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


itsborb
@itsborb

i think a lot of technical people don't quite grasp that i don't like fighting with computers. even if i win


nora
@nora

this is absolutely me. i am generally a person who is in the middle of technical and not technical, but when the technical has invisible social mores that i will be expected to follow in addition to the regular technical hurdles i simply will not get involved.


Peek
@Peek

i AM technical, i am a computer fiddler by trade, and i still don't feel like i want to fight with my computer just to make post. i think computers are a tool, a means to accomplish a certain task (shitposts). but i think for a certain kind of person, Fiddling With The Computer is the end goal in and of itself. it's less about what you do with it, and more just about the Experience of Using The Computer. i think that's how a lot of stuff ends up the way it does and why a lot of computer-related communities are so hostile to newcomers and people expressing any kind of frustration at their wacky-ass platforms


atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

I'm done adjusting the computer. I got it the way I want it. I don't want to do that anymore.


mifune
@mifune

Being technical and getting older made me more sensitive to these things. I don't want to constantly fiddle with things to keep them running, it should just work and preferably the same way as it did a year ago.

Having to do constant maintenance for a service is a red flag for me. With mastodon there is a constant threat of losing people you follow because their instance shut down, or they moved somewhere else. An IRC client was always on the verge of losing its connection to the servers and I had to make sure everything was still ok.

But most importantly I've found that I like to see more things than just computers and their software. I like to see art, hear about weird history, how everybody's cat is doing, and even why they are so exited about this sports thing they are into. Making a service technically complicated quickly makes the group that can post about that smaller.


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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.

in reply to @itsborb's post:

A big issue with Mastodon's culture of technicality, which I consider downstream from its inherent tech-libertarianism, is that it has a lot of highly-technical bad actors. I'm thinking of all the griefers who used a specific version of Pleroma that wasn't "fixed" and therefore could bypass certain types of blocks and defederation. Ultimately, you wind up with a Randian "who's going to stop me" attitude that subordinates, you know, whether someone is being an asshole.

The thing that really works for me on Cohost is the basics of reading and posting are easy and fine, plus I've already gotten sucked in to wasting time trying to do pointless cool css things, which is the kind of thing I can get sucked into, but that's like a weird side quest, it's not like step one or two before I can even do any simple normal thing!

in reply to @Peek's post:

I think you summed up why I never was able to summon the will to post much on my personal website, the bare html code even if simple is a pain compared to nice round non-threatening buttons that just work.