Pretty interesting opinion piece on some of the UX hurdles open source and federated software faces.
I’ve thought about this as I was someone who jumped onto Mastodon as soon as Twitter went dark side. I think the reason it never became a go-to for me like Lemmy has, is the fundamental difference in how I used Reddit and Twitter.
With Reddit, while I curated my feed by following subs, I was really looking for something to cover me when I was idle for a time, and wanted to scroll. I am not too choosy about what I want to see, just surprise me.
Twitter was strictly a service that I used to follow organizations and individuals. I never went to trending or anything like that. My follows were just accounts I gained interest in somewhere else. Mastodon failed because probably less than 10% of the accounts I followed even tried the service. There was nothing to see.
When the Twitter migration happened, a lot of folks got overenthusiastic about the idea of the fediverse and started setting up their own Mastodon instances, despite having little to no experience with selfhosting before.
A lot of such instances have since shut down as they realised the amount of efforts that actually needs into hosting such a platform, especially instances with open registrations. However, a large number of them did survive and are now thriving.
Has the growth rate slowed? Sure, just like it is expected happen after a sudden influx. But it is false to say that Mastodon growth has stalled. Instead, the phrase I would use is ‘stabilized’. Mastodon growth has stabilized into a healthy level as user growth is now happening more organically. Some stats below:
12,808,214 accounts +217,864 in the last week
Stats on most active instances:
By number of users:
https://i.postimg.cc/fb6FyY89/Screenshot-20230625-121432-Firefox.jpgBy number of posts:
https://i.postimg.cc/cCWbM0y1/Screenshot-20230625-121509-Firefox.jpgHow can anyone look at these numbers and say that the growth has stalled?
I have been working in software development for 2 decades. I’m saying that to make the point that I’m in the more technical group of internet users.
Anyway even I just jumped ship from Twitter to mastodont without really understanding how it worked.
So I’m pretty sure lots of users just signed up with the first server they found and slowly realized it wasn’t just a Twitter clone.
Now that I do understand it I really love the concept, but it’s definitely different than just Twitter.
For example I use two accounts on different servers with very different content. Personally I really like that separation.
Fantastic article, thank you for sharing. I think it really hits the nail on the head as far as the exclusionary culture goes - members of the Fediverse want the Fediverse to grow, but by-and-large they want the Fediverse to grow full of people just like them - and, unfortunately, most people just like them are already here.
Once the technical kinks are worked out (easier said than done, I know), it’s the user experience that has to be improved, and the overall onboarding experience must be tuned for people who don’t know or care what a Fediverse is besides “that place where I can see the reddit and twitter type posts”. Yes, maybe the community will change and we’ll hit our own “eternal September” moment, but it’ll be better overall for the internet to have social media decentralized. This could very well be our Web 3.0 turning point but we have to accept the bad with the good if we want that sort of future.
It is the same reason I don’t have an email at my own domain. It is difficult to setup my own and people who run small operations can only give hobby level commitments.
Social media happened because not everyone wanted to build a website. They just wanted an easy place to post and view content.
These tendencies will always bias towards a few other entities handling most of the traffic. Email, social media, and other online experiences like chat.
So…this whole evidence point out by the author amounts to personal experience, and not even a kind of personal experience that is good for evidence. Smaller instances closing down isn’t the same as large instances closing down when it comes to adoption. Heck, there’s a recent report that shows the opposite of what is said here, with proper data to back it up.
Unfortunately, there’s noone who would respond to that. Everyone knows about ux problems yet noone knows how to approach them. Those who can help, usually do so with pull request – and even if not merged right away, they give base for future attempts.
Open source needs quality contributions to move further. However if one cannot solve any “good first issue” by themselves, tossing $5 into the donation bin allows devs to hire those who can solve those.
Once critical mass of contributions is achieved, you get wikipedia, vlc, blender etc: dominant players with no close proprietary rivals
Fediverse brings us inconvenient experiences which is necessary to evolute our SNS technology.
This was extremely well-written and absolutely worth the read - thanks for posting. I would like to see this get tons of boosts and upvotes.
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