Confused about this. In my experience it's always just been a matter of adding
Is this not always so simple?
You definitely can't click that handle and add follow them, I could put https://cooldude.example.com/@cooldude and you could click to their profile on their instance, but there would be no way to follow them directly from there on your mastodon.social (or whatever) account, you have to go to your instance and type/paste in their handle and then click follow.
Edit: There is a remote-follow workflow that involves clicking a link and entering your full handle to get redirected to a page where you can follow them. Maybe slightly better, but still not great.
I mean, I'm not saying that mastodon is super duper easy to use for everyone but in this particular example you seem to be going out of your way to make it more complicated than it is.
If the thing you found on hn was a link to their profile your flow would make sense, but if you have an id@domain the flow is really simple and basically the same as other similar things (ie. put it in your email client).
With email addresses, you have the mailto: link, which works pretty well so you don't have to copy paste. Maybe we need a follow: url scheme that browsers know what to do with.
Which you can, regardless of what instance they're on.
Moving in bulk is also easy, using something like Debirdify
Correction: You can't do it if you are linked to their user page https://mastodon.social/username...that doesn't work if you're not on mastodon.social. And often I seem to find myself at these URLs and can't see if I'm following the person, and have to go through extra steps to follow them.
Is copy/paste also too much to ask of technology's current generation?
There's a big (and only) search bar at the top of the homepage. You can simply search the username and they'll pop up across instances. There's a little follow button next to their name you can click and you're done
Exactly like Venmo or Snapchat or Instagram. It's already in the cultural norms to ask "what's your insta" or "what's your venmo".
What's your mastodon?
for example. if i want to search for @[email protected]... i do that, and click follow.
thats it. i click follow. like, where are you guys having so much trouble with this?
1. View a user's profile page on another instance.
2. Click "Follow".
3. A "remote follow" window opens with the message "Enter your username@domain you want to act from".
4. ???
How profile pages are displayed changes depending on whether you middle/right click ("open in new tab") or left click on a user's name from your own instance. If you left click, you get the profile page on you own instance. If you get the link by any other means (including e.g. someone sends you a link to their profile), you get the above. It's confused me more than once.
I think it means going to your home instance, searching for @[email protected] and clicking the follow button that will show up. But maybe you mean something else? Either way it's not easy to find it.
You can just search for "@personiwannafollow" and they'll show up and you can hit a single button to follow.
It's the big, and only, search bar at the top of the home page...
But people understand how federation works. They see it happen everyday with e-mail. You just need to tell them it works like that and they'll get it.
The number of people I had to teach about the "@" symbol alone. And then a few years later the pain was gone. Enough people had learned that most people asked their friends and family rather than need tech support.
The tipping point comes quicker than people expect. E.g. many of the discussions on Mastodon on Twitter is already full of neophytes who had never heard about federation a week ago who are now explaining it to others.
I have no illusion this wave here and now will be the watershed for Mastodon, even with 10x-20x as many daily signups as a couple of weeks ago (currently the hourly signups are above the daily signups two weeks ago), but every wave makes the next one easier.
Phone numbers with area codes are still a thing?
@[email protected] shouldn't be too hard to wrap their head around.
This is "just" extending that concept to @[email protected], @[email protected], whatever. This user on this site, same as this email address on this domain.
Honestly which instance is hard because instances can be small. Which means that an instance runner can get petty with federation. One instance I looked at clearly had the owner in some sort of drama with the owner of another instance.
Sure while it may be possible to avoid now, imagine that drama had happened after I'd been on the instance for a year. I wouldn't likely know until I suddenly stopped seeing my friends posts in my feed. Or what if my previous one had shut down with no warning instead of giving me months to migrate. Should a normal person have to back up their data weekly from the site in case it's owner does something stupid?
In reality Federation is cool and all but most people are going to end up on Mastadon.social
Non-technical users have never understood these things. They browse the web by accident and sending e-mail is incomprehensible magic. Most people don't care at all how such things work, they only care when they don't work.
There are shades of gray between the people who understand the technical definition of federation, and people who, as you put it "browse the web by accident". The people who are looking for an alternative right now understand e-mail well enough (from an end-user perspective) to make the comparison.
If we ever get to the point where enough people use mastodon that the latter category would also be interested in participating in it, it would be so ubiquitous that they would ask someone with a minimum of understanding to et it up for them. Just the way it works now with other things.
