atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

the former's status as an Obviously Federated Platform that Works Differently in all the ways it does has a hidden drawback, besides the hassles one can experience in using it. a friend pointed out "an absence of non-technical users"

people who use mastodon are often there because they are interested or invested, technically or ideologically, in the structure of the site. lots of times folks don't go to mastodon because they want to talk to their friends, they go there because the structure of the system is interesting

mastodon has hurdles. it has all kinds of hacked together shit you have to understand to use it. trying to reply to a user on another instance is weird as hell.

twitter and cohost have made it easy; you don't have to understand how the site works to use it. this lets people who aren't interested in or can't understand the technical side post as they please without having to understand what it means that their own or their friend's instance has "defederated" or what activitypub is

artists and musicians and ordinary people who are only interested in their work or friends, not in how the system underneath the website works, can post without worry. it leads to a much better diversity of users in many fashions


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in reply to @atomicthumbs's post:

And the thing I keep thinking is, friction in posting/UI is useful! It’s a way to nudge user behaviour! But not a single piece of Mastodon’s friction is designed, it’s the outcome of the technical infrastructure. It doesn’t accomplish any useful social purpose and it requires you to accept that that infrastructure is worth the cost.

great point. mastodon's friction is only designed if you consider "people struggle to understand and use it if they aren't already familiar with the technical concepts" a desirable trait, which happens to be true of many gatekeepy open source nerds.

As a minor counterpoint: I have done nothing with cohost. I can't figure out how to find anything. I gave up on it as a literal ghost town and didn't log in for a couple of months. I came back today (because I was reminded of its existence) and there were like 3 new posts in my feed in that entire time.

Now, obviously, that's because I don't follow enough people. The reason I came back today was to add some more people, that I discovered because they announced they'd joined on Twitter, with their handle, that I could then look up here.

Mastodon has server-local and global feeds; you can watch those scroll by, and maybe see some users to follow, or threads to join into. New people, even, as well as people you might already know from other platforms that you can look up by name. Lots of other services have channels you can see and join, as a starting point to joining discussions and finding people.

The new user experience for cohost is utterly .. lonely. There's nothing to see, you can't post, and there's nothing in the navigation to discover new people / content / posts or anything. Just.. blank silence; nothing happens, except some announcements in the sidebar.

I do "have to understand how the site works to use it". Not in the way you meant, sure — but nothing in the default new-user navigation helps me find anything, and all the discovery is indirect via some other external service.

That's a lot of friction. And I can't even post about it to start with, or once I can noone will see it anyway.

also, it was only today I realised that a lot of stuff is hidden behind a tiny, faint, grey message in the footer that says something like "2 comments + 36 on shared posts". Did not notice that. Also need to "know how the site works" to interpret what that means, as well as see posts with non-0 values to work it out.

Then I forgot to mention it in the above, and.. there was no way to find the comment I had just posted (or the article I had just comment on) from my home page to come back and add it.