How to get people to use Mastodon?
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Too damn close to tankie (TANK-ie), hard pass.
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Agreed on all counts, except that rebrands rarely succeed without boatloads of cash behind them. And even then not always.
I’ve heard (and experienced to a certain extent) that a rebrand is a sign of the beginning of the end for a product.
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Somebody needs to put this guy in charge of all the branding elements.
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As long as we're suggesting improvements for Masto:
- Remove character limits. This forces users to either not fully explain themselves or to break their post down into 5 different posts which then have to somehow be assembled by the reader. GoToSocial raises this to 5000 as the default. If someone posts >500, by all means, collapse the post.
- Stop fucking tagging literally anyone who was ever involved in a thread. I don't understand why this is a thing. It just makes every message super cluttered and makes me not want to get involved in any discussions for fear of having my notifications blown up with irrelevant BS at any time.
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I think there's a few other issues with server selection
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Longevity. How do you know that the server you are on will be there in 1, 5 or even 10 years? For larger servers like Mastodon.social you have a general idea that it will last as long as Masto itself, but others have very little guarantees on if you'll log in and find your entire feed gone. It only takes
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That brings me to my next point: migration is currently inadequate. Migrating accounts only redirects your following/followers lists and some account settings. All of the posts, reposts and content uploaded are left on the old server and potentially wiped out if it's shut down. Professionals or anyone who wants a lasting online profile need to stick to big instances because they risk losing everything if their server can't continue. I also feel like there should also be an emergency "export all" button the admins can press, so the server will email all users a copy of their data in case of shutdown. That way users who can't export their data manually before the end date will have a copy of it. And this still doesn't solve the issue of small servers shutting down out of nowhere and wiping out every user's profile on there. If that happens to an average user they're probably just going quit Masto outright
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Defederation is a good idea to keep bad servers isolated from the community and let servers dictate how open they want to be. But there's not a lot of indication of what servers have blocked/restricted the one you're signing up for, other than going to another server and seeing if the admins have manually typed up a list of that they blocked/restricted. There's also not a great way to see if the server you're looking at is read-only and any posts you make aren't being seen by users on the other server. Or that you're looking at a server that has since defederated and will no longer update posts. Also (afaik, there's not a ton of good explanations) but if you're newly connecting to a server it will only federate new posts going forward and not previous posts. Which again messes things up for people who want to use it as a consistent timeline. Dropping users into random small/medium servers risks preventing them from seeing their friends posts or cutting them off from their friends entirely
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You mention data privacy as a risk of large servers, but how is it any better on small servers? You have no idea if the user you're handing your data over to is trustworthy or reliable or that the server they manage is secured. And how do you know that a large company won't come in and offer them money to sell the server, and suddenly all your data is in the hands of spammers? And direct posts are not private. Plenty of people on Twt used their real names/emails/pictures. It's not going to be viable to have every user create a burner email and never reveal any info, even in private messages without them deciding it's not worth it. Alternatively, they have to verify the trustworthiness of every admin on a potential server, despite them likely only having a username and posts to work off of
I think there are bigger issues than "just choose a server, they're all like email" that causes people to gravitate towards larger platforms. It's not just connectivity and uptime, there are logistical issues that will impact users if Masto gains more mainstream adoption. I haven't even touched on the threat of bad actors and spam which I don't feel like the network is ready for yet
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Stop fucking tagging literally anyone who was ever involved in a thread
OMG yes. It is so annoying it is like someone keep hitting reply all in an email. And it is not just mastodon, *key does this too. -
rename boosting to re-tootin
I would say reserve re-tootin for when quote post lands on mastodon
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Quite frankly, I never understood the point of character limits to begin with. I mean, sure, don't let people post literal novels on your short-form social media platform, but it being a short-form social media platform already conditions people not to post novels...
Yeah. I see astro_ray in the thread has already replied to that point... It's ridiculous!
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I've weighed in a few times on the "choose a server" thing on various federated platforms. When signing up for a Fediverse service, you're presented with the following contradiction in terms: "Choose an instance. Your choice does not matter. The choice is yours."
There are two ways to fix this:
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We embrace "the choice doesn't matter" and the new user gets assigned an instance automatically. I think this will require some kind of formal agreement and a badge of compliance among server admins, a kind of verified checkmark. Enforce a common set of moderation rules, maintain some technical requirements like uptime and version updates etc. and agree to accept anyone who clicks the random button, you get a checkmark and randomly assigned users. The Windows software install wizard asks you "You want to go with the default settings or you want to make some decisions for yourself here?" Operating system installers do the same thing, and the "something else" choice is often last or less prominent. Because most people just want it to do the normal thing, but sometimes people have a reason to pick something specific. "Join a random server" is a big prominent button, "or, pick a server manually" is a hyperlink just below it.
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Make the choices meaningful. I see this one happening the most on Peertube where storage and bandwidth are both significant costs, so the instances there are more likely to segregate by type of content. "We host arts and crafts" "We host video game let's plays and speedruns" "We host travel and nature videos". Even if you have eclectic tastes, that choice has meaning and thus isn't as paralyzing.
