It's possible that it is simple to use, but the community hasn't been able to explain it yet. My attempt: Mastadon is Twitter with far fewer users. The self-hosting and federation stuff is really detail to most people, much like most of email infrastructure.

I don't think it's correct or useful to make an equivalence between Twitter and Mastodon.

Mastodon is software. It implements the ActivityPub protocol. People run Mastodon instances of their own to connect to other ActivityPub systems. There are other ActivityPub implementations, Mastodon is just one. It's not a platform like Twitter any more than WordPress is like the NYTimes.

I’m technical (as most people are on HN), but I don’t care how it works. I don’t care whether it’s a service or a protocol. I don’t care if it’s centralized or federated. What I want to know is how I use it as easily as possible. If that requires me to know the details - it failed. By “failed” in this context I mean “to be a viable Twitter alternative”. There may be other goals such as being a viable social network/protocol on a different scale or with other goals than being a Twitter competitor - but I don’t think most are interested in Mastodon for any purpose other than as a Twitter alternative.

If you read the TFA you'd realize that your second paragraph is precisely what she's criticizing.

It's possible that some concepts or tools can't be simplified or there's no point. Try explaining Webpack to an end-user. Such categories of things exist, in which case they are not products but components of other products. If Mastodon can't be understood simply, then it will only catch on with those who understand complexity, and be used in a product that is itself simple.

It's an intentionally obtuse criticism, and I don't think it's been made in good faith. I'm seeing all kinds of weird, gleeful hatred being thrown at a piece of software that a bunch of people are running for a variety of their own reasons. It's like being mad at WordPress because of a hateful website you found.

Mastodon is not that hard to understand. It's just not Twitter. It's not meant to be a 1-to-1 replacement for Twitter, but people keep trying to compare it to Twitter and then acting out like they're all upset because they don't find everything they're looking for in the thing.

If "Mastodon replace Twitter" is a thing, it will mostly be in the sense that people will be using their time differently, not that they'll be doing the same things as they do on Twitter. You're not going to "build a brand" on Mastodon. You're not going to make a name for yourself posting "dank memes". You're not going to get a chance to show off your "sick dunks" to your followers.

I think it's weird that people keep calling Twitter a "public square", but if that's how they want to think of Twitter, that's not at all Mastodon.

What is Twitter, actually? It's an advertising platform. It carrots people with celebrities and sticks them with promoted tweets. Along the way, some people find they can keep up with their friends, colleagues, and industry acquaintances through the thing.

Mastodon is just about the last thing.

I've used it for months and I still couldn't tell you exactly how it works. Open efforts like Mastodon desperately need simple infographics to explain the service to newcomers or you'll end up with a bunch of ex-twatter users signing up, using it for 5 minutes, being annoyed that it's not nearly as simple as twatter and then idling their accounts while they switch to something else. See also: matrix, which has some uptake by the open source technical crowd but nowhere near the general adoption of telegram.

People have written whole books on how to use twitter. There's a whole generation that needed this kind of introduction to make sense of it, when it was relatively new.

Every time a twitter thread gets posted on HN, there's at least one comment on how difficult it is to read it, for one reason or another.

Are you serious? It took me 5 minutes to spin up twitter and post a shitty twit. It took me half an hour to get mastodon and i still dont know what it is, other than a distributed clone of twitter with unlimited powers given to server owners.

Yeah, I don't get the big deal at all. I self-host a Pleroma instance, it took me about 10 minutes of doc-reading to set it up - similar complexity to the IRC bouncer I set up a while back. And if you don't want to self-host, you just sign up to an existing instance.

The threading mechanics of twitter took me a non-trivial amount of time to get my head around.

I suppose if the goal is to emulate irc servers but for short twits then depending on who owns a server and how well they keep things on topic then it could work. Say a mastodon thingie for software developers, than bans any politics or crypto would be nice to have. Ideally something that search engines can index so we dont silo knowledge. I think, i still dont know what this is.

You are not the average person. This is basically alien language to someone who isn’t tech savvy, which makes it a non starter.

I'm using technical language because I'm on HN.

"You visit a website (or install an app) and you create an account with an email address and password" is something the average person is used to. The UX will be confusing at first - there are new concepts to learn. People will figure it out.

You seem to be out of touch with what the non-technical web users. Practically none will read and implement the stuff in their documentation in 10 minutes.

Even if some do, most of those will run into a tiny random roadblock and will give up.

Nothing as "techy" as Mastodon or the one you mentioned will be adopted at the scale of Twitter.

There's a huge difference. Books can be written about Twitter, but you don't need to read any to use it.

The Mastodon registration comes to a halt for many already at the server selection page where you are presented with topics (why?) and list of instances. There should be a default choice in the express signup for people who don’t care about instances at all.

Exactly this. Also, servers should not be topic oriented. Imagine that email services did something like that: "it's email for plumbers and it's plumbers you talk mostly with here"

The qualities that make a social network successful have little to do with the protocol technologies involved. If the next hit social network happens to be on Mastodon, that will only be a coincidence.

It's not hard to use. Make an account and visit the web page or use a client app. But people feel they don't have a valid reason _why_ they'd use it over Twitter.

So geeks explain the geeky benefits, which are substantial, but virtually no non-geeks care about.

welcome to the arc of every new and/or innovative technology ever :D

It will never be simple to use... until somebody makes it simple to use.

My wife was struggling with the password reset flow yesterday, which behaved in unexpectedly and seemingly broken ways via the mobile app she was using. Just basic usability.