Mastodon Is the Good One
Mastodon is interoperable, decentralized, operated by a nonprofit, lively, and, ACTUALLY, isn't hard to use. So why is everyone championing Threads as the main Twitter alternative?
Turns out if you get rid of ads and the algorithm, you end up back in the land of sanity.
Also obscurity, practically none of the content creators or companies I followed on Twitter have moved to Mastodon and getting news from them was the only purpose of that site in the first place (for me).
It just takes a bit of time, then people will evetually come to the fediverse.
I think the UI/UX is really good now, and comparable to Twitter, and better then Threads/Bluesky. Unfortunately most don't get that far, because onboarding on the fedi is still a very big pain point and the very first thing people have to overcome. Also actually using the fedi, people linking other instances and whatnot really breaks the experience when you wonder why you're suddenly on an identical looking site but are signed out. I think decentralization is simply a requirement for freedom, but also it is a confusing concept for onboarding that we haven't quite solved yet. I'm optimistic that these things can improve though.
I think I've started learning that I'm kind of ok with that barrier to entry... I mean, it's pretty fucking low. It's not that difficult to understand if you are willing to take 5 mins to learn how it works.
Don't want to be gatekeeper-y or anything, but maybe if you can't pass that simple test, then the overall discourse is better off without you in it.
How low the barrier is depends on how good is your prior knowledge. If you are a millennial that remember the internet before Facebook, it's probably very easy to understand the gist. For older people who never got into how computers work, or younger people that only saw the internet through smartphone apps, that barrier may be higher than we feel.
And it's hardly five minutes anymore. If using the official app sign up is as fast as Twitter or any other app.
That high barrier of entry is going to automatically keep out most non-techy people, and they tend to be a big source of entertaining content out there. Generally if you discount any bad UX as "takes only a bit effort to learn" that just means it's not user friendly and needs a lot of improvement.
They've made huge improvements to onboarding over the past few months, it's as easy as any other app now:
It's literally that easy now. Anything to do with Federation (like following other users) is also hidden to the background unless you go looking for it.
The actual fedi experience for a non techy:
At each one of these steps, there's a new learning curve. If it's not easy enough for your grandma, then it needs improvement.
Money. With no ads no company has any interest in it. Companies could very well make their own instances and advertise there but no one would follow, unless the ads had any value e.g. a bit of comedy or feel goods. No company wants to put any money into old school advertising they'd rather just pay Google or Facebook to shotgun ads into people's eyes.
I seen a talented analysts leveraging this knowledge and making decent advertising firms. But that's just conjecture.
I can definitely see certain brands doing well with their own forums. Sports teams would be a very good niche for hosting their own instances. Another one would be the entertainment industry. It's just not feasible for companies that aren't interesting to talk about. Like there won't be a Coca-Cola instance worth a lot of users.
Oh 100% with Sports teams. I could see movie studios making their own instances. Especially marvel or dc movies that are made in a series.
You say companies wouldn't make one but I'm willing to bet KFC, Tacobell, or Wendy's would make a decent instance considering how get their ads have been the past 10 years.
People need to get past the laziness that the Internet has become from automating copyright strikes of youtube to automoderating forums such as reddit. It was all with the goal of not paying people for their work and it's ended up a cold and vapid internet.
Im not bothered about adverting your products as long as its not just advertising in every single post and theres a human element to the social posting Rule 5,6 of Cupoftea.social (my instance) "No accounts setup purely to sell something / Fake Engagement (Such As Investments/NFT/Cryptos/Wealth stuff) There has to be a human element in your posting. ""No spam , Excessive promotion , Porn or St Posting, Its just not for this server " Mastodon.social is full of crap and its user numbers are mostly from spam bots and porn.
I am bothered by ads that are targeted but still advertise meat to me (I don't eat the stuff). I am bothered by ads that prevent me from reading the content on the page.
If they want to send a product to an influencer who actually uses the product and they post a well written out review to be crossposted on relevant communities. I'm all for that.
But your right, the human element is missing in 99% of ads on the internet. At this point I am no longer interested in supporting these websites so everything is blocked. That is also something advertisers need to learn. If your ad devalues the reason the user loaded the page, your ad failed.
Eventually they will join, but will take a while...
I really hope not. I'd rather the business and influencer stuff stay on a platform that they can monetize and not be a force to enshittify the fediverse.
Agree that Mastodon is good but...
Not difficult to sign up for
Yeah....about that... The choose an instance thing is confusing for a lot of people. It actually made me think twice before signing on, which is not a good thing for a platform looking to get more people on.
Not difficult to use
Well if they make it easier to follow people on other instances, sure.
Also, content discovery is not easy on Mastodon. I have to go to directories (yes, remember those?) to find out the interesting accounts on there.
Yeah there are a lot of little usability things that give mastodon a lot more friction to use compared to twitter. Sure a tech savvy person can figure it out and breeze through it but for an average user being forced to choose an instance, having to figure out how to find people on other servers that arent coming in, and using other websites to search and browser addons is a lot of work.
The site has gotten a lot more usable recently, but during the first few twitter exoduses Mastodon was very rough and it's no wonder that average users bounced off of it.
Thats not even getting into the network effect. Sure some people are there for the microblogs from anyone and building out the network effect. But twitter became mainstream with professionals. So for a lot of people the appeal of twitter was getting direct contact from celebrities and famous people, getting news from reporters as it was happening,Insight from industry professionals like writers, artists, and directors, and more! You could even get better customer service from companies because their twitter reps were more empowered to help you since your issue was more public.
Then there were the niche subjects that being big leads to. Wrestling mastodon is like 70% one guy on my timeline who is just really enthusiastic about womens wrestling(and posts news and cards for men's stuff too probably because he notices how little is out there). On twitter you have lots of people tweeting about it along with the actual wrestlers themselves!
There actually hasn't been a "choose an instance thing" for a few months now. If using the official app sign up is as straightforward as Twitter or any other app. Similarly, if using the official app following accounts is equally straightforward.
Thats a nice change!
Content discovery is really easy for me on Mastodon, I can search for what I want via hashtag or a post, plus the people I follow and my followers always have nice suggestions. But if your instance has low federation, you might not see much.
Filter by Hot, Active and Top Day are godsends for Lemmy. I understand the lack of blackbox algorithm but zero control over your timeline outside of Chronological and tags kills Mastodon for a lot of people.
I've really enjoyed mastodon. The community is pretty great and it seems to have plenty of features.
Mastodon is boring. I left Twitter years ago, and don't miss it. I joined Mastodon like 2 years ago, I like it, but still find it boring.
Because they're stupid.
Because Threads is where the mainstream people are going due to ease of use/marketing/popularity and familiarity with other Meta products. Which is why Threads integration with ActivityPub and not defederating with threads.net is so key
