Happened upon this a few days ago and always feel a little bit frustrated when there’s an article about breaking up with big tech and the Fediverse only seems to get a tiny mention, if it gets a mention at all. I know @stefan has been working on some things to help explain what it is and how to join (I certainly could’ve done with something like that when I joined Mastodon in 2019 and promptly abandoned my account until 2022 before also using PeerTube and other fedi things), but what do folks think is the biggest obstacle now? Aside from some of the moderation discussions I’ve seen where we can generally agree there’s still a lot of room for improvement on the microblog side, I feel like sometimes people make the Fediverse sound more intimidating than it actually is when they explain how it works and also the feed can look confusing if you can’t find your interests easily and maybe you don’t know how to create columns and lists for the tags you do follow (I feel like it’d be good to create resources that show people how to keep their feed interesting and more manageable perhaps?). Or do most folks actually prefer some sort of algorithm to help sift through loads of posts?
By the way, the comments section is open on that Guardian article if anyone wants to add their cents or pence.
I really think most people don’t make decisions like this because of feature comparison, UI, etc. I think it’s basically 100% network effect for most people.
So the mainstream has chosen Bluesky, I guess, because of the way they rolled out (get all the celebrities on there first )
After the fact, they can say “I didn’t like the vibe on Mastodon” or whatever — which is fair enough if there’s no one on there you know. And it takes a bit of effort to find new people.
I still think ActivityPub is the better protocol, because it’s cheaper to run (more accessible for us povvos). And more importantly: the community I’ve found on Fedi is incredible.
But after closing my Bluesky account due to predictable corpo fascism, I’m now on the waitlist for https://northskysocial.com/ . Not sure how it will work yet, but the existence of BlackSky is encouraging!
I’d also be more comfortable bridging if it’s possible to defederate the fash like any other server…
This is a question that really intrigues me too. If someone set up a fediverse UX working group that explored how to make the network more accessible to newbies, improve onboarding, etc, I’d totally join. Just don’t have the spoons to initiate and drive it myself for the foreseeable.
My intuition though is that it’s a slow and steady wins the race situation, and that the best way to grow the network is at the edges. People who are already convinced of its long term value setting up local servers, shepherding their family/ friends/ community groups/ hobby circles/ activist networks into them, and providing hands-on guidance and support. What the toot.wales folks have done with Twt is a great example.
Hopefully also collecting nuggets of info about the pain points and feeding them back to developers. Since newbies are the most likely to notice the missing stairs, the ones the rest of us are so used to that we step over them without even noticing they’re there.
I had a page on my site a while back which was meant to act as an intro to the microblog part of the Fediverse for anyone that was interested but I still think it suffered from the “assuming that people already know what this means” aspect with some of the tags, etc. The link now points to https://nham.co.uk/2024/05/what-is-a-fair-music-platform/ but I feel like it’d be great if there was a single page that gave a very straightforward startup guide. Like this but music-specific: https://blog.elenarossini.com/my-fediverse-starter-guide/
A lot of people I know went to Bluesky, because “everyone is there”.
Then I often hear arguments like: “I can find other people faster on Bluesky” or “They’re not on my instance and I don’t like this”.
But also I have to admit that my wife for example had issues with Mastodon. She was on an instance for a special interest in medical stuff.
At some point the admins hadn’t anymore the will and money to continue supporting this instance and eventually shut it down. Before that a lot of the instance users already moved over to Bluesky when it was opened for everyone. Somehow they thought they’re found a “Twitter 2.0” or so.
After all my wife haven’t really found a good alternative to her former Mastodon instance and left it completely in favour of Bluesky.
So I don’t think that the UI or protocols are the obstacle but how the product is “sold” and Bluesky attracted a lot of people. But I really don’t know.
I’m using Bluesky and Mastodon equally beside some Discord communities.
Thanks for describing your wife’s experience @NGC-224 , this is something fediverse devs need to see more of.
I’m not sure it’s either. I suspect it has more to do with how well the most well known fediverse apps serve people’s needs right now. Tim Chambers wrote an excellent post on the 7 Deadly UX Sin of the Fediverse Web Experience, and then a follow-up post on potential fixes. The problems your wife had to contend with are covered in these, and many more.
I say well known, because some fediverse apps solve problems that others don’t. For example, apps from the Zot/Nomad branch family - Huzbilla, Streams and Forte - all have accounts (“channels”) that can be multiplexed across 1 or more backup servers (“nomadic identity”), so they can survive the originating server going down. Cool feature, in theory.
But I’ve tested apps from this family a few times over the years, and even I find the interfaces confusing (I test bleeding edge software for fun, and I’ve been teaching myself how to use computer interfaces with no manual for about 4 decades). The UX of actually setting up “nomadic identity” for a “channel” is mindboggling. None of this has improved much over time, presumably because the itches the unpaid devs want to scratch are all in the back-end.
I think that’s exactly what they’ve found, as Christine Webber (ActivityPub spec editor and founder of Spritely) says in her excellent analysis of ATProto as a protocol, and BS as a platform Will it go the same way as Titter did? Maybe. Or maybe the fediverse, ATmosphere and Nostr-verse will eventually merge into one network, using a future version of (or replacement for) ActivityPub. Just like what happened with the OStatus, Diaspora and DFRN/ Zot networks, to form the fediverse as it is today.
Either way, it’s hard to fault people for sticking with the apps they find to be best at getting out of their way, and enabling them to do what they go there for, and ditching the rest.
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