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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Mastodon has a long way to go in the onboarding experience. Most non-technical Twitter users simply will not engage with Mastodon in its current form.
Mastodon right now reminds me of email before web-based services. It's not friendly enough to pull in the "normies". It needs a Gmail.
Pick an instance and sign up. I don't understand this take. Its literally the same as email and we all managed to figure that out when we were 9-11 years old.
Tell me you've never worked in tech support without telling me you've never worked in tech support.
@legion @TendieMaster69 Are you onboarding using the browser or using the official #Mastodon app? Onboarding online is a lot more understandable than onboarding in the app IIRC
In the browser. It's not confusing to me, but I'm a software developer. Millions of Twitter users aren't going to make it past the server selection step. And many that do are going to be confused when they click to Follow someone and get a weird popup (because that someone is on a different Mastodon instance) instead of instantly following the person.
It's nowhere close to a smooth enough experience for the lion's share of Twitter users to transition over. I think people that are used to even slightly technical things vastly overestimate what the average end user is capable of handling. These are the people that ask for help to plug in an HDMI cable.
I feel like the hurdles are kind of features. If your elderly parents can't figure out then they can't well flood it with trash. Reddit was the same way at first, oh so long ago. People weren't used to the format and users without any tech savvy were dissuaded from entry. That turned into a libertarian foundation. This time around the generations that are tech savvy aren't libertarians, they're progressives. So we're seeing a progressive foundation in the federation become established, and that's going to narrate the future culture here, just like libertarians narrated the culture of reddit for so long.
@legion Hmm. I would challenge anyone to go to mstdn.social for example and show me the onboarding friction.
Signing up for an account on a #Mastodon instance is quite easy, if you're doing so through the browser and go directly to the instance you want to join
When people say getting onto mastodon is hard I assume they must mean setting up an instance because even if soapbox and rebased are easier to use, it's still just signing up for a website.
It was simple for me personally, but I guess I'm a more advanced internet enjoyer?
I think people are intimidated by step 3. Don't ask me why, but for a certain type of web user, it's an absolute deal breaker for some reason.
Yeah, having to actually choose a place to go was the main impediment for meto create a mastodon account in the first place. I kept stalling and putting it off, once I did it iwas easy enough. I think a lot of people don't realise at first you can make other fedaration accounts with the same email and how easy it is.
Except I'm I was not a big twitter user in the first place, so I probably should have started with one of the niche feds first, like star trek or the art one, those would prompt me to interact more.
Yea I understand that, it's a bit overwhelming to be presented with a shit ton of servers, there are around 79 general servers as of right now to choose from. https://joinmastodon.org/servers
Tbh it's capitalism. It teaches people to be afraid of choices, and to just take what the corporation is handing them. It's... disconcerting how pervasive this kind of convenience culture has become and what kind of effect it's having on people's lives
Fedi doesn't have an onboarding problem, people have a capitalism problem
that is an interesting point. when people are confronted with the choice of where to store their data, they just nope out
I don't think it's explicitly an issue with capitalism itself (although capitalism does use it to it's advantage). Decision Paralysis is well-known, and i don't see why abolishing capitalism would make it universally easier to make uninformed decisions
The onboarding for Masterson is the best of all the fediverse sites but I still think the average internet user would get confused.