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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

I don't really see how Mastodon will ever catch on outside the tiny circle of people who classify PGP key signing parties as a social activity. There's just so much friction around the federated model. In some contexts you need to cut and paste URLs to follow someone? If I view the profile of a follow on their home world, it doesn't know I follow them, so it offers the UX urging me to follow? There are different streams for "home" and "federated"??? It's basically just a huge collection of nerd UX mistakes.

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Agree 100%. An average person that just knows how to send whatsapp/text/messenger messages & make calls will get put off by the high barrier to entry. Anything more complicated than a @handle and password (maybe phone number too) to sign up is just too much. Even then things like dealing with the concept of having different servers etc is just too much. It all needs to be abstracted away so that anybody can use it.

Anyone that's ever worked on a helpdesk in a large business can spot these faults - you really have to cater for the lowest common denominator.

This kind of sounds like a feature, not a bug.

Definitely agree with this. Just explaining the fediverse to the masses is a huge challenge.

It's like when Diaspora launched. They publicly had lofty statements about returning data ownership to the masses, replacing Facebook, "run it yourself," etc. The majority of people even in technology don't want to bother with that. It would have been hilarious to hear a Diaspora evangelist try explaining to the grandma who just wants to post pictures of her grandkids the benefits of her own Diaspora instance.

Relevant to today, you're going to try explaining to some guy who's only on Twitter to trash talk other sports fans, the benefits of sports.social or whatever? It's not going to happen.

"Run it yourself" is the worst possible model of social media network. It means I will be strictly incapable of sending a video to a billion people, because I could never afford the hosting bill. It also means that I could never use social media to do any kind of anti-government organizing (protests, revolutions, etc) because even the weakest, dumbest regime on the planet will be able to DoS me right off the air.

I agree. Mastadon is great in theory but when you actually use it you quickly understand why it will never gain traction beyond a certain crowd.

Yup. It feels like the design goal was purely to be federated, not to be a better version of Twitter that also happens to be federated.

There’s so much UX friction that only people who happily use words like ‘Fediverse’ in a sentence would consider it worthwhile pushing through.

Mind you, making things just arcane enough to keep out the n00bs is a pervasive if unspoken design goal of a lot of open source projects.

If these people find that their desire to leave Twitter to spite Musk does not outweigh the friction of learning how a new piece of software works - a piece of software for which there is bountiful explanatory documentation and hundreds of friendly people more than willing to help explain how it works - then I guess they just really don't hate Musk all that much.

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