3 ms·

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

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
  Only if your important metric on which to join is its politics. If, instead, your goal is professional, eg https://infosec.exchange/ https://infosec.exchange/ or https://mstdn.science/ https://mstdn.science/ for microbiology, the choice becomes much clearer.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    I don't think they meant big-P Politics in the sense of political affiliations, but politics in the sense of intra-group and inter-group dynamics.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    Clicked on the latter link. Found no microbiology, just lots of anti-musk and leftist activist commentary. This might be an example of the Vote phenomena where only people quite unhappy with the previous big place leave, which means the new place will end up with a very big skew...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - fragmede 4y ago
      Ah sorry I should have linked to the local posts page instead of the bare url, which brings you to the federated stream, which automatically pulls in all of the dreck. Too late to edit now, but if you go to https://mstdn.science/public/local https://mstdn.science/public/local instead, you'll find it's way more science (well, and Xmas) focused. Using that URL no longer pulls in diatribes from general topic servers where that kind of thing is encourage like mastodon.social. It's not 100% absolutely totally politics free but the SNR is way higher. Dr Fauci is a fellow at the American Academy of Microbiology so it's only natural he comes up on a server focusing on microbiology. One even wished him a Happy Birthday (Dec 24)! Another good one seems to be https://sciences.social/public/local https://sciences.social/public/local
    - scaramanga 4y ago

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
Only if your important metric on which to join is its politics. If, instead, your goal is professional, eg https://infosec.exchange/ https://infosec.exchange/ or https://mstdn.science/ https://mstdn.science/ for microbiology, the choice becomes much clearer.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  I don't think they meant big-P Politics in the sense of political affiliations, but politics in the sense of intra-group and inter-group dynamics.
- concordDance 4y ago
  Clicked on the latter link. Found no microbiology, just lots of anti-musk and leftist activist commentary. This might be an example of the Vote phenomena where only people quite unhappy with the previous big place leave, which means the new place will end up with a very big skew...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - fragmede 4y ago
    Ah sorry I should have linked to the local posts page instead of the bare url, which brings you to the federated stream, which automatically pulls in all of the dreck. Too late to edit now, but if you go to https://mstdn.science/public/local https://mstdn.science/public/local instead, you'll find it's way more science (well, and Xmas) focused. Using that URL no longer pulls in diatribes from general topic servers where that kind of thing is encourage like mastodon.social. It's not 100% absolutely totally politics free but the SNR is way higher. Dr Fauci is a fellow at the American Academy of Microbiology so it's only natural he comes up on a server focusing on microbiology. One even wished him a Happy Birthday (Dec 24)! Another good one seems to be https://sciences.social/public/local https://sciences.social/public/local
  - scaramanga 4y ago