Every point of friction you add for a user of a new thing is a reason for them to abandon it. Even if Mastodon isn't trying to necessarily replace Twitter, catering only to the most dedicated users is not a way to grow a healthy community.
Here's a story about an engineering professor lamenting that their first-year students do not understand folder structures, because they have been using Google Docs for a decade, and don't use use anything besides the search bar.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
That's not to say they're obsolete but it's not necessary for whole classes of users to use and understand them.
I would posit that it's easier to understand things like objects, arrays and API endpoints if you have that basic familiarity with folders.
In many cases hierarchies are just ceremony or boilerplate that slow down a user. Say a note taking application. It can store the actual notes in a database that can sync between machines and the web. Using search to find notes, especially if it supports some sort of inline tagging like hashtags, is faster for the user than trying to come up with some folder hierarchy. Hierarchies also are inconvenient when documents straddle multiple categories. Grouping by tags let a note/document exist in multiple categories without reorganizing everything.
Thirty years ago the only "view" into storage was directories and files. File systems were relatively sparse in terms of metadata support. Directory hierarchies were the only tool for organization. Information Retrieval systems were all about adding an over the top database and document indexing system on shitty sparse file systems.
Today a lot of those Information Retrieval concepts are rolled into online storage systems (Google Docs etc). So hierarchies aren't the primary organization unit since they're not the only mechanism the backing store has for organization.
I can't communicate with anyone whose address I don't already know. There's no real "discoverability." Many people have multiple email addresses, and I don't know whether I'm communicating with the correct one, or even whether more exist that I don't know about. If an email address stops working, it just... stops working. Emails bounce back (if I'm lucky!) with no easy or standard way to say why, or what address to use instead. I could go on.
Email is great for point-to-point communication, modulo some of the issues listed above, but that's a very limited use case, not at all comparable to most social media. It's a poor replacement for Twitter, for example.
Unlike Twitter, ActivityPub sites generally don't beat you over the head with follow recommendations. The goal is not to get you mentally addicted to spending hours a day on Social Media.
A Google search is probably the most common discovery mechanism. Once people start putting their Mastodon addresses on their web pages, it will start getting easier.
The fediverse is young. Don't expect a finished product when there has been so few man-hours and so little funidng put into it.
If you search for Twitter2, the fediverse is not it.
If either of those things exist for mastodon, I'm not seeing them, and half the people on here are saying, "this isn't twitter go away" while the other half is raving about how exciting it is to be the recipient of "#twittermigration"
Which is all very cute, but it does tend to give commenters whiplash, not knowing whether the responses they're going to get are going to be from one side or the other, or both!
Both replies absolutely coexist because of something simple: the fediverse is not Twitter. If you're looking for Twitter2, that's not it. If you're looking to build the fediverse by being a member and contributing to the discussion. You're going in a different universe, learn the rules :)
These all sound like features to me. If I want you to contact me, I will give you my e-mail address. Otherwise, leave me alone.
This isn't very discoverable at all, though. Hitting the follow button is worse and doesn't tell you the easy way.
I think you misunderstood what I wrote. The problem is the Mastodon software is incredibly hard to use, and flaky.
This has nothing to do with "understanding federation"!
In fact, a few people have said, "Someone said it was just like email, but wow, it's not at all like email!".
That explanation does not work for non-nerds. At all. It does not help.
Even Hotmail was able to sign up millions of users with 1996 levels of tech-savviness.
It's only 'like email' if the people you're talking to have set up their own IMAP and POP servers.
The amount of conceptual learning needed to understand the federation model is roughly similar to a complicated strategy game that needs a 15-minute tutorial. A motivated child can work it out; a stressed and distracted thirty-something will try to avoid it, or maybe mock it so as not to normalize its use.
I totally think it's possible to normalize federation since there are tons of conceptually difficult systems in daily life. Some of the burden of that rests on UX and onboarding. But far more of it is a case of, are people desperate enough to bother?
We should stop picking on normal folks. I write software for a living and, honestly, I'm over dealing with BS software. We've swung WAY too far to the "developer productivity" side of engineering and away from "consumer productivity". It's annoying and, frankly, if I have to jump through hoops, I simply choose not to anymore.
