Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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Maybe ask the people what they find confusing about Mastodon, and listen.
I'll give you example. Say I want to sign up , but mastodon.social has currently closed sign-ups. People tell me I can just sign up on any instance, but there's dozens of them and they all appear to be the same. As someone who's not familiar with federated services, I don't know what to base my instance decision on.
How would you help me overcome this choice paralysis?
Additionally, there's the usability hurdle of interacting with non-home instances from outside mastodon. If I pull up someone's blog and click the little mastodon social media icon, it may very well link to mastodon.world. If my home instance is mastodon.social, now I have to launch into my own server, search up the account, and then begin interacting.
It's trivial to do but it is an extra step, and for your less-tech-literate friends and family it can be a point of confusion. Mastodon handles federation great in-ecosystem, but the broader web is still going to treat each instance as a different site.