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It's wild that no one ever had a problem with this with email and yet this is apparently so confusing they abandon it.
Do you work in IT? I couldn't imagine sitting there trying to guide people through IMAP and SMTP settings. Like email has been made a lot easier on that end because most people use an app on their phone that allows them to select from one of the three major providers, they click it, poof all done.
But imagine someone calls you up and is like "hey how do I setup mutt for gmail?" "How do I set up Canary for Microsoft?"
Then imagine someone who has 1/10 of your knowledge trying to set it up. We have to remember that a lot of people are unaware of the file/folder metaphor in computers because a lot of people just "put it in a cloud" and call it done. The tablet/phone era has really eroded a lot of knowledge about systems. I know that seems hard to believe on the Fediverse when we're all surrounded by incredibly knowledgeable people.
People at work think I'm a wizard because I can do formulas in Excel and know how to navigate through directories in the file explorer. Even standard keyboard shortcuts (Like Ctrl+C) are strange magical things to many of my coworkers.
I see your point but do you really have that level of complexity on the fediverse?
You pick an instance, create an account and then browse; much like you would pick an email provider, create an account, and email your friends.
Sure if you're setting up your own domain for email, or configuring a mail client to work with your email provider, then you have to deal with these things but in my opinion the analogy works reasonably well. Maybe I am being dense.
Agreed, imo lemmy is more of lacking critical mass. Ime, more people seem to complain about the small size of communities.
I would just never get accustomed to mastodon, though. Finding out people is difficult there.
So it's hard choosing one instance but having an account in Bluesky, another one in Steam, another one in Epic, another one in PSN/XBox Live, another one in Twitch, ... it's the easiest thing in the world.
This analogy gets used a lot here, but it ignores the fact you literally see users struggling, asking for help, then giving up.
Also, email had a lot of things helping it out. Many ISPs would (and still) give people an email address and set it up for them. Moreover, mail web clients like Hotmail and Gmail didn’t pester people with domain selection. Average users didn’t pick a Hotmail or Gmail domain because they were thinking about the domain, they got it because they were thinking about the features that the web client and host offered.
Hotmail and Gmail are domains. People had already chosen a domain before they went to the website.
My point is email isn’t just a domain. It’s a client and a hosting service. You were forced to use their domains if you wanted access to their web clients, free storage, etc.
No one chose Gmail early on because they wanted the “Gmail” domain. They chose it because of the web client and massive free storage.
So you're arguing that Mastodon instances don't do enough to set themselves apart on features?
You don't have to deal with being sent links to other people's mail servers' public mail lists, and then figuring out how to get your own mail server to figure out how to join that conversation. Mailto links open in your mail client which already knows what your server is.
Mastodon don't have a mailto: equivalent, pages can't identify themselves in a way your browser recognize as a Mastodon host, your browser won't remember your Mastodon account(s) specifically. And federation sync issues aren't even dealt with here...
Email is not the same, if it was, then mastodon would just be another email client.
One of the biggest issues with federated social media is discovery, a specific problem that email doesn't deal with, sense communication with email is primarily done between individuals with known addresses.
It's also easy for people to comprehend email because it has an easy analog to regular addresses and traditional communication (I'm writing a letter on my computer and it's getting sent to someone else's computer)
Finally, it took email decades to get to the place it is today, and 99.99999 percent of people using it don't understand how it works in the slightest, like at all.
Exactly this. IIRC the Mastodon devs don't want to add recommendation algorithms, since those can be gamed. The problem is that many users rely on them to bootstrap their account and find ongoing events.