself to do it if it's not your job.
  - shortformblog 4y ago
    But in the scope of an open source project user retention is not always the most important thing. One could argue that pre-2010 Twitter itself is proof that not having the slickest onboarding path is not something that will prevent success. Onboarding can be improved and reinforced over time. Infrastructure is much more complex and building it first prevents a fake-it-until-you-make-it mindset.
- im3w1l 4y ago
  Onboarding for a federated network is not easy. Answering "which server should I set up on" is almost inherently difficult and mired in politics. The issue is that advice has a centralizing effect. If it becomes common wisdom that a given server is the best and everyone joins it, then decentralization is over. This is an issue that neither a centralized service nor a pure p2p service has (e.g. Patchbay/SSB).
  - fragmede 4y ago
carapace 4y ago
Think about it as a filter: the early adopters are folks who are at least smart enough to join a Mastodon server. (And BTW that's really a low bar. A friend of mine was talking the other day about "the pain of switching from Twitter to Mastodon" and I had to stop him. You just click some buttons and type a bit. You don't even have to get out of your chair!? I am always reminded of the Jetsons arguing over who is going to push the button to make dinner. Anyway...) > If Mastadon (sic) is too complex to attract critical mass of users to achieve a competitive network effect, I would say it already has attracted critical mass of users, eh? > it will not replace Twitter. Question the assumption that it should?
maxbond 4y ago
Mastadon is not a big tent community like Twitter. It's not a tech company seeking to attract every user on the planet. It's a toolkit for building communities. People will join because the communities they want to participate in are there (which eliminates the supposed dilemma of "which instance should I join?" - this is only a problem for people fleeing Twitter and looking for safe harbor, not for people discovering it organically). They'll stay because it's a good toolkit and they want to join more communities. Or those things won't turn out to be true and it will fade away, nothing is guaranteed, but if you judge it based on whether it is Twitter, you're missing the value proposition. In my view, having everyone in the same tent is one of the mistakes Twitter made; it doesn't need to be replicated. It created opportunities for messages intended for a certain community at a certain time to be taken out of that context and misinterpreted to fuel flamewars. It made it possible for there to be this spectacle of the "main character" who was ridiculed for day and then tossed aside.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  This. Facebook's founding premise wasn't easy onboarding. It was getting laid at Harvard. And then getting laid by someone who knew someone at Harvard, or another selective-admissions university. The initial founding cohort was one that engendered strong aspiration of others to join that group, though of course, in others joining the group, the specific appeal waned. A loss in per node value however was offset largely by the network value of the group as a whole. (I've argued that this dynamic of balancing network value with network costs is key to how social networks grow, are limited, and ultimately decline. In particular, each new member adds a variable value (not all nodes are created equal) but a fairly uniform cost, in the form of additional friction, information overload, and the like. A large-scale network attacks those costs ruthlessly through hygiene functions, including content moderation and the like.)
  - trenning 4y ago
    I also remember when Snapchat purposely obfuscated features in the UI and was designed to not cater to the “Facebook boomer” audience. Bad onboarding and complexity was a growth feature.
SyzygistSix 4y ago
At the risk of sounding like the snob that I am, isn't that a selling point for Mastodon? Keeping the complete morons out by making it slightly difficult or requiring a modicum of effort is a big plus, as far as I am concerned.
- charlie0 4y ago
  Yes, this is definitely a plus. Not everything should be hard to use, but one must admit even small barriers means only a certain type of person will use it. As someone in the minority, these are nice spaces.