The all text, green screen terminals hooked into an AS-400 were far quicker to use than the mess of mouse driven web GUI stuff (often with slow page loads on top of it), and 'discoverability' has not exactly improved a ton in the mean time. It sucks that repetitive task efficiency isn't valued more in so many situations.
Similarly, local-to-your-instance links to a specific toot, vs. globally-accessible / canonical toot URLs.
Both can be resolved through the Search dialogue on Mastodon, but it took me a while to work that out myself.
Fully-transparent blocking tends to play to the interests of griefers, abusers, and trolls.
For many instances, blocks are listed on the /about/more page of the instance. Mind that you'd also have to check to see if the remote instance is blocking your own.
(the way to do it is to paste it into the Search box of your mastodon instance)
There should be just a page with a quick checklist/cheat sheet for twitter users.
There's some disconnect between how people who really understand it on a deep level are explaining it to other people who understand other technical things on a similar level and how people with 30 minutes and a publication deadline are explaining it.
Twitter was once considered pretty obtuse compared to facebook, at any rate. Once upon a time people didn't know what a retweet was or how to "at" someone. They didn't learn because twitter was "so easy" they learned because the people they wanted to talk to were there.
Network effects always trump all on these things.
Yeah.
I've taken a look at it a couple of times but never actually jumped on because whenever I try I'm faced with the same sort of creeping dread I face when reading the how-to for reverting a fauly git merge[1], where like... why do I need to understand this much low level plumbing to do this very basic thing. The Feynman diagrams help but it's still insane.
[1] https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/howto/r...
This is incorrect. You click the "Discover Users" from the instance home page, and you can view (public) profiles and as well as posts that they have made. I agree that it would be better to just be able to view the local timeline.
Discord is different enough from other tools that many people are confused by it.
But even then, Mastodon is different enough from Discord--and other tools--that many people are confused by it.
I load Discord, and I see someone's post, and I think to myself, I should message that person. So I click their username, and right there is a text box for me to start typing a direct message to them. Alternatively, there's a "Direct Messages" option in my left toolbar where I can hit "+" to start a conversation with any "Friend."
I load mastodon, and I see someone's post, and I think to myself, I should message that person. So I click their username, and then on their profile page, I click the three dots and choose the "Direct message" option. So that's not quite as direct, but not too bad. Alternatively, there's a "Direct messages" option in my right toolbar where... all I see is "You don't have any direct messages yet. When you send or receive one, it will show up here." No options to start one from here, and no friends list here. Hmm, there's a "Follows and followers" sidebar link which takes me to the expected list of people, and then I guess I can click on their profiles and again navigate to the three dots, and... huh, this person doesn't actually have a "Direct message" option there. Okay, maybe that person doesn't accept DMs, at least from me. Let me try someone who is following me back. I click their name and... their profile doesn't have a three-dots link. Oh, in fact several of these don't.
Well, I guess I don't actually know how to DM most people on mastodon. Let me try something else. If I go to Notifications, and since I have "show every option" enabled, I can see just my "follows," and I can click on those names, and yes, there I have the three dots and can DM people.
So maybe I can only DM people who follow me? Or who have showed up in my notifications? No, there, if I am looking in my timeline view, then I can get to the three dots for anybody.
Anyway, perhaps it seems like I'm making this too complicated, but I assure you that I won't be the only one wondering why "Direct messages" doesn't let me send direct messages, or why sometimes I can see contact options and sometimes I can't!
Mastodon is just a whole other world of complexity and confusion.
The funny thing is: If there was a service called dwitter and had exact the same features that twitter had, people might be willing to give it a try.
At this point a twitter alternative doesn't need to be different. It only needs to have a different owner.
As someone who’s been on Mastodon for a few years, the front-ends and apps aren’t very good, with the UI/UX being particularly bad.
One of the few apps I would recommend for iPhone users is Metatex, which is the best mobile app I’ve seen—by far [1].
It's amazing to see how much trouble they're having... "Do I have to create a log in on every Mastodon?" ("No, and it's pretty much impossible"), "Can I follow someone on another server?" ("Yes, but it's incredibly hard -- try to follow them on whatever server you're on, maybe someone else is following them already in which case you'll be able to, otherwise here are directions that sometimes work") kind of things.
It's just not ready for prime-time, even (IMHO) among nerds, but wow, are normal folks having a hard time.