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I’ve now been using it for about two months and I am here to tell you that it is, in principle, what we should want the internet to be. If you have been remotely interested in Mastodon but had reservations about joining because you thought it would be difficult, confusing, or otherwise annoying, it is not.
Here is how you make a #Mastodon account: You go to this website. You agree to not share #disinformation or be an asshole. You select a username and password. Then, you have a Mastodon account.
https://mastodon.social/@jasonkoebler/111267677411898394
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So, Mastodon:
1. Not difficult to sign up for
2. Not difficult to use
3. Has an app like every other social media network
4. Not owned by world’s richest man
5. Not owned by a company whose main platform has been credibly accused of facilitating genocide by the United Nations
6. Not funded by the guy who made the last place, which sold itself to the world’s richest man
7. Doesn’t have a crypto thing going on
8. Free and open source
9. Administered by a crowdfunded nonprofit
10. Decentralized, portable, and interoperable
I’m writing this because it has been weird to watch some journalists and people who are fully aware of Facebook’s catastrophic history with things like disinformation,
https://www.404media.co/mastodon-is-the-good-one/
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algorithmic dark patterns and ever-shifting reward systems, user monetization and tracking, disastrous forays into the news business, shoddy content moderation, and complicity in a genocide become the world’s largest Mark Zuckerberg / Threads simps because he’s a little less awful than Elon Musk. These same people who are chit-chatting with Mark about his MMA are chastising their colleagues who choose to stay on “Xitter,” “the Bird Site,” “the hell site,” etc because their audience is there.
If your audience won't follow you they are not your audience.
@nikol and if you don't like mastodon, there's misskey (mastodon but fun, rich text support, web app is great, no eugen), lemmy (what it reddit but good), pixelfed (instagram but good), etc. i think there’s a WordPress one, but i forget the name
@nikol Regarding 1 and 2: It doesn't matter if it isn't hard as long as the other ones are easier and have better features in terms of relevancy and discoverability. It's like evolution: You need to be better than the others to win, regardless of how good you are. I hate to say it but Mastodon really isn't very good at these points and needs to improve not to replaced by #bluesky once they open up.
@DrSeltsam @nikol this is one of the main forbidden truths on Mastodon (the biggest is that, in the big instances at least, there is less diversity of opinion on most issues than almost any other social media).
Given every other place is at least one of: seething with hate, untrustable, unsuitable for most content, empty ... . Mastodon may as well knock the self-praise on the head and just advertise with the slogan: what other choice do you have.
@DrSeltsam @nikol "forbidden truth" was maybe a little dramatic. "Argument fuel" is probably a better term, as chances are nothing will happen, but it occasionally causes arguments.
I agree things need to be better here, but IMO they are. Call for features that make Twitter and Facebook what they are happens all the time here. 
If you want that, what are you here for?
Let me suggest, you want community and civil discourse, interaction over megaphone accounts etc.
The things that make Mastodon better mean taking time. Success is not about replacing or 'beating' any other platform. Let Bluesky go the same way as Twitter, just like Medium & substack
@DrSeltsam @nikol the other points could be seen as competing features - but most people don't see it that way.
We are in a situation where the users of those platforms have very different experiences and also most have limited experience with the consequences of these digital monopolies and dark patterns.
We have the younger generation who haven't lived through most of the previous enshittifications and we have older generations for whom the digital sphere is not so integrated into their lives.
And then we have the (small) bunch who are kind of digital natives but also have the experience of enshittification and who got a glimpse of decentralised systems in the early days.
@DrSeltsam @nikol I think the most we can do is ask ourselves how we can address the usability/accessibility shortcomings, stay true to our values and show what the alternative can look like.
We won't win by emulating what makes people addicted to the other (commercial) platforms.
They have to go through the experience of that addiction being a bad pattern.
I have seen the same in business with management going for shiny new things. It has to hurt before they ask for advice. 
And if it doesn't hurt - who am I to tell people they have to do things differently...
@nikol this post should be boosted by everyone.
@nikol it's more difficult to use than other social media apps.
@marjolica @nikol semi-true, e.g. if someone links a post, your browser will open that post on a certain webapp which isn't chosen by you
Nah,
Facebook doesn't respect your settings, wont let you see your timeline. Thinks it knows better than you as to what is relevant. Picks "relevant" posts but hides the ones that actually are useful.
They are all now full of "ai" so searching sucks. Now you have to have a chatbot conversation to find things.