Cyberdog 4y ago

Before you write anything, please understand what Mastodon actually is. It is one of many pieces of software which uses the ActivityPub protocol to exchange messages between servers. There is no "Mastodon network" and using that term is like calling the web "the Chrome network" or calling email "the Gmail network." - the commonly-accepted term is "the fediverse" but you can call it "the ActivityPub network" if that sounds too silly. Similarly, trying to explain the experience of "using Mastodon" should be like explaining using a web browser; it's just a piece of software which can show you almost any sort of content, so there's really no singular experience you can have. In these regards, the OP article is yet another example of journalism from the last few weeks gushing about and/or bashing on "Mastodon" without really understanding what it is and conflating it with the underlying network, which existed before Mastodon and will probably exist after it.

shortformblog 4y ago
I’ve been using it for five years. I know.
schuyler2d 4y ago
I have news for you -- the public barely understands webbrowsers -- mostly not. Yes, we could take the time to explain that "the Internet" isn't just the web -- but you'll just lose your original point. I'd rather accept "Mastodon" as a (maybe temporary) moniker while we bootstrap familiarity. The worst that happens is people ask if something else is "compatible with Mastodon" which may end being a good baseline anyway if Twitter or another company try an Embrace-and-extend move
- Cyberdog 4y ago
  It's fine if the public barely understands web browsers, so long as they are not journalists or other people with a facade of seriousness and stature writing articles explaining how web browsers work and why they're better or worse than gopher browsers or whatever.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  > I have news for you -- the public barely understands webbrowsers -- mostly not. It's also fine if most of the public doesn't understand Mastodon.

crazygringo 4y ago

> It's not the onboarding, it's how the experience goes a month, or even a year, in. No -- as any product or marketing manager could tell you, it is the onboarding. Using any product is a "funnel" that starts when you open the website/app for the first time. Every piece of friction/confusion that results in lost users, well it results in lost users, period. And that's 100% the fault of the onboarding process. It's never the fault of users who won't stick it out for "a month" or "even a year" (!). And journalists should be reporting on the experience of the average user. Sure, they should get the perspective and some quotes from die-hard fans as well, but you certainly can't expect a journalist to use a product for a year before writing an article about it that needs to be published tomorrow.

patcon 4y ago
> No -- as any product or marketing manager could tell you, it is the onboarding. Agreed. Onboarding is the main control of the boundary. The boundary (whether in a cell, in a community, in a company, in a fandom, etc) it controls what is "in" and "out", self and non-self. Onboarding is the cell membrane of community. If you fail to onboard effectively, you are a different creature :)
shortformblog 4y ago
This is a product mindset that’s being applied to something that is not a product in a traditional sense. That’s kind of my point here. Mastodon represents a presentation of open protocols, and all of the work was put into making sure those protocols and the broader network provided a good experience. Additionally, social networks are not things you use just once or twice. I would argue that social media is defined by how it functions as a mature tool much more than the initial experiences. We have not had much in the way of social networks that seem to be designed for long-time users. We focus too much on new users in a space where people use these tools for years, decades even.
- dasil003 4y ago
  Yes, the pursuit of scale at all costs is what has led traditional social media to become such a dumpster fire. Is Mastodon the answer? I’m not sure, but it’s a legitimately interesting experiment at the very least.

schuyler2d 4y ago

Onboarding is very important but I think the metaphor to reach for is maybe (bad) corporate onboarding: People will point you in the right direction (if you ask) but everyone is busy with something else and if you don't get email or your slack account on the first day, you'll have it by the time that it matters. You're expected to figure it out because you have your own motivations rather than needing to make it easy. I'm very interested how journalists and others bounce off the platform. I get the sense that people are looking for some "hook" or that people used to 1000s of followers enter unenthused to the task of building things up with slightly different rules and none of the recruitment/support for "influencers". But it all seems pretty straightforward to me -- boringly so almost

judge2020 4y ago
If Slack isn't apart of your day-one onboarding, you're using Slack wrong.