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Also it should make a lil trumpet sound when you "trumpet" something
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Quite frankly, I never understood the point of character limits
My understanding is, in the early days, you could send an SMS to Twitter to post, and that is the origin of character limits. Why it's still a thing? Haven't the slightest. Drives me fuckin batty. It's one reason I never joined Twitter in the first place. Why Mastodon implemented it? It seems a lot of derivatives want to be a "clone" of some existing service, presumably for user familiarity. In the process they don't seem to consider whether any individual "feature" is actually beneficial.
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Longevity.
100% percent! This needs to be taken into account.
Migration.
I definitely think account migration should be improved, but I wonder how feasible that is, in a technical sense... I don't know how that sort of data is structured at all.
Federation/Defederation
That's a good point. Once again, I really don't know of a solution to this. I'm not too familiar with how federation works, in a technical sense. Servers definitely should definitely make public by default their blocked servers and whatnot, though.
Privacy
Of course, it's impossible to make sure that every single server is safe. My point was that, if everyone is in the same server, then the risk of something going bad for any number of people increases, versus if everyone is in a bunch of different servers. I guess it's a balance between the trustworthiness of many people with control over a few and the trustworthiness of a few people with control over many. Maybe it's not so relevant. Most people don't care about privacy anyway, I was just trying to make a point about why decentralization should be valued in a practical sense.
Yeah, there's a lot of things that still need to be improved!
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My understanding is, in the early days, you could send an SMS to Twitter to post, and that is the origin of character limits.
OH! Had no idea!
Well, maybe they'll remove it if the community pushes for it.
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On the auto-selector, I've said it before but join-fediverse needs to ask a few questions: Service? Location? Language? Hobbies? And then it spits out one or two recommendations, with an option to load more.
While I'd be fine with an auto-selector (as I help Admin feddit.uk), it would miss out on the variety of instances out there - books, games (video, tabletop, etc), franchises, etc that some people might be looking for.
So how about 2 big points: auto-selector (based on location) and answer a couple of questions.
I think the single biggest change that Mastodon can make, as far as this goes, is to shift the Explore->Posts feed to the Home tab. Just do it like Twitter or Bluesky, make the discovery feed the first thing a new user encounters.
Lemmy is better for on-boarding on this front as they have the Local and All feeds from the start. Just having that front and centre (defaulting to Local, as you don't want to overwhelm them) would be a big help.
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yes, that's what boosting is on mastodon. see how ineffectual their 'boosting' nomenclature is? that's why they should be renamed.
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Ooh sorry, I thinking like Misskey. In the English translation, they use note and renote to replace tweet and re-tweet from Twitter era
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I can’t get with that as a person who has sound off always
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My understanding is, in the early days, you could send an SMS to Twitter to post, so the limitation was imposed by SMS and not necessarily Twitter.
No. The twitter were build with the limit in mind, in fact it is its whole spiel.
Why? It's not thar deep.
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It games the attention span of viewers. You can read 3-4 articles before getting tired or going about your day, but you can guzzle infinite number of twits, because they are small, engaging and various
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It not only games the viewers but posters too. Maybe you want to write an article, or blog post, but you know it's going to be long. So you better do it on the weekend. Or when you have more time. Which for many is never.
But writing a couple sentences? Easy! You can do it on a bus! You can do it on the toilet! And, if everyone is on the same level as you, you don't feel bad for keeping it short.
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While I'm not entirely convinced that Trunky is the best choice of names, I do agree with your overall reasoning. Mastodon was always an awkward choice for a name and probably hurt adoption quite a bit, despite all the cute elephant cartoons people ended up making. Even Pleroma (an alternative server implementation compatible with ActivityPub) sounds cooler than Mastodon, despite also being three syllables long.
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Lemmy is better for on-boarding on this front as they have the Local and All feeds from the start. Just having that front and centre (defaulting to Local, as you don’t want to overwhelm them) would be a big help.
Yup, Lemmy does it really well.
So how about 2 big points: auto-selector (based on location) and answer a couple of questions.
I think that's totally fine. The big point is that the user shouldn't choose a server. Answer a few questions that can lead to a server? OK. But as soon as you make someone choose you might be reintroducing that confusion that seems to not be very popular with normies.
While I’d be fine with an auto-selector (as I help Admin feddit.uk), it would miss out on the variety of instances out there - books, games (video, tabletop, etc), franchises, etc that some people might be looking for.
Here, I'll point to this thread by Ted Curran: https://indieweb.social/@tedcurran/113946323075198755
Also, this reply thread https://lemm.ee/comment/18473212
Ted talks about how it might be best to simply send people to one instance (a sort of starter instance) and then encourage them to move to a different, more specific one. Other users complain that account migration is insufficient.
Maybe, after improving account migration, we should send users to a few semi-random starter instances that have agreed to a certain set of rules and adhere to a set of quality standards, but then encourage them to leave by migrating their account to an instance that better matches their interests.
From what I've gathered with the replies I've been getting, this might actually be the best solution, for now. Though, of course, it does include a significant improvement over the tech side, rather than relatively simple UI changes...
