While Twitter is busy limiting the number of readable tweets and breaking its Tweetdeck app, open source Twitter alternative Mastodon is celebrating the launch of a significant refresh of its Android app. The new app, released over the weekend, features a complete Material You redesign — Google’s design language for Android — as well as […]
Not just worse, it’s also extremely dependent on instance choice when you first try to build your circle of follows. Having to follow people to find people to follow to find further people to follow makes that first step the most important, and Mastodon’s vision of an “Everything” feed is a disorganized mess. Intentionally, for anti-viral reasons.
The reason that’s an actual huge issue is that instance choice is also, easily, the highest barrier of entry to a new user. People are CONFUSED by it. Which means that if someone who would be in earnest willing to try Mastodon and give it time, may still end up coming out with a bad impression if they made a mistake with the prior step and couldn’t figure the right second and third step to overcome the hurdle.
Meanwhile, here on lemmy, our choice of instance is largely irrelevant. The only change we get on our “All” feeds is just a couple top posts, so we may not have the same starting position, but we do have something in the same ballpark.
This whole conversation is and was tiresome to have, honestly. I did see people try to solve it, but even there they’d run their onboarding environments built by mastodon users counter to what newcomers may want. For example, I saw this web wizard that would quiz me on my region and languange and also slur-censoring preferences… when all of that stuff is completely irrelevant to me - I look up entertainment communities by topics FIRST, not social philosophy, and specially not by regional peers, because fuck my regional peers.
Anyways, point was… Everyone I know who actually stuck to Mastodon… Have mastodon.social accounts. Exclusively. But here, people are already spread between .ml, sh.itjust.works and .world.
Only if you’re on an instance that already has users subbing to a ton of communities. I’m not sure how this is much different than the federated timeline on Mastodon. If I joined a small lemmy instance it would be a similar experience. I’d need to reach out to find external communities that interest me.
I’ve been pretty happy on noc.social. I’ll concede that my local timeline has a skew to it due to the server I’m on but the federated timeline is a bonkers firehose from all over the place.
Regardless, my point whenever this conversation comes up is to say that yes, I agree there’s a learning curve for new users going from a monolithic service to a federated one. But I don’t think the solution is to emulate a monolithic service (i.e. everyone on mastodon.social). I think the solution is to improve the on-boarding process and provide resources so that those new users are eased into the change and can learn how to find the content they want.