But fediverse isn’t ready to take over yet
But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot. The growth that Mastodon has seen thanks to a Twitter exodus has only exposed how hard it is to join the platform, and more importantly how hard it is to find anyone and anything else once you’re there. Lemmy, the go-to decentralized Reddit alternative, has been around since 2019 but has some big gaps in its feature offering and its privacy policies — the platform is absolutely not ready for an influx of angry Redditors. Neither is Kbin, which doesn’t even have mobile apps and cautions new users that it is “very early beta” software. Flipboard and Mozilla and Tumblr are all working on interesting stuff in this space, but without much to show so far. The upcoming Threads app from Instagram should immediately be the biggest and most powerful thing in this space, but I’m not exactly confident in Meta’s long-term interest in building a better social platform.
I never interacted much with Twitter and I’m not a hardcore Mastodonian either, but I don’t understand why people say it’s hard to join.
For me, the process was simple:
That was it. There was only one step (selecting the server) that is different from any other site. And it didn’t require SMS verification like Facebook, Twitter, and even Google do nowadays. It was objectively easier than signing up for Twitter.
Am I missing something, or did these people just shit their pants at the server selection screen? I get that it’s a little unfamiliar but…just pick one. It doesn’t really matter. That’s the whole point.
I think the biggest issue is finding the content you are looking for.
Sometimes people aren’t on Mastodon and even if they are it’s not alway easy to find them if they are not on the same instance.
The discoverability is a uniquely Mastodon problem though. Mastodon’s lack of keyword search really hinders discoverability. I get why they don’t want site-wide keyword search (to reduce harassment) but it also really hurts usability. Hashtags only work if everyone uses the same tag (and actually tags it in all their posts).
This doesn’t seem to be an issue on Lemmy. Site-wide keyword search works fine here.
Yes, stealing all users personal information makes it a lot easier to connect them. So all ethical alternatives will have a harder time with this.
This has been my biggest issue. Finding and carefully curating what I’m looking for. My twitter (which I had for nearly 15 years) got so cluttered I kind of gave up on it. Add in the people/places I followed suddenly getting political, and I was just over it.
I don’t want that to happen with my “refresh” so I’m being a lot more careful. That said, a lot of the problem is some of the people I really cared about simply won’t change from those platforms. I’ve not used facebook in years, but I still get friends and family asking if I’ve seen whatever bs was posted there.
I don’t get it either… Like Mastodon looks slightly different than twitter, and maybe it’s a bit confusing having things on different instances… But it’s basically the same? I guess there’s some cultural differences around content warnings and stuff that caused a lot of drama, so maybe that’s part of why people are confused…? I’m trying to have empathy about it, but it just seems like a lot of learned helplessness or something.
How did you create an account before selecting a server?
Sorry, that was a little confusing. When you select the signup option in the app, selecting a server is the first step (IIRC). You can’t finish creating an account without selecting a server.