this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Technology
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I think the UI/UX is really good now, and comparable to Twitter, and better then Threads/Bluesky. Unfortunately most don't get that far, because onboarding on the fedi is still a very big pain point and the very first thing people have to overcome. Also actually using the fedi, people linking other instances and whatnot really breaks the experience when you wonder why you're suddenly on an identical looking site but are signed out. I think decentralization is simply a requirement for freedom, but also it is a confusing concept for onboarding that we haven't quite solved yet. I'm optimistic that these things can improve though.
I think I've started learning that I'm kind of ok with that barrier to entry... I mean, it's pretty fucking low. It's not that difficult to understand if you are willing to take 5 mins to learn how it works.
Don't want to be gatekeeper-y or anything, but maybe if you can't pass that simple test, then the overall discourse is better off without you in it.
How low the barrier is depends on how good is your prior knowledge. If you are a millennial that remember the internet before Facebook, it's probably very easy to understand the gist. For older people who never got into how computers work, or younger people that only saw the internet through smartphone apps, that barrier may be higher than we feel.
And it's hardly five minutes anymore. If using the official app sign up is as fast as Twitter or any other app.
That high barrier of entry is going to automatically keep out most non-techy people, and they tend to be a big source of entertaining content out there. Generally if you discount any bad UX as "takes only a bit effort to learn" that just means it's not user friendly and needs a lot of improvement.
They've made huge improvements to onboarding over the past few months, it's as easy as any other app now:
It's literally that easy now. Anything to do with Federation (like following other users) is also hidden to the background unless you go looking for it.
The actual fedi experience for a non techy:
At each one of these steps, there's a new learning curve. If it's not easy enough for your grandma, then it needs improvement.
Right, that used to be how it was done, but it's not anymore. The very first result in the iPhone app store and Google play store is the official app. The official app has not prompted the user to choose an instance since May of this year.
Many of the other questions (like about data and privacy) are extremely valid but also apply to any app, so by that logic Twitter for example would have considerably more steps than Mastodon simply by virtue of a significantly more complicated TOS.
Normies will not even come to mastadon so no need to dumb down the experience to grandma level. They will use Facebook or X just like they will use windows and edge. They use computers as if they were TVs, never changing any defaults even.
You should try the sign up process, you don't understand it. Explore tab shows you top posts on your instance to follow and no one posts links to masto comments because it doesn't look good.
The only actually confusing thing is people trying to quote tweet when it isn't possible, and maybe losing followers when there's server defed drama. Thankfully there hasn't been any recently.