It reminds me a little of the old internet. I like how relatively small it feels, and that people post content for the sake of the content, not to promote themselves. I haven’t found my usual corners yet, the ones I used to hang out in on older platforms, but I figure that’s just a matter of time. I’m not super nostalgic for the old internet or anything, but it’s nice to find at least a hint of something human-centered somewhere.
I hope it doesn’t fall apart and that it keeps growing.
I was skeptical when I switched to Linux, but then I ditched Windows on my dual boot for good. It was a hugely positive experience, and it really felt like freedom. I’m hoping this will be the same.
And don’t be mad at me if I act totally clueless here sometimes 'cause all that is new to me.
Yeah I feel like it’s not going to get through to people until it’s more common.
Also tbh people don’t really need to know all the details to make full use of the fediverse. Like most people probably have vastly simplified or wrong ideas about how email works, or how websites themselves work, but they know enough for their purposes.
They don’t need to know the details, no, but the new user experience – especially on Mastodon-based websites – can be very confusing without at least a basic understanding of the syndication-based nature of the place. Lemmy and Piefed aren’t quite so bad about it, you can see the Local or All feed by default when going to your website of choice, but also because users coming from Reddit have been used to having an empty main feed if they haven’t subscribed to anything yet, while Twitter has been providing an algorithmic feed of “for you” content for a while now.
And because the Mastodon developers seem to very badly want to obfuscticate the nature of the network, and want “Mastodon” itself to be the title character, and not any particular masto-based website, the default that users get is their subscription feed, and not the Local feed.
People think Mastodon is dead, because it doesn’t work the way they expect.
This was especially bad during the Twitter exmigration, because people just joined whatever random Mastodon-based website they came across, and were trying to find each other again, and didn’t understand how searching for users on other websites worked. They seemed to think it was dumb that their website wasn’t aware of users on a completely different website, where the only thing they had in common was that they were running the same website engine.
People coming from highly curated environments need to know at least a little bit about how the whole system works in order to embrace the system. Otherwise, they interpret the limitations are arbitrary.
Yeah I’m not a huge fan of Mastodon throwing its weight around. Like I was setting up a snac2 server and I had to add so many extra endpoints to interface with Mastodon instances.