this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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I know it's hard for tech literate people to understand but choosing a server is daunting. Most people chose their email because it was linked to a service they were already familiar with like Google and Microsoft. There's no familiarity with the Lemmy or mastodon instances and there are so many of them that people who already have trouble learning new technologies get to deal with decision fatigue on top of that. People like what is familiar and having a service that mostly works the same is still very confusing for them.
That's what bothers me about these sorts of threads. We represent a completely self-selected group of people who have not just managed to create accounts on the Fediverse, but then decided to stick around.
Of course we think it's simple.
We do not represent "typical users" (whatever that means) of mainstream platforms, and yes, Mastodon, Lemmy etc. have a lot of work ahead of them to make themselves appealing to those users.
It doesn't really help to talk about how simple the Fediverse is, or to shame people who find it confusing. The only thing that will actually help take it mainstream is UX work to remove the friction and make it as simple to use as we claim it is.
I agree that UX work is important but the current state that mastodon UX is in is ready for the masses. It is simple. It will just take some time for people to wrap their heads around it, just like it took time for people to adopt email, facebook, twitter, etc. UX friction isn't the reason your grandma isn't using mastodon right now. These things don't happen overnight.
If users need to "take some time [...] to wrap their heads around it", the UX is not ready for mass adoption. It's that simple.
I consider myself relatively savvy in this area, and I still regularly run into walls with random federation-related issues.
It's not that simple. Twitter and email are both just as complicated yet they enjoy mass adoption. You and I run into walls because we're not accustomed to it. When you were new to other tech I'm sure you ran into similar walls.
This meme has to die. Federated services are not some black magic.
I would have replied to this earlier, but my Lemmy instance was unexpectedly down...
Federated services are cool. They're not black magic, but they have their own issues that still need to be handled better for there to be mass adoption.
Every day, though, these federated platforms are being developed. Different users have different thresholds for what they're willing to put up with, and slowly but surely, more and more people are going to be within the expanding bubble of acceptability.
Same goes for UX. Mass adopters don't care about "technological superiority" if it does not directly benefit the user experience.
I am tech literate and even for me the choice of “which instance to register on” delayed my Lemmy sign up for 2 weeks. I eventually just signed up on 3 of them but now I have 3 different accounts each with their own set of subscriptions and favorites.
Aside from that, the Lemmy UI is a usability disaster and needs an overhaul. I’ve been thinking of giving that a try but I already have other projects that are taking up all my free time at the moment.
Oh, and then there’s the bugs.
The "which instance to join" thing is the worst for me. People here are claiming at the same time that "it doesn't matter because fediverse" and "it does matter because you need to find one that you agree with their stance/philosophy/admin-decisions".
I was thinking that for this to work, each instance should had a mandatory landing page with the "about us", but this is not a solution either. How do you know that the instance has competent sysadmins? I've seen instances with exposed logs with IPs, private info etc. Its impossible to know and its literally roulette.
I have ended up having a different account in different intsance in each of my devices, which I actually enjoy tbh but claiming "just sign up" is bullshit. I may even sign up in one that the admin decides to shut down tomorrow. If I don't know the risks of randomly selecting an instance it is almost certain that something will happen that will piss me off.