Comment by neoberg
3 years ago
Not parent commenter but; I personally don't have any interest in what you described. Especially when it's something like mastodon, which is inferior in almost every aspect.
- All clients are straight up bad but this is mostly personal opinion. - I don't want to maintain and pay for a personal instance - On public instances there is always the risk of the admins deciding not to run it anymore without notice. In that case you lose all your followers. - Due to how it's designed; some things are very inconvenient. For example; when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow. Too much friction for a simple and one of the most important actions of the platform. - With these inconveniences (that are not easy to solve without centralization), it's imho impossible for it to go mainstream. It requires a certain level of tech-saviness. Even the concept of "choosing an instance" is confusing for most people. I don't want to just follow or be followed by techbros and edgy artists. I like having normal converstaions with regular people.
I would be interested in an alternative to Twitter but in its current state, Mastodon isn't that.
>when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow. Too much friction for a simple and one of the most important actions of the platform.
I get that is quite a UX/UI problem. However, given what is now known about FAANG and big tech corp, I would rather have my data unreliable and use bad UX/UI for online exchange then to use the mainstream big corp platforms. Personally I don't want to be a product.
What recent information about FAANG (and presumably Twitter) pushed you over the edge? Genuine question in case it comes across sharp, for all those except Netflix I haven't respected their business practices or ethics for at least a decade.
The UI/UX problems of Mastodon really are due to the federation model, they aren't inevitable when moving away from a corporate walled garden. Bit of a dead horse on HN, but RSS really does most of what Mastodon does better, throw in WebMentions and you have all the social features too. To the original thread here, it's be very cool to see indieweb support on omg.lol since everyone gets a subdomain and webpage already!
Not disagreeing with you that there is an amount of friction at the moment. However, just to provide some counterpoints:
> All clients are straight up bad but this is mostly personal opinion.
There are a _lot_ of new clients in active development right now. I'm on the private alpha of Ivory by Tapbots (who built the popular Tweetbot client), and it's quite good.
> On public instances there is always the risk of the admins deciding not to run it anymore without notice. In that case you lose all your followers.
Agreed that this is an issue, but there are ways around it. I'm a member of a coop-run instance, social.coop.
> Due to how it's designed; some things are very inconvenient. For example; when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow.
Agreed, but most clients resolve this.
> it's imho impossible for it to go mainstream.
Strong disagree - I think it's already going mainstream, and lots of non-tech people are picking it up every day.
> Even the concept of "choosing an instance" is confusing for most people. I don't want to just follow or be followed by techbros and edgy artists. I like having normal converstaions with regular people.
Agreed, but this is resolved by just picking one of the big, popular instances. I was on universeodon.com first, and was immediately having "normal" conversations with "regular" people.
Again, your comment absolutely rightfully points out that there _is_ friction there. However, I don't think it's at all insurmountable, and I think it will continue to improve and gain traction.
I generally agree, but Mastodon is getting a lot of dev attention right now due to the Twitter problems, and while FOSS tends to improve slower and more incrementally, it also tends to only improve (as opposed to user-hostile pivots and so forth). For this use case, I'd rather use a clunky service that'll be around for the rest of my life than a slick one that might get bought by Elon Jr or whoever.