@nikol I use Mastadon but it definitely wasn’t easy to sign up for and it takes FOREVER to load. I refuse to use twitter so here I am.
@nikol@mastodon.bida.im
But to be fair journalists have a hard time with saying #fediverse. Must be the hash tag or something?
@nikol I contend that the process of finding an instance to join is quite daunting for a first-time user unless you already know people using it. Additionally, the server list sites by default just shouldn't show instances that require approval or invites. It took me three attempts before I finally got an account.
Everything else you said, though, is spot on.
You're absolutely not wrong about it being difficult for some, but they've made significant improvements. Joining up through the "official" app or at joinmastodon.org and selecting to choose a different server than .social puts one through to an index that lets one choose by instance focus, and sorts the results so that open instances are all listed before the ones that require an application, and they're tagged as such right on the results page, so someone who wants to just sign up post-haste can do o without wasting time checking out the ones that have a delay.
I think there's always going to be some friction just because of the federated aspect, but they're doing good work listening and responding to a lot of the concern, I feel. Certainly lots still to do - moderation and the whole defederation/blocklist thing are issues that need working on, but there's a lot of will to make things better. YMMV, ofc.
@Caution @StarkRG @nikol I suggest @FediGarden for people looking for instances to join.
@WhombeX @StarkRG @nikol @FediGarden Yes, but you’re not there when newbies are signing up, which is why it matters that they’re improving the most common paths and removing barriers to entry.
@Caution @StarkRG @nikol @FediGarden yes, you are right.
@nikol
What I've seen lately, interoperable until the admin of your instance decides they don't like someone on an another instance or the other way around, and the connections are severed. Maybe even dragging a whole clique of intances to it and leaving users wondering why they can not see each other anymore.
It is by design, but very confusing and annoying for people who just expect things to work.
(he/him) @nikol I disagree that Mastodon is easy to sign up for (a lot of people have told me they haven't signed up for this very reason), but I think the benefits of understanding how to sign up, and getting to participate in the space created does outweigh the inconvenience. I think Twitter, Facebook, Insta, etc gets one over on the user, without them realising, by making it easy to join.
This is my third account.
My second account was created accidentally when trying to sign up for the first time.
I met my first boyfriend on chat in 1980*, and although I am not a super genius, I possess basic computer literacy.
If it's difficult for me, it's only going to be worse for the majority of user.
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* not a typo. MECC (the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium) had a program called MultiTalk and we were on different state uni campuses.
@nikol well it is quite hard. Hard to discover new people, you’re mainly limited to your local server’s timeline unless it’s a big instance with lots of people following various instances. That’s the biggest flaw of fediverse that you need to manually make a lot of effort to find valuable content.
I was never on the bird site so I can’t compare the experience, but as a relative computer dunce I got on here easily. At first my feed was boring, but once I started following people & #, it’s great. I don’t think the problems with adjusting to Mastodon are universal.
yes but many media outlets have in part based their reporting strategies around using Xitter as a news aggregate. Until Masto can supplant it and fulfill that same function (ie critical mass of journalists onboard) they won't see us as viable.
@nikol and most importantly - it’s actually fun?!
@nikol this is unfortunately not the way to convince “the masses” to move. They mostly don’t care about technical, legal or even moral points. They will go where the interesting content is. For me it was news as they happen directly from the sources, IT content, conversations with interesting folks and the occasional funny meme stuff. All of that is not even 50% of what Twitter was before its self-destruction. I will stay here because everywhere else it’s currently worse.
@nikol 11. Has lots of gay people /lh
@nikol do some people enjoy seeing advertising?
x7 @nikol Also journalists can run their own org server, so they're not beholden to somebody else's arbitrary rules.
But, 
.
@nikol The weird thing is that we’ll need to share this article on FB etc. to convince people (and also, I’d need it in French for most of my contacts).
@nicolasfolliot I've shared article about fediverse on fb of course
1. is transparently false. All the "good" arguments in the world won't change the user experience. Instance selection confusion is very real and pretending it doesn't exist helps nothing. It is one of the major adoption barriers for people.
Related to that: The recommended instance is certainly big. It's also a widely muted/restricted instance. Which is another aspect of the federation that throws and alienates would-be users.
I enjoy the Fediverse but don't minimize the obstacles.
@nikol
Also:
- no ads
- just generally less toxic people
- I've yet to hear "did you see what the [prominent authoritarian racist rightwing banana head] wrote on Fediverse?" Zero times. Competing brands OTH...
- custom emoji 