PixyMisa 4y ago

That's like telling someone that Dragon Ball Z gets good around episode 100. Maybe it's even true, but it doesn't matter.

tarboreus 4y ago
It does if they have some patience, I guess.

wheats 4y ago

>"onboarding isn't as much a priority" I hear people talk extensively about how difficult it is to get acquainted with Mastodon and how their onboarding is a big part of that problem. What exactly is the problem? What solution does that problem have? It seems to me that the issue with federated instances is that the first thing you need to do when you join is to choose an instance which is a huge choice. Mastodon starts off by explaining how federates instances work and then gives you a list of popular ones to choose from. What else should they be doing to decrease the friction here? The documentation exists and I doubt making it mandatory would help. Is it possible to make onboarding easy when learning about the federated server model and choosing an instance is an inherently difficult task? What specifically does everyone think Mastodon is doing wrong here? Is it possible for an ActivityPub/federate instance model to replace something as big as Twitter?

montebicyclelo 4y ago
> Mastodon starts off by explaining how federated instances work Exactly, most websites just give you a box to put an email and password in. Whereas here we are trying to get people to understand new concepts with words and ideas that many are not familiar with. And after reading it they still don't necessarily know how to sign up. > then gives you a list of popular instances to choose from So I've got this big list, but how do I pick which one? Since I don't know any better, I'll just pick the most popular one. Oh wait, that one isn't accepting sign ups any more.... Should I just pick the next one? Or should I just give up? Does it matter which one I pick, what if I make a wrong choice? Why are the names so random - what do they mean? Do I need to go through and read a bunch before deciding which one to sign up to? Again, compare this to most websites where you: - Go to the website - Are presented with an email/password form, which lets you make an account
TheBrokenRail 4y ago
> Mastodon starts off by explaining how federates instances work and then gives you a list of popular ones to choose from. This is kind of terrible. Now instead of just putting in your emails you have to make an impactful choice that won't be terribly easy to reverse. Now you have to check which instances have sane moderation, which instances actually have funding so they won't just die on you, which instances are fast or slow, which instances have blocked which other instances, and all the other inevitable petty drama between them. And again, this is compared to just putting in your email and not thinking about it. And this isn't even inherent to federation either! Matrix has an officially-endorsed default homeserver for people who just want to create an account (most people). You don't have to understand federation to use Matrix, it's available if you want it, but you could live without understanding any of it. This causes Matrix to have a much better on-boarding experience.

standardUser 4y ago

Forcing users to "choose a server" is a hard ceiling on adoption for Mastodon (as I've commented many times). I recently joined Post and although they currently have the annoying "request access -> wait a week -> get email allowing access", the process was familiar and straightforward enough that I doubt the average Twitter user would fall out of the funnel. With Mastodon, they start by making users make a decision they neither understand nor want to make. It's an onboarding slaughterhouse.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> I offered to help, they posted twice, didn't appear to read any of my advice on where to start or who to follow What is your advice on this? I signed up and mostly saw people complaining about Twitter, which I can get from pretty much every news outlet, and also from Twitter.

tptacek 4y ago
Be interested in information security, which has shifted dramatically to Mastodon away from Twitter, which is now kind of a ghost town for it.
shortformblog 4y ago
I specifically recommended people who I thought were interesting who had been using the service before the recent surge—as those would be the kind of people who would have something more to say than just complaining about what's happening on Twitter. I also offered to answer any questions they had.

crossroadsguy 4y ago

From a user’s perspective, who could be tech savvy or not, what is in front (including onboarding) is the priority. Not realising is the time tested recipe for going DoA. What I see going on in Mastodon world — let’s just limit it to that for the time being because terms like fediverse, activity-pub, instances confuse users even more — is likely to be a massive missed opportunity, much bigger than that of WhatsApp exodus. So the UX and its aspects like onboarding have to change and be as welcoming as it gets. People writing about how beautiful or pure this thing’s backend and spec are is not going to change anything except like echos for fellow enthusiasts.

ymolodtsov 4y ago

Having users on your network is just as an important part of the product as the backend. You can have the best social networking app out there but if your friends or people you're interested in aren't there you will leave. Mastodon onboarding has gotten much better but still could be improved, especially in third-party apps.