this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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i still do not fathom how mastodon is difficult, do people just expect the platform to read your mind and do everything for you? How is it any more difficult than youtube?
Learn of YouTube, go to youtube.com and there's content.
Learn of Mastodon, ask "where's that?" and be told to go to joinmastodon.org. When I did this, you had to pick an instance. mastodon.social was full, you had to find something else. So you look at every instance there is in the list, and try to filter for moderation rules as you're told this is best practice. Don't worry, all of Mastodon can see everything posted by everyone on every instance! Picking an instance is really choosing where your values are best aligned, nothing more. So you spend the effort, make an account, get asked a reason why you're signing up (though I might be mistaking this memory for when I signed up to Lemmy), have to wait for approval, get an account, and sign into the official app...
... and there's no content. The only way I ever managed to get content was to learn of Mastodon accounts outside of Mastodon and manually look them up. So I ended up following a whopping 3 accounts, one of which being some EU governmental account, another essentially being the XDA RSS feed. Needless to say, I didn't stick around.
I don't know if things have improved since then, or how Bluesky does things. But I'd imagine a platform supposedly started by the people who founded Twitter, built from what supposedly was once an internal test of modifications to Twitter, to have an easier onboarding experience than whatever Mastodon did back when I tried it.
Well said. This almost perfectly describes my experience with Mastodon as well. I ended up joining a Firefish instance later which was better, but no amount of "antennas" or topic follows helps when your instance has 20 users and it can't find anything.
Bluesky works almost exactly like Twitter right now. It makes a vague mention of federation on signup but it's basically irrelevant and everything right now still goes through their central server, so there is no issue finding content or users.
Mastodon has local and global feeds, and has for years. Did you just sit in your home feed and wonder where all the stuff you haven't subscribed to was?
I don't use mastodon, but yes, people are use to social media doing everything for you. Youtube is probably the greatest example of a service that will spoonfeed you content with little to no input from the user. My understanding of mastodon is that you have to know what you're looking for to find content.
Unfortunate since people are confused on the whole federated aspect (which... who hasn't used email? 🤦🏻♂️), but also the interactions are much more rewarding since they're genuine and don't feel like an algorithm (since there is no algorithm).
I can respect that, but also respect that people will find it empty and confusing, especially because it isn't corporate, so there is no funnel to get the rolling. They have to be motivated enough to seek all of that information out and as much as people use social media, it isn't that important to them.
Email does not have issues finding emails. For a much better post than I can write, read TheChargedCreeper's comment above about the on-boarding experience they (and I) experienced.
Ah now see...
I've certainly had issues with desktop outlook finding emails that mobile outlook recieved minutes ago. But now pertinent is that is only true for modern email - and only true for established email - it's why everyone suggests not hosting your own email.
But, hopefully that experience continues to improve so it's not a concern for any longer