Fediverse

The problem a lot of people have with it is in Steps 1 and 2.

Step 1: download an app. There are so many now, it's hard to tell them apart and decide which one is better or worse. The official mobile one is OK for most, but there are half a dozen others and no easy way to pick one over the other.

Step 2: Create an account. Turns out that decision is where people get stuck the most. Which server should they choose? One based on their interests, their location, where other exiles from their previous social network went, or go for a big one like mastodon.social? And since you can create more than one on a different server, should you create more than one before you get going? So many decisions.

Finally, let's say you've gone through both steps and are finally on. How do you get followers, or decide who to follow?

Itt's all good once you've jumped in, gone through a week of confusion, missed all the people you used to follow because they're too scared to leave and FOMO. Then you realize following a hashtag is a good thing, but it brings in a lot of people spamming it (try following #press to get news) so now you have to start muting accounts.

Now put yourself in the shoes of an old auntie fed up with the crap on other sites and how they can navigate all this.

Until the onboarding experience -- from zero to where you're enjoying the experience and not feeling like every step is a potential cowpie -- is streamlined, people will keep saying it's hard.

I'm a big fan, btw, and have pretty much cut out all other social networks, but I don't think my auntie would enjoy it quite as much.

Why do journalists say it’s too confusing to catch on? I have no fucking idea.

It seems like it would be pertinent to make an attempt to understand the problem before trying to solve it...

This is getting posted a lot which is too bad because it’s worse than useless.

Do people not understand how technically useless 80% of users are? They CAN NOT REMEMBER THEIR PASSWORDS. (No, they didn’t write them down. Password management software? lol.)

I’m saying the height of their technical ability is to remember their password. And we want them to switch platforms, away from a fascist right-wing brainwashing troll factory to- what is it called again?

Yeah. It needs a guide with this title, but actually useful. Well-written, with the context that people reading it are already well above and beyond in making an effort.

Why are so many people still on Xitter? I have a fucking idea.

Sorry, but as soon as a website starts throwing pop-ups at me I close it. Why people tolerate that nonsense is beyond me.

Why do people say it’s too confusing to catch on?

I have no fucking idea.

This just seems to highlight a problem. People are saying they're confused by it. But if you're either unaware why or acting like you're unaware why, that's a problem. Even if there are ways to approach using Mastodon that makes it easy, there's clearly something making many users pause.

Everyone says subscribe to hashtags to get content. I have no idea how to do that on the official Mastodon Android app. If it's that obtuse, it's not going to catch on easily.

Microblogging was never my preference and as it wasn't easy enough to figure out in the app itself, being a casual user, I never looked it up in a guide/video.