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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

> The vast majority of people don't want to deal with multiple platforms. They want to be on the same platform as their friends, and the content creators that they like. That's it.

Statements like this make me feel like I'm living on another planet. I socialize with my friends almost entirely over IM (iMessages, SMS, Signal, etc.). Social media is just the huge content pile that we sometimes discuss and link. In that sense there are already few barriers to switching platforms because "engaging" with any content on social media seems like a foreign concept.

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The past few days' discussion of federated social networking have really brought out the... I don't know how to describe them, KPI-brained people? If you've worked in social networking UX for the past decade your entire professional experience & perception of norms have been geared toward funneling people into the optimal mould to which to sell advertisers the right to manipulate them. That's it! All the frictionless stuff isn't about making peoples' lives better, or "delighting" them, or whatever. It's to ensure as many people as possible are available as grist for the manipulation mill. Myopic, this makes the UX actually very bad. I don't need to rant about all the consent-disregarding stuff we've all seen ("Do you want to enable bad thing? Yes/Ask me later") but fundamentally I don't think we should care about the opinions of anyone applying their corporate UX reasoning skills against the idea of federation, appealing to some prescriptive sense of what people care about.

Here's a recent BBC article about Mastodon: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63534240

Notice how much trouble it has trying to explaining it, going as far as to include a tweet making a joke about how complicated it is. Mastodon is more often than not just described as Twitter, but more complicated.

I would posit that both Twitter and Mastodon have terrible UX. But everyone understands Twitter. This is a real problem that federated platforms need to solve before they can be seen as viable alternatives to centralized social media. One of the biggest concerns about Twitter right now is consistent content moderation, but Mastodon proudly claims that it has none. Why should people switch?

Peoples' understanding grows and changes over time. There was a time when the concept of signing up for an interactive website was unknown to the entire world (the advent of this understanding was called Web 2.0). You can find similar BBC articles from that era. I'm not going to argue why people "should" switch to Mastodon because that's up to them. It's there if they finally get frustrated enough being abused by twitter to look up how to switch. It seems like quite a lot of people are feeling that lately, which is why we're having these discussions. It's also untrue that mastodon "proudly has no" content moderation, and I'm sure you know this.

Mastodon is in trouble if it still has a communication problem in late-2022. It's had 6 years to refine its experience, and apparently is still unable to capitalize on Twitter's missteps.

I don't know how 30% overnight growth means it is in trouble. I don't know how a service that isn't geared toward profit is in trouble from a lot more people using it and learning about it. I really, honestly don't know what you mean by that.

Basically, Mastodon still can't explain in layman's terms how users should think about its federated model, or why they should care. This 30% bump is driven entirely by short-term drama around Twitter. I bet you that in the next few months, you will see Mastodon's DAU's drop back to around what it was before this whole mess.

The biggest reason for this is that, as you yourself said, Twitter's UX is terrible but Mastodon is almost identical. So why switch?

Thankfully laypeople will always continually excel beyond your professional opinion that they can't understand how to log into one of several websites.

Again, why should users switch to Mastodon if the UI is identical? You made some good points about Twitter's UX being terrible due to their focus on advertisers, but it looks like Mastodon is literally trying to be a Twitter knock-off. What's the benefit?

Same, but: how do you know what to link on social media? You have to browse one first. I'm fairly online, so I do end up browsing several different social media sites, but most people aren't. They have the one or two that they like, and they use those. Nobody wants to manage ten different platforms, a successful solution has to make it seem like you're only on one.

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