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.