this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Mastodon
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It's pretty obvious 99% of users bounce off the signup page. People who think otherwise simply are too disconnected from normie reality
Here is what happens
Let's join this thing
I have to choose a server ? Ok which one ?
Wow that's so many, is this important or cani pick at random ?
If you pick wrong, everything you write could be deleted or never seen by anyone.
Ok, well I better choose properly
Read server rules pages for 2-3 minutes
There's a distraction
Later, joins threads
I wouldn't even go that far to be honest.
"wtf is this"?
"I never had to pick a server for twitter!! What are they doing wrong? This is too much, I'm off"
And those who don't, bounce off the fact that it's not intuitive to follow someone from their user page.
Mastodon is not as complicated as it is sometimes made out to be, but it'a disingenuous to pretend that it's simple, either.
there should be a service that redirects registrations to random servers from the "trusted" list.
Like nextcloud's signup page.
Yes, in a world where migration is seamless and preserves your reputation and relationships on the network.
Yep ... agreed all round.
While decentralisation has advantages, the fediverse will probably have to learn the hard way that from a user perspective, without a layer on top that polishes the UX experience, it's a net negative unless you're a nerd and interested in it for its own sake. It's a classic case of tech people making something that works for them and not for others.
The parts of the fediverse that are truly valuable IMO ...
The fragmentation that occurs as a consequence of this decentralised way of conducting social media is probably going to be the natural state of the fediverse for years to come. By its very nature, being decentralised, federated instances are not going to amass hundreds of thousands or millions of users from all (most) walks of life, and only appeal to those with a certain type of mind with nerdy, freedom-centric, and dedicated tendencies. By its very design, it's not going to catch on most people.
And it wouldn't have been a problem at all if accounts, their history, content, identity, relationships and reputation were seamlessly migrateable between instance. Whatever happens, you could just migrate to your own personnal instance.
But right now, while you can copy your old bulk text, you basically lose everything from what little of a migration you could even do.
All relationships are lost and you start back at square one. And that's what makes choosing the right server important and that's what bounces people right off mastodon and lemmy.
And it also drives re-centralization because one way to side step the problem is "just join the biggest instance"
Pretty much how it has been for me for both lemmy and mastodon. I think I went to the sign up page for mastodon several times in the days that it was blowing up, and I just didn't know what server to pick, and even when was at the point of "I will just join one" I still had issues picking one because a lot of the site names sounded untrustworthy, or like specializing in a community I am not really part of. Like the one I ended up on gave me vibes of being for people into astrophysics.
I am also not sure if people would read the rules pages, but more skim them for keypoints in maybe 30 seconds. Think went that route with lemmy that I skimmed the rule of a potential instance and saw the rules and went "nope, not for me" and was back to step 1. Though this time I was more familiar with the rodeo and have made more users on more instances
There are benefits to having an extremely, extremely small barrier to entry.
To prevent spammers ? Yes To prevent grandma ? No
Depends on whose grandma. My own nice sweet grandma returned to life for some reason? Sure! Somebody's deranged racist grandma who used to bring casseroles to the local neofascist meeting? No thanks!
You forgot the step where you write three paragraphs explaining why you want a server account and get denied because you didn't supply sufficient detail for them to approve your application.
And yet, my server where this is policy is thriving. If it grew any faster than it has been there would likely have been even greater technical issues, and there has never been a lack of people to talk to. It's almost like there are benefits to not letting people create hundreds of bogus accounts that outweigh the small cost to the user!
This obsession with growth is pathological. People have internalized the needs of capital and don't even understand their own needs.