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Comment by esskay | Hacker News Reader

Tooting aside (it's a silly enough term as it is) Mastedons never going to go mainstream. It's too convoluted and complicated to explain how it works to someone with a moderate level of skill in IT, let alone your average every day person.

"It's a decentralized social platform where you sign up to individual..."

Yeah they're already asleep. The average person doesn't give a damn about that, and they sure as hell arent about to jump through a poor UI experience and extremely badly worded terminology to sign up to it.

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Let's not kid ourselves. Average person isn't reading anything that is on the sign up page. There exists some magical break point when people start to switch over and after that the sign up page can be blank and people will move there.

It is completely different matter if that point will ever be reached.

> Mastedons never going to go mainstream. It's too convoluted and complicated to explain how it works to someone with a moderate level of skill in IT, let alone your average every day person.

Email's never going to go mainstream. It's too convoluted and complicated to explain how it works to someone with a moderate level of skill in IT, let alone your average every day person.

"It's a decentralized communication platform where you sign up to individual..."

Email had a real world counterpart. In that sense it was easier to explain because you could start from traditional mail and use that to explain emails.

Mastodon and its relationship with the fediverse is indeed complicated to grasp.

"It's Twitter, but set up like email where you have multiple servers, but they can all talk to each other"

That wasn't very hard at all.

'what's a server?'

Is this actually a problem? I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of people who use the internet have a good enough idea of what a server is that even if they're dead wrong about how one works it isn't terminology that would be confusing to them.

Vast vast majority don't even know what their router is, let alone a server.

The internet (or cloud, if you prefer, mostly the same thing) is just a bunch of computers connected to each other. "Servers" are the big ones in the middle that handle stuff like email and youtube videos

this is not THAT hard yall

The average person uses _email_, bear in mind. They don't know or care how it works, but they use it.